Show Love to Your Neighbor

Show Love to Your Neighbor
By Rabbinic Intern Rebecca Thau

When I was a kid, I had a habit of cornering my rabbi with questions. Once, I asked, “What’s the most important part of the Torah?” I expected him to name a blockbuster moment, like the parting of the Red Sea or Revelation at Sinai.

But, to my surprise, he named Parashat Kedoshim, also known as The Holiness Code. This week’s Torah portion.

It turns out, my childhood rabbi wasn’t the first person to call this the Torah’s most important section.

Nearly 2,000 years earlier, Rabbi Akiva, one of the Talmud’s preeminent scholars, similarly taught that this parasha contains the Torah’s key principle: וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ, which we normally translate as "love your neighbor as yourself."

Our rabbis, ancient and modern alike, have spent a lot of time analyzing this line—in part because it seems to command something impossible.

We’re supposed to love our neighbor—the guy in the apartment next door, or the family in the house down the street—we’re supposed to love that person, as we love ourselves?

That degree of expansive empathy and generosity seems unrealistic. To address this concern, some sages limited the definition of “neighbor.”

Perhaps most famously, certain commentators insisted that “neighbor” only refers to our fellow Jews.

This particularist reading might feel extra comforting and appealing today in the face of a terrifying spike in antisemitism.

As Rabbi David Ingber recently argued, we cannot lose sight of this particularist reading right now. As we face anti-Jewish animosity and attacks, he reminded us that we must  “Center Jewish concerns and Jewish survival.” I agree wholeheartedly: We in the Jewish community really need each other’s love. Jewish solidarity is essential, especially now, but I don’t think that’s the only thing this verse is charging us to do.

I recently read a commentary that convinced me that this crucial verse is much more expansive than that.

This alternative reading comes from a somewhat obscure 19th-century Torah commentary called the Biur. The text focuses on the word “kamocha”— “Like you.”

We’re often tempted to translate “kamocha”  like it’s an adverb modifying “love,” as if it describes that love’s quality or intensity.

In that interpretation, the verse would read, “Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.”

But the Biur noticed that “kamocha” functions as an adjective throughout the Torah. So, in this verse, kamocha isn’t describing the verb love—it’s describing your neighbor, insisting that your neighbor is like you.

As the commentary itself put it, “Every human being was created in the image of God. [...] The text therefore [...] tells us to love our neighbor who is a human being,”

Kamocha, “‘just like you’.”

Torah’s most important principle, then, is our alikeness, our shared humanity.

This might still sound vague or unrealistic. How are we supposed to feel love for all humanity?

But this verse—and this entire parsha—isn’t asking us to cultivate emotions. It’s asking us to take action.

It goes back to what my childhood rabbi taught me all those years ago. The Holiness Code is essential, he said, because of its opening injunction, which gives us its name:

You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal Your God, am holy.

And how does this parasha go on to instruct us to emulate Divine holiness? Through interpersonal mitzvot—commandments of care, generosity, fairness, and kindness.

At the same time that the Torah instructs us to be holy like God and to love our neighbors, it also commands us to: honor our parents; pay workers promptly; judge everyone equally, irrespective of their finances; respect the elderly; use honest weights and scales; ensure those who are hungry can eat and preserve their dignity.

These interpersonal mitzvot are all ways Torah asks us to embody holiness—by showing love to our neighbors.

Our personal relationships teach us that sustaining and maintaining love requires effort. And this is the kind of intentional love that Torah expects of our communities, too:A love where we show, through our daily actions, that we are willing to work more intentionally to build a loving, holy world.

The medieval sage Maimonides even insisted that

וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹך

is the basis for numerous other interpersonal mitzvot that are never mentioned in this parasha, including comforting mourners, celebrating with a wedding couple, and visiting the sick.

Perhaps each of us, like Maimonides, can add our own modern mitzvot to this list, things like: avoiding gossip, assuming best intentions, calling that relative who lives far away, offering words of gratitude, and words of apology, more often and more easily.

No matter which manifestation of holiness we choose, each is rooted in the same unwavering principle:

וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ

Which really means: show love to your neighbor, who is a human being, just like you.

When we actively show love to our neighbors, we affirm our shared, inherent worth as human beings, and foster the holiness for which our parasha is named.

Given the enormity of today’s challenges and crises, it might sound naive to focus on love, whether love between Jews or love between us and our non-Jewish neighbors.

But consider the potential consequences of losing sight of our shared humanity.

Rabbi Akiva, who first called this Torah’s key principle, knew these stakes intimately.

You see, Akiva was such a beloved teacher of Torah that 24,000 students clamored to learn from him. But then, suddenly, all 24,000 of them died in a sweeping plague. The reason the Talmud gives is haunting: the students perished, our rabbis teach, because they disrespected each other.

These students did not internalize their teacher’s key principle. They did not recognize their neighbor’s inherent worth and show them the love they deserved.

So many cultural forces today tempt us to act like those students. Isolated information ecosystems entrench us in our already-held positions, and public leaders act in increasingly polarizing ways to appeal to an increasingly polarized populace.

As derogatory discourse is normalized, many of us are struggling to relate to each other, struggling to see that all of our neighbors are kamocha, fellow reflections of the Divine Image.

The story of Rabbi Akiva’s students is a warning that a harsh cultural climate is more than unpleasant–it can be dangerous, when we fall into patterns of dehumanization, when we fail to show love to our neighbors, there might be grave consequences.

That ancient plague occurred between Pesach and Shavuot, the same period in which we find ourselves today.

In these intermediary weeks, will we act like Rabbi Akiva’s students, who disrespected each other to destructive ends?

Or can we choose to follow Rabbi Akiva’s teaching–to show love to our fellow human beings,

and thus to make our broken world a little more whole and a lot more holy?

We have the power to create compassionate communities of care where each person’s life and dignity matter; where we celebrate each other’s humanity; where we provide a crucial counterweight to our prevailing culture of cruelty–where we show love to every holy human being.