70 | APRIL 27 • 2023
T
he opening chapter of
Kedoshim contains
two of the most pow-
erful of all commands: to love
your neighbor and to love the
stranger. “Love your neighbor
as yourself: I am
the Lord” goes
the first. “When
a stranger comes
to live in your
land, do not mis-
treat him,
” goes
the second, and
continues, “Treat
the stranger the way you treat
your native-born. Love him as
yourself, for you were strangers
in Egypt. I am the Lord your
God (Lev. 19:33-34).
The first is often called the
“golden rule” and held to be
universal to all cultures. This
is a mistake. The golden rule
is different. In its positive for-
mulation it states, “
Act toward
others as you would wish them
to act toward you,
” or in its
negative formulation, given by
Hillel, “What is hateful to you,
do not do to your neighbor.
”
These rules are not about love.
They are about justice, or more
precisely, what evolutionary
psychologists call reciprocal
altruism. The Torah does not
say, “Be nice or kind to your
neighbor because you would
wish him to be nice or kind to
you.
” It says, “Love your neigh-
bor.
” That is something different
and far stronger.
The second command is
more radical still. Most people
in most societies in most ages
have feared, hated and often
harmed the stranger. There is
a word for this: xenophobia.
How often have you heard the
opposite word: xenophilia? My
guess is, never. People don’t
usually love strangers. That is
why, almost always when the
Torah states this command —
which it does, according to the
Sages, 36 times — it adds an
explanation: “because you were
strangers in Egypt.
” I know of
no other nation that was born
as a nation in slavery and exile.
We know what it feels like to
be a vulnerable minority. That
is why love of the stranger is so
central to Judaism and so mar-
ginal to most other systems of
ethics. But here, too, the Torah
does not use the word “justice.
”
There is a command of justice
toward strangers, but that is a
different law: “You shall not
wrong a stranger or oppress
him” (Ex. 22:20). Here it speaks
not of justice but of love.
These two commands define
Judaism as a religion of love —
not just of God (“with all your
heart, with all your soul and
with all your might”), but of
humanity also. That was and is a
world-changing idea.
But what calls for deep reflec-
tion is where these commands
appear. They do so in Parshat
Kedoshim in what, to contem-
porary eyes, must seem one of
the strangest Torah passages.
Leviticus 19 brings side-by-
side laws of seemingly quite
different kinds. Some belong
to the moral life: don’t gossip,
don’t hate, don’t take revenge,
don’t bear a grudge. Some are
about social justice: leave parts
of the harvest for the poor; don’t
pervert justice; don’t withhold
wages; don’t use false weights
and measures. Others have a
different feel altogether: don’t
crossbreed livestock; don’t plant
a field with mixed seeds; don’t
wear a garment of mixed wool
and linen; don’t eat fruit of the
first three years; don’t eat blood;
don’t practice divination; don’t
lacerate yourself.
At first glance these laws have
nothing to do with one anoth-
er: some are about conscience,
some about politics and eco-
nomics, and others about purity
and taboo. Clearly, though, the
Torah is telling us otherwise.
They do have something in
common. They are all about
order, limits, boundaries. They
are telling us that reality has a
certain underlying structure
whose integrity must be hon-
ored. If you hate or take revenge,
you destroy relationships. If you
commit injustice, you under-
mine the trust on which society
depends. If you fail to respect
the integrity of nature (different
seeds, species and so on), you
take the first step down a path
that ends in environmental
disaster.
There is an order to the uni-
verse, part moral, part political,
part ecological. When that
order is violated, eventually
there is chaos. When that order
is observed and preserved, we
become co-creators of the sacred
harmony and integrated diversi-
ty that the Torah calls “holy.
”
Why then is it specifically in
this chapter that the two great
commands — love of the neigh-
bor and the stranger — appear?
The answer is profound and
very far from obvious. Because
this is where love belongs — in
an ordered universe.
Jordan Peterson, the
Canadian psychologist, has
recently become one of the
most prominent public intel-
lectuals of our time. His 2018
book 12 Rules for Life has been
a massive bestseller in Britain
and America. He has had the
courage to be a contrarian,
challenging the fashionable
fallacies of the contemporary
West. Particularly striking in the
book is Rule 5: “Do not let your
children do anything that makes
you dislike them.
”
His point is more subtle than
it sounds. A significant number
of parents today, he says, fail to
socialize their children. They
indulge them. They do not teach
them rules. There are, he argues,
complex reasons for this. Some
of it has to do with lack of atten-
tion. Parents are busy and don’t
have time for the demanding
task of teaching discipline. Some
of it has to do with Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s influential but mis-
leading idea that children are
naturally good and are made
bad by society and its rules.
So, the best way to raise happy,
creative children is to let them
choose for themselves.
Partly, though, he says it is
because “modern parents are
simply paralyzed by the fear that
Love’s Not
Enough
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks