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