Love Your Neighbour as You Love Yourself
We had been in our new house for about a week when I put a bag of dog poo in the wrong bin.
Every night before bed I take my two youngest boys for a walk. It calms them down, and it calms me down too. Some nights we bring Jesse, our dog, who is 17 and slower than she used to be but still loves the outing. That night she did her business, I picked it up, and I was so busy talking to the boys that I dropped the bag into the nearest bin on the street without a second thought.
It belonged to the house behind it, and the woman who lived there was walking towards us. She was furious. She shouted that it wasn’t our bin, asked how I could do such a thing and told me to take it out right away. So I did. I reached into her bin, fished out the bag and apologised over and over. She was still angry when we walked off, and the boys were shaken. So was I.
She was right, of course. It was her bin and I had been careless. Knowing that didn’t stop the three of us from nursing a small grudge, the kind that grows quietly on a nightly walk.
Every time we passed her house after that, one of us said something. That’s the mean lady. She shouted at us. The boys would point at her windows. One evening my youngest suggested we leave some poo on her doorstep. I told him no, that she had been right and we had been wrong. I meant it. I also kept calling her “that nasty woman” whenever we went by, which probably taught him more than my little lecture did.
Tonight, on the way home, I spotted her on the other side of the road. My first instinct was to hurry the boys inside before she saw us. Then she crossed over towards us.
We said good evening. I told her I still felt bad about the day we had upset her with the bag in her bin.
She said she had been hoping to run into us. When it happened, her 15-year-old dog had just died. He had crawled into the garden and passed away there, and she had loved him dearly. Her husband was also going through chemotherapy. She hadn’t been herself, she said, and she was sorry for how she had spoken to us.
Then she turned to my boys and told them that forgiveness is a very important thing, and that they had learnt a valuable lesson. They hugged her, and she started to cry.
We walked the rest of the way home quietly. For weeks we had been pointing at the windows of a woman who had just lost her dog and was watching her husband go through cancer treatment. Jesse is 17. I know what it will feel like when we lose her. If a stranger had dropped something in my bin that week, I am not sure I would have been gracious either.
The verse everyone quotes from Leviticus is “love your neighbor as yourself.” The first half of that same verse gets far less attention. It tells us not to take revenge and not to bear a grudge. My youngest wanted revenge with a bag of poo. I settled for the grudge, as if that were the respectable option. The Torah puts the two side by side and asks us to give up both before it asks us to love.
Pirkei Avot has a line I have known since I was a girl: judge every person favourably. I have quoted it more times than I can count. I couldn’t manage it for one upset woman on my own street. One bad moment with her became, in our house, her whole character.
My boys will forget plenty of what I tell them. I think they will remember tonight. They saw a grown-up they had decided was mean cry on the pavement because two small boys hugged her.
Tomorrow night we will walk past her house again. This time we will wave.