Love Your Neighbor: Rabbi’s Sermon, Rosh Hashanah 5787

This past year I officiated at a funeral for a wonderful man who died in his early 90’s.  He was a kind man, a generous philanthropist, and very committed to Jewish life particularly on the campus of his Alma Mater where he was a major donor to the Jewish student organization.

As you know, the past few years since October 7th and the Gaza war have not been an easy time for college campuses, with many divisions including within the Jewish student population.  In addition, there have been generational differences, with some of the older, alumni donors who care about Jewish life at their alma maters upset at what they saw, making their concerns known to the university.  This man did as well – though what he said to the campus rabbi was not what I expected, because it was not an argument defending one position or another.  Rather, he advised:  “With all that is happening about Israel, teach that Judaism is about love and kindness.”

I was deeply moved and also surprised, realizing how rare it has been during these fraught years of angry arguments that I heard someone remind us, kindly, that Judaism is about kindness and love.  These words may seem deceptively simple.  To some, they may even seem sound naïve. To me, however, they were the heart of the matter.  For we have lost our way.  We have been caught up in arguments not “for the sake of heaven” as the Talmud teaches, but rather in the service of our fear and our anger. The heart of Judaism, the heart of any great religion, is not to defend our worst instincts,  but to nurture and encourage our best.  Yet we, from many different positions and different religions, have defended the indefensible because we have forgotten that the core of our great spiritual traditions, is kindness and love.

Today we need to remind ourselves of that core.  Because during a crisis, and we are in a crisis, we tend to forget it, even though we desperately need to remember.  We need to remember that our prophets and sages, including ones who lived in times as difficult and precarious as our own, explicitly addressed the question of what is the core principle of Judaism.  The answer was not survival at all costs, nor military dominance, nor loyalty to particular rulers.  The answer was love and kindness.

Rabbi Hillel, who lived at the beginning of the first century, and was famously asked by a gentile, perhaps mockingly, to summarize all of Judaism on one foot said: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow.”  That is the core.  “The rest,” he said “is commentary.”   Ben Azzai, who lived in the 2nd century  between the destruction of the Temple and the later Jewish-Roman war, believed that the one great principle upon which all of Judaism rests, is that every human being is created in the image of God. His colleague Rabbi Akiva, believed the core principle was the verse in Leviticus: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  All three of these rabbis emphasize our common humanity and the need for empathy and love.  They were not naïve.  They lived in difficult times under a Roman rule that was anything but benign.  And yet for them, this was the core of Judaism.  “The rest,” as Hillel taught, “is commentary.”

And of course, Hillel understood the irony of that phrase.  Commentary is not extraneous, but also essential, because it is about how we actually live out these big values.  And living them out is what I want to talk about today.  What do these moral principles, simple to say but not so simple live by, mean to us today?  What does it mean to love your neighbor—especially at a time like this?  Who is our “neighbor?”  What if our neighbor is our enemy?  And what does it look like to love your neighbor “as yourself?”  The big principles are our North Star.  But to prevent them from being words alone, we need to talk tachlis as we say in Yiddish.  We need to talk about the details.

This past July, I was honored to participate on a multi-faith panel with a Muslim scholar of Islam, Dr. Celene Ibrahim and two Christian religious leaders Pastors Ray and Gloria Hammond, all of us wrestling with those questions from their own traditions.  Pastor Ray Hammond brought to us the work of social psychologist Henri Tajfel who did important work on prejudice and the human tendency to form ingroups and outgroups.  Tajfel was a holocaust survivor and the only member of his family to survive.  So his motivation for this research was personal.   In Tajfel’s article, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” he wrote about an experiment where he divided strangers into groups using arbitrary criteria, such as a coin flip or whether they liked a piece of art.  In Pastor Hammonds words, “within minutes, participants favored their own assigned group and shortchanged the other, despite no history of conflict and no real difference between the groups.  The finding suggests that in-group bias requires only the perception of boundary, not any substantive grievance.”

This part of human psychology is significant.  Kindness is a part of our nature, yet so is a tendency to create boundaries with others, and this darker side of our nature can easily be activated or manipulated.  When it is, loving your neighbor can sometimes go against the grain of how we are programmed.  And yet, all three of these religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and I’m sure many others, challenge us to do just that.

So who is our neighbor?  The Torah explicitly commands us to love everyone from the neighbor to the ger, the one who, like Abram and like Hagar, is a migrant, immigrant or refugee and is the most vulnerable within the social structure.

The Quran and the New Testament also teach the expansiveness of the term.  The Quran teaches our responsibilities to both the “near neighbor” and the “far neighbor.” The New Testament relates the story of the Good Samaritan, who crossed the group boundary and helped a stranger in great distress.

All these traditions challenge us to go beyond our own in-group.  The Jewish commentator known as the Biur says that the command to respect our neighbor’s feelings and interests apply to every human being without distinction.  In the verse, “love your fellow as yourself,” he correctly points to the Hebrew word “Kamocha”— “as yourself” as really meaning “like yourself.” In other words, the verse does not say “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” which seems unrealistic since, as commentators note, we seem to be partial to ourselves.  It rather means  “love your neighbor like yourself,” who is a human being just like yourself.”

And what does this love look like?  Dr. Celene Ibrahim taught that the Islamic Prophetic Tradition says the following:

“Do you know what the rights of the neighbor are?  Help them when they seek your help.  Give to them when they ask.  Lend to them when they need a loan.  Rejoice at their good fortune.  Grieve at their affliction.  Do not build your wall higher than theirs so as to block the wind from them.  Do not let the smell of your cooking disturb them unless you send them some.”

Judaism similarly teaches that loving your neighbor is about generosity, wishing them good fortune, not hating or holding a grudge, not oppressing or taking revenge.  Jewish tradition differs on who the “neighbor” is in the verse “love your neighbor as yourself.”  The Hebrew word “neighbor” actually means is “fellow,” “companion,” or “friend.”  But whatever its meaning, it must be read together with the verse, just lines later, in which we are commanded to “love the stranger as yourself,” making it beyond  doubt that the commandment to love is to be understood as expansively as possible.  As it is written in Leviticus (and on a banner outside our synagogue):  “When strangers reside with you in your land you shall not wrong them.  The stranger who resides with you shall be treated the same as the native born (or citizen) and you shall love each one as thyself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.  I the Eternal am your God”  (Lev. 19:33-34).

So what does that look like?  The Bible offers us possibilities through stories.  This morning, we read the Torah story of Hagar whose name sounds like ger, migrant or immigrant.  In the story, Sarah, jealous of Hagar, asks Abraham to banish her from household and into the wilderness, at a distance beyond which her cries cannot be heard.  Yet the God of Abraham and Sarah does hear her cries.  God sends an angel who speaks to Hagar and asks, “what troubles you, Hagar.” When she answers that she has no water and her child will die, the angel reveals a spring of water for her and her child Yishmael to drink, saving their lives, and more than that, showing the reader that they are equally beloved by God.

An angel gave a poor migrant water.  What would happen to that angel today, for we are living at a time when angels can be detained for helping a ger, a migrant?  How many angels in Minneapolis this past winter were imprisoned, beaten or even shot dead for loving their neighbor?  While no society perfectly measures up to the commandment to love your neighbor and the stranger as yourself, when a society goes so low as to criminalize trying, this is a moral emergency.  And the Torah, also has a story about such an emergency, the story of Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Egypt is place where loving your neighbor is made dangerous.  The story begins with Pharaoh’s command to the midwives to kill the Hebrew baby boys upon their birth.  The midwives secretly but courageously disobeyed.  Who were these midwives?  Were they Hebrews helping their own people?  Were they Egyptians taking a moral stand against their own government?  Jewish tradition points out that the Hebrew grammar supports reading it both ways.  The midwives could have been fellow Hebrews, and indeed it is our responsibility to help our family, friends and fellow Jews.  They could have been Egyptians, and it also would have been their responsibility, as it is ours, to stand up to our own people and leaders when they are carrying out oppression against others.  We are commanded to help the near neighbor and the far neighbor—the friend and the stranger among us.  Just as Moses’ mother Yocheved, and his sister Miriam took great risk to save their son and brother, so did Pharaoh’s daughter, an Egyptian with no family relation, take great risk to save the Hebrew baby from her own people’s cruelty.   Her own father’s cruelty.

And I’ll tell one more story, the story of Jonah the prophet, about whom we read on Yom Kippur afternoon.  Jonah is a story of crossing boundaries to help another people.  God sends Jonah not to his own people but to Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire and an enemy of the Israelites.   Jonah does not want to go.  Could it be that he did not want to prophesy to the enemy, calling them to do teshuvah (repentance and change), because by doing so he would save them?  Yet God is insistent on offering the possibility of the path of Teshuvah for everyone.  The book ends with a question to Jonah, and to us.  God says:  “am I not to care for the great city of Ninevah, which has in it more than $120,000 children?”

Over $120,000 children.  Far away from us—but not from God.  Who are the prophets today who can call their societies back from the moral brink, and remind us the simple truth that we are all God’s children deserving of our love.  There is no justification for abducting children in Israel and holding them hostage in Gaza.  There is no justification for taking children from their parents here and keeping them in detention centers. And there is no justification for dropping 2,000 pound American-made bombs in densely populated Gaza, inevitably killing children, destroying homes, hospitals and schools.  There was no justification for flying planes into buildings 25 years ago on 9/11, an act of hate that still reverberates.  Turning “love your neighbor” into “hate your neighbor,”  has no justification, and none of our arguments to rationalize or blame others would stand in the heavenly court, whose angels weep at the cries of children.

Nevertheless, such behavior is rationalized, and one that is used in different forms is that since we are obligated to love own first, this diminishes the responsibilities we have for others. This idea has recently been offered in the public realm in the form of a Catholic teaching from Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas and called “Orders of Love.”  And, just an aside, for someone like me who wanted to be a medievalist in high school and actually read Thomas Aquinas as a teenager, this is a dream come true.  So I’ll quote the current Vice President’s interpretation of Orders of Love.  He said:  “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He argued that people who are passionately concerned about the treatment of immigrants are going against this “order of love.”

Pope Francis disagreed.  “Christian love,” he wrote, is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”  Judaism disagrees as well.   The three teachings in the Torah that command us to love: love your God, love your neighbor and love the Ger–cannot be ordered but are integrally connected.  As one Hasidic commentator interpreted: “To the extent that a Jew is deficient in observing ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” he is deficient in observing “You shall love the Lord your God.”

Of course, it is true that we have unique responsibilities to our families, our parents and our children, for example.  And yet, I believe that we can celebrate those feelings and fulfill those special responsibilities while still working for a society that takes care of all of our children, and for the well-being of all.  Isn’t that the kind of society we want our children to live in?  Isn’t working for a loving society also working for our children at the same time?  Rabbi Hillel famously said, “If I am not for myself who will be for me?  If I am only for myself who am I.”  Tyrants want us to believe that we cannot do both at once.  And they reinforce that by laws and policies that punish people who try.  But Rabbi Hillel is clearly teaching that taking care of ourselves and being a true neighbor to others are not separable.  Taking care of yourself also requires taking care of others, for if we don’t “what am I?”

So we must resist the idea that loving our neighbor is part of an ordered list of people deserving of our love.  In such a society, any of us could be on the bottom of someone else’s list.  Orders of love can easily morph into orders of hate.  And once there is hate, nobody is safe.  Even members of the group on the top of the list, if they dissent, are termed disloyal.  If you think it is utopian to love your neighbor, we are all finding out how dystopian it is to hate your neighbor.  As Pope Francis wrote, “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

The good news is that people are saying “no” to hate and yes to loving our neighbors.  Minnesotans of all religions took the lead this winter in showing us what it means to be a neighbor.  Tom Friedman, who grew up just outside Minneapolis, spoke at the Summer Institute this summer about how Minnesotans turned “neighboring” into a verb.  In his essay in the New York Times, he quoted Adriana Alejandro Osorio who said “people recognized that they need to neighbor, and that was a positive thing in a dark time.”  Mayor Jacob Frey said “This was not a resistance movement.  It was about something far more powerful and expansive. It was ‘Love thy neighbor.’” Sondra Samuels, president of the Northside Achievement Zone, “ said, the ICE invasion “happened to all of us. And then we redefined ‘us.’”

So we need, all of us, to play a role in building a society of “neighbor love,” as Pastor Gloria Hammond calls it.  And I started thinking about my own experiences as a recipient of “neighbor love.”  I thought about the beginning of Covid.  It was April 2024, just a few weeks after the first case of Covid in the Boston area.  We had no defenses against a disease we knew nothing about, nothing other than it was killing people and beginning to spread.  By the beginning of April, Newbridge, a nursing facility where my father was living, announced its first infection.  It spread quickly after that.  Family was not allowed to visit.  Patients were isolated, and the Newbridge care team suited up in hazmat suits to care for those who were ill.  We communicated with our loved ones through an Zoom on an iPad, which the care team would facilitate.  I remember the shock of seeing on the screen my friend and colleague, a rabbi at Newbridge, completely suited up in my father’s room, taking great risks to offer prayers with my father and with other patients.  She was a mother herself, and this kind act was certainly the kind of neighbor love our spiritual traditions teach.  And she was not the only one.  The nurses, the CNA’s and the doctors, whom I did not know also spent their whole shift at risk to themselves attending to patients they did not know.  The patients were “strangers” but they were cared for like family.  And honestly, while everyone was hoping they would save lives, I’m sure they understood that many under their care would not be saved. They were taking risks not as saviors, but as people offering comfort, kindness, neighbor love, so those who were ill and separated from families would not be in pain or alone.

In the past six years, we have seen enormous acts of kindness that have crossed all kinds of borders and boundaries.  During this same time, we have also seen enormous acts of cruelty.  All three of these religions, including our own, as well as others around the world, have been used to justify this cruelty and spread fear and hatred as fuel for more fear and hatred.

So there is a great struggle going on right now within our religions, within our nations and within our communities.  Will we spread hate or love?  Fear or faith?  Will we be, as David French writes a “fear-the-world church or a love-your-neighbor church?”

We cannot sit on the sideline, for all that is sacred is on the line.  We cannot just blame the other side and free ourselves of responsibility.  We cannot allow our traditions to justify abominations.  Too many of our leaders and too many of our religious leaders are creating “fear-the-world” religion.  As Pope Leo said, “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”  Too many of our Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations are creating a “fear-the-world” Judaism.    But there are so many Jewish leaders and religious leaders of all faiths that are creating love-your-neighbor communities.  As Pope Leo said, “Blessed are the peacemakers. The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

We need to be one of the multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.  We need to be a “love-your-neighbor” synagogue.  We need to model that love with each other, with our Island community, with Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, with our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel and around the world, with families who are targeted for their color or country of origin in the United States, with those around the world suffering from hate and violence.  We need to choose life,  and choosing life means choosing love.   And from that love, we can be loved.  From that help we can be helped.   That is not utopian. That is a matter of survival.

“With all that is happening in Israel, teach the students that Judaism is about love and kindness” the man of blessed memory said to the campus Rabbi.  Amen.  May all of us teach and live that core value.  And if we could increase that love and kindness beginning on this first day of the New Year, and each day after, we will indeed make this year a good and sweet one.