SPIRIT

K

edoshim contains the two great love 
commands of the Torah. The first is, 
“Love your neighbor as yourself. I am 
the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). Rabbi Akiva called this 
“the great principle of the Torah.
” The second 
is no less challenging: “The stranger living 
among you must be treated as 
your native-born. Love him as 
yourself, for you were strangers 
in Egypt. I am the Lord your 
God” (Lev. 19:34).
These are extraordinary 
commands. Many civilizations 
contain variants of the Golden 
Rule: “Do unto others as you 
would have them do to you,
” or in the neg-
ative form attributed to Hillel (sometimes 
called the Silver Rule), “What is hateful to 
you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the 
whole Torah. The rest is commentary; go and 
learn.
” But these are rules of reciprocity, not 
love. We observe them because bad things 
will happen to us if we don’t. They are the 
basic ground-rules of life in a group.
Love is something altogether different and 
more demanding. That makes these two 

commandments a revolution in the moral 
life. Judaism was the first civilization to put 
love at the heart of morality. As Harry Redner 
puts it in Ethical Life, “Morality is the ethic of 
love. The initial and most basic principle of 
morality is clearly stated in the Torah: Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
” He adds: 
“The biblical ‘love of one’s neighbor’ is a very 
special form of love, a unique development 
of the Judaic religion and unlike any to be 
encountered outside it.
”
Much has been written about these com-
mands. Who exactly is meant by “your neigh-
bor”? Who by “the stranger”? And what is 
it to love someone else as oneself? I want to 
ask a different question. Why is it specifically 
here, in Kedoshim, in a chapter dedicated to 
the concept of holiness, that the command 
appears?
Nowhere else in all Tanach are we com-
manded to love our neighbor. And only in 
one other place (Deut. 10:19) are we com-
manded to love the stranger. (The Sages 
famously said that the Torah commands us 
36 times to love the stranger, but that is not 
quite accurate. Thirty-four of those com-

mands have to do with not oppressing or 
afflicting the stranger and making sure that 
he or she has the same legal rights as the 
native born. These are commands of justice 
rather than love).
And why does the command to love your 
neighbor as yourself appear in a chapter con-
taining such laws as, “Do not mate different 
kinds of animals. Do not plant your field 
with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing 
woven of two kinds of material?” These are 
chukim, decrees, usually thought of as com-
mands that have no reason, at any rate none 
that we can understand. What have they to 
do with the self-evidently moral commands 
of the love of neighbor and stranger? Is the 
chapter simply an assemblage of disconnect-
ed commands, or is there a single unifying 
strand to it?
The answer goes deep. Almost every 
ethical system ever devised has sought to 
reduce the moral life to a single principle or 
perspective. Some connect it to reason, oth-
ers to emotion, yet others to consequences: 
Do whatever creates the greatest happiness 
for the greatest number. Judaism is different. 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

38 | APRIL 28 • 2022 

A WORD OF TORAH

Made with Love

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