When we say our regular morning prayers from the Siddur,
though, it’s interesting to me there is no prayer at all about asking God to
help us finish the checklist we’ve set for today.
There is only a message as each new day begins about how we
will treat other people during the day, how we will try our best to do the
right thing when we are faced with decision-time, so that our energy to do good
will overcome whatever is pulling us away from the good: a bad night’s sleep, ambition, jealousy and
the like.
Each morning we start by saying: Hareni
mekabel alay, mitzvat ha ‘Boreh V’eahavta li’ray’acha kamocha.
Translating to: I
take upon myself the teaching of the Creator:
Love your neighbor as yourself, or love your kinsman as yourself, or
love your fellow human being as yourself, or wait a minute, do unto others as
you would have them do unto you, or the Golden Rule…
This teaching V’eahavta
li’ray’acha kamocha that we find in this week’s parasha, the heart of the
Torah’s morality message for humanity, is a wonderful kavannah, a wonderful
intention and lens for the rest of the day but what exactly does it mean? How do we translate it? The translation makes a difference here.
What does it mean to ‘love’?
Is love or friendship something we feel, an emotion, or is it how we
relate to and treat the other person?
Who is the Re’ah? Is
a neighbor just the person who lives next to me or behind me? Only another person of my faith? Or any other human being?
The great teacher Nehama Lebowitz pulls together these
questions and sources for helping us answer them.
I’m going to use the word re’ah since there’s no clear
translation into English.
The Rashbam, Rashi’s grandson, observes, how can we love our
re’ah if that person is wicked? Should
we be open to wicked people? No, he
says, only relate to them if they are righteous and good.
The Ramban asks, “How can we love someone else as much as
ourselves?” Our own well-being and
survival tend to come before that of someone else, and even Rabbi Akiva teaches
our own life takes precedence over another’s – based on the classic moral
dilemma of the 2 people in the desert with only enough water for one to survive
until reaching the next city for help.
One drinks and lives instead of 2 drinking and not surviving.
So if we cannot love someone else as much as ourselves, what
is Ramban, what is Nahmanides saying that ve’ahavta means? It means we should wish our re’ah the ‘same
benefits we wish upon ourselves’.
Similarly, the Biur, Moses Mendelsohn, observes if God asks
us to have full empathy for others, then we would mourn other’s sorrows as
deeply as our own. And such a way of
living would be ‘intolerable since scarcely a moment passes without hearing
of…[someone’s] misfortune’.
And so Mendelsohn argues we should accept Hillel’s
re-reading of the Golden Rule which is, “What is hateful to you, do not do to
your fellow.”
Rabbi Naphtali Hertz Weisel offers an alternative reading –
that we should care for all human beings, that is, the word kamocha, does not
mean, care for someone else as much as we care for ourselves, rather, it means care
for all those who are like us, our fellow human beings. Hillel’s reading, he argues, limits the
teaching too much. And after all, we are
all God’s creations – we can decide in the end how much we will care for, or
not care for, any given person but we should be motivated by the idea each day
that when we see other people, we see them as holy, as created by God in God’s
image just as we are.
We see them this way even if they are flawed, as Bal Shem
Tov teaches us, Just as we love ourselves despite the faults we know we have,
so we should love our fellows despite the faults we see in them.
There is a trend to translate re’ah as just someone from our
own tribe, from our own religion, but the Torah does not support this
translation. When the Israelites leave
Egypt, they are to ask of their neighbors for parting gifts – and the word for
neighbors here is re’e’hu, the same word in our verse here in Leviticus.
There is another message coded here in our verse, in perhaps
one of the best known verses of Torah across the world. And, as it happens, similar statements of
faith appear in most world religions:
Christianity, Bahai, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jain, Sikh,
Islam, Confucian, Tao, Native American, African religions.
Here, there is a hint of that universality, that sense of
community implied by the way the verse makes a key assumption, the assumption
that there is some level of relationship between us and the people we’re to
relate to, no matter who they are, that somehow we’re connected, that we’re not
meant to live isolated lives alone, that it’s not enough to just be harmless
instead of helpful but we also must strive to be friendly, thoughtful, and
supportive to others even if we are not true friends, even if we are not BFFs.
And isn’t it amazing for us that our teaching ve’ahavta
li’re’acha kamocha appears in verse 18?
18 which is Chai, meaning life, that this teaching give us a fundamental
perspective on how we should conduct our lives, no matter which reading or
readings, no matter which translation we choose.
And so every morning, let’s say as we wake up, before the
barrage of to dos and before the rush to get out the door, ve’ahavta li’re’acha
kamocha, we accept upon ourselves this teaching as a prism for seeing ourselves
in relationship to others and making decisions not just about what we will do
today but how will we do things today, tomorrow, and God willing forever.
Shabbat Shalom.
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