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PDF FormatContrary to the immortal and oft-cited last utterance of the early Zionist hero Joseph Trumpeldor—“It is good to die for our country”—you would probably agree with me that there isn’t the slightest thing good about dying for your country, your nation, your religious beliefs, or whatever. I don’t wish this fate upon anybody (except maybe Saddam Hussein; I hope he is privileged to die for his country—soon). What I do wish, upon every single person still persevering through these pages, is that you do have things in your life that are dear enough to you that you would be willing to die for them, if it ever—God forbid—became absolutely necessary. Says John: “Nothing to kill or die for….” Says me: In that case, nothing much to live for, either.
There is another important subject to be addressed in this connection, however, a subject we left dangling more than ten pages ago. Back then we were trying to figure out the motives of Rabbi Akiva for apparently contradicting himself by lauding the precept “Love your neighbor as yourself,” while at the same time ruling elsewhere (in the case of the forgotten flask) that when it comes to choosing between your life and that of your neighbor—your life is paramount. We have tried to show that as a Judaic scholar, Akiva was reared on the principle of preferential love, and thus he was forced to rule as he did. But we still haven’t resolved the glaring disagreement between his ruling and the explicit scriptural prescription he praises so highly. Let’s try to do that now.
Last week I was sitting in this Yemenite restaurant in Jerusalem reading a book and munching my malawah. At seven P.M., the air was shrilly pierced—as it is every hour on the hour—by those six long beeps that some sadistic socialist functionary from the early days of pre-state broadcasting decided was an appropriate way to introduce the news. After a run-of-the-mill item—some foreign dignitary’s helicopter had been hovering on the brink of Israeli airspace for the last three hours and was about to plunge into the Mediterranean because officials of the Foreign and Defense ministries were quarreling over whose prerogative it was to issue the entry permit—the anchorperson announced that two hundred thirty people had been killed in an airplane crash in Indonesia.
“That’s terrible,” I thought, and proceeded to cut myself another large, juicy morsel of malawah, drench it in my side dish of humus, and loft it lazily into my watering, hangar-like mouth. Yummmmm. “That’s really awful—oh, there’s a nice big piece of chicken smothered in delectable harif sauce, come to papa… mmmm, yummmm….”
And then I stopped. I was actually a little angry at myself for being unable to get sufficiently upset about those two hundred thirty Indonesians and their poor, grief-stricken, destroyed families to have it affect my appetite even for five seconds. So I tried an experiment. I took the headline I had just heard on the radio, and changed only one or two words. Now it read: Two Hundred Thirty Israeli Soldiers Die in Plane Crash over Negev.
“Oh, God. That really hurts. It physically hurts. As if someone punched me really hard in the stomach. Is that what it feels like? That much pain? I’m not thinking about my next bite of food anymore, that’s for sure. I’m pretty close to being nauseous. So now I know. Now I have some inkling at least of what those crushed, devastated, wrecked, innocent families are experiencing right now, as the news reaches them one by one that everything they ever lived for is gone. Dear God….”
You may not believe this, but I actually got up and left without finishing my malawah (and there was at least a third still sitting there on the plate). I know, I know: My momentary abstinence really helped those Indonesian families. That’s not my point. Let me give you another example.
A couple of years ago I was under Manhattan, riding the One Train downtown to South Ferry. Round about Sixty-Sixth Street, the door on the end of our car slid open, and a man with no legs came through, propelling himself with his arms and carrying a bucket in his teeth. He didn’t say anything (obviously), wore no explanatory sign, but I guarantee you this: By the time he made it to the other end of the car, there was easily upwards of fifty more dollars in that bucket. Granted, people give for all types of reasons. But I know what made me at least reach for the paper and not the change. It wasn’t “altruism,” whatever that is. It was really a much simpler, more compelling deal: As I would imagine most other people did on that train, I looked at that indescribably miserable man and instinctively said to myself: “My God: What if that were me? What if that were my father, or mybrother, or my son?”
Preferential love is the most powerful love there is, the only truly motivating love there is. It is by means of that love—the special love we harbor for those close to us—that we learn how to begin to love others, who are farther away. Genuineand galvanizing empathy for “the other” is acquired most effectively and lastingly through a process which involves, first and foremost, immersion in love of self, then of family, then of friends, then of community… and so on. It is via emotional analogy to these types of strong-bond affections that one becomes capable of executing a sort of “love leap,” a hyper-space transference of the strength and immediacy of the feelings one retains for his favorite people, smack onto those who have no direct claim on such sentiments.
If you don’t love your own best of all, we said, you really have no idea what genuine love is. If you have no idea what genuine love is, your chances of learning to love people in Indonesia or Syria or Tajikestan or Wyoming, your chances of learning to feel for people in faraway places or contexts (or on the other side of a tense border, or in the opposite camp of a kulturkampf), are pretty slim indeed.
Here, then, is (my guess at) Rabbi Akiva’s exegesis of the much-touted verse: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In his eyes, it doesn’t signify “Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself”; Rabbi Akiva doesn’t believe in such artificial love, we know that from the flask story. To him it reads (and the Hebrew happens to support this, even though Akiva was not generally the type who cared): “Love your neighbor in the same fashion as you love yourself.” Use the feelings you have toward yourself as a guide for how to feel about him. You will never love him as much as you love yourself—you should never love him as much as you love yourself—but you will learn to love him at all, in the first place, solely through your overwhelmingly powerful love of yourself and your own. It is to this process and no other that the Tora refers when it urges—in over twenty different versions of the same statement—“Love the stranger: For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19)
The world of preferential love and distinct sociocultural and political entities certainly need not be one of hatred and interminable warfare (what is Isaiah’s vision? “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” Isaiah 2:4). It may, in fact, be the only system available to the human race which will ever have a chance of breeding genuine global empathy and tolerance.
Imagine that.
IX
You are still not happy. “Okay,” you might say, “I’ll concede, for the moment, the following points: (1) I accept that the kind of love that means the most to me is preferential, distinguishing love: I want it, I need it, I can’t live without it; (2) I’ll give you that the world should optimally resemble a tapestry of distinctive families, or groups, or peoples, or nations; and (3) I’ll even grant you that I personally, for the sake of my own happiness and for the general good of humanity, should connect myself in a vigorous and loving fashion to one of said groups. Fine. What you haven’t really told me is… why on earth should that group be the Jews?”
Well said. After all, you might claim that you’ve had little or no exposure to Judaism or the Jewish community, so what’s it to you; or you might claim that what meager exposure you did have was not exactly tantalizing, and you can’t see much point in going back for seconds; or you might (finally) ask this extremely excellent question: Why shouldn’t I adopt as my “special society” all the members of the intramural hockey league I play in? Or all the guys I go bowling with? Or all the fighting feminists of the world? Or everybody who digs Biz? Or all the people who live in the same city I do? Or all the people who live in the same country I do (I’m as good a patriot as the next fellow!)? Why not these groups as my first loves? After all, I probably have a great deal more in common with them than I do with your average Jewish person walking down the street.
