How To Make Yourself Into a Better Person
The English name of Sefer Devarim, Deuteronomy, derives from the Greek and means “repetition of the law.” The fact that many of the laws are repeated in Devarim, sometimes with significant variations in language and detail, provided the sages with an opportunity to scrutinize those differences and derive ideas that became essential to their religious and legal outlook.
Consider, for example, the following law:
“You shall not see your brother’s ox (shor achikha) or his sheep slipping away and ignore them. You shall surely return them to your brother.” (Deuteronomy 22:1)
This commandment has a counterpart earlier in the Torah:
“Should you encounter your enemy’s ox (shor oyevkha) or his donkey wandering, you must surely return it to him.” (Exodus 23:4)
The Torah itself does not explain why one passage speaks of a “brother’s ox,” while the other speaks of an “enemy’s ox.” The sages, however, seized upon this difference and sought to account for it:
“Your brother’s ox” (Deuteronomy 22:1) — I might infer that the rule applies only to your brother’s ox! On what basis, then, do we include even your enemy’s ox? Scripture states: “Your enemy’s ox” (Exodus 23:4) — [help the animal] no matter who owns it!
If so, why does it specify “your brother”? Actually, it teaches that the point of the Torah is to defeat the evil inclination [which can even challenge brotherly love]! (Sifre Devarim 222, Finkelstein ed., p. 255)
From the perspective of the sages, the two verses are not redundant. The passage in Shemot challenges a person to transcend his ordinary inclinations and extend himself even toward an enemy. The passage in Devarim, by contrast, speaks to the more ordinary expectations of moral behavior: one should not stand idly by when a fellow human being is in need.
The remarkable insight of the midrash is that even “brotherly love” cannot simply be taken for granted. The Torah recognizes that our moral obligations can come into conflict with our natural inclinations. It therefore demands not only that we do what is right, but that we overcome the yetzer hara that can stand in the way of doing so.
The Tosafot, sages French sages from 12th-13th century, added another layer of meaning to this principle. In discussing the obligation to help one’s enemy, they ask how “overcoming one’s inclination” can be relevant when there is, in fact, a mitzvah to hate the person (namely, a sinner). Tosafot respond by pointing to the reciprocal nature of human emotions:
“The mitzvah is to help the one he hates in order to overcome his inclination.” But how is overcoming one’s inclination relevant, since it is a mitzvah to hate him? We may answer: Since he hates him, his fellow also hates him, as it says, “As water reflects a face back to a face, so does one person’s heart toward another.” (Proverbs 27:23) And as a result they come to complete hatred (שנאה גמורה), and therefore overcoming one’s inclination is relevant. (Tosafot, Pesahim 113b, s.v. shera’ah)
Tosafot thus introduce a profound psychological insight. Hatred is often reciprocal and self-reinforcing: I hate you because you hate me, and your hatred of me confirms my hatred of you. What may have begun as a conflict between two individuals can therefore develop into what Tosafot call complete hatred—a cycle in which each person’s hostility feeds the other’s.
The mitzvah of returning a lost animal to an enemy hopefully interrupts that cycle. It requires a person to act generously even toward someone whom he dislikes, even when his natural inclination tells him to do otherwise. And the very act of helping may begin to weaken the hostility that produced the hatred in the first place.
Perhaps this is the deeper lesson contained in the Torah’s repetition of the law. The Torah does not merely tell us whom we are obligated to help; it challenges us to confront the feelings that make such help difficult. The sages understood that moral behavior can do more than express a change of heart, it can produce one. Sometimes the way to overcome hatred is not to wait until we feel differently, but to act differently first.
In that sense, the Torah’s command to return the lost ox is about much more than an animal. It is a prescription for breaking the cycle of reciprocal hatred by doing good even when your feelings tell you not to, because the act itself may be the first step toward changing those feelings.
