This Simchat Torah Can We Love Our Neighbor?

There is an infamous story in the Talmud in which a man went to Shammai asking to learn the Torah while standing on one foot, and was rebuked. The man then went to Hillel and made the same request. Hillel said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.”  This is our central core prinicple around which the Five Books are all a commentary.  This is our central tenant around which our narrative is woven.

This weekend, we conclude the cycle of reading Torah, we have read our way through this narrative, and we do so as we chant the words of Deuteronomy, “And for all the mighty hand, and all the great awe that Moses displayed before the eyes of all Israel.” We then turn immediately to begin reading Torah anew, and chant the words of Genesis, “In the beginning Adonai created the heavens and the earth.”

This same weekend we stand at the precipice of a weekend that runs the gamut of human emotion. We are expressive of exceeding joy in our celebration of Torah, the central tenet of our human story, the narrative of our Jewish people, and the framework for discerning our ethical behavior in community and at home. We are so joyful to have inherited a story of a people for whom our principle is “love your neighbor” and within which our  cycle of stories is woven, a story that begins with the awesomeness of the Divine, in whose awe we stand as we witness God’s redemptive capacity at the end.

And at one and the same time this weekend, we bear raw witness to three years of commemorating the devastating and horrific attacks of Simchat Torah, October 7th, after only one year in which no hostages remained in captivity since that terrible day. The cycle of violence, of destitution, the experience of hefkerut (chaos and abandonment), is only now beginning to bubble up to the surface in the lived experiences being expressed. There is no joy in this story. The love within our own people feels fragile and the love for the other feels distant and dissipating.

The capsule of the Torah, which starts and ends with witnessing God’s awesome beauty and indestructible, dependable presence in our lives, contains within it long narratives of trauma and dysfunction, alongside prosaic retellings of battles to achieve redemption, and with that redemption a sense of physical and national security. The cycles since October 7th recount deep national trauma, within which we preserve and hold close moments of individual joyful redemption, and a very transparent and visible battle for national security.

In the musical Rent, we are asked as an audience to account for the vulnerable and to consider how we measure a year in the life. The seeking, the cry, the hope, is love. The lived experiences of the Jewish people over the last three years, and the cycle of our Torah, all remind us that we are living with and holding the challenges of Hillel’s core value: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. The entire Torah is distilled to one essential value: Love.  Love your neighbor as yourself.

The Bible scholar Professor John Collins remarks on this passage: “The command to love one’s neighbor as oneself is undoubtedly one of the great contributions of the Hebrew Bible to the ethical development of humanity. In context, the law was primarily concerned with the cohesion and identity of a particular people, yet the application of the ‘neighbor’ would in time be extended to all people, and grounded in the recognition of shared humanity.” (Retrieved from: https://www.thetorah.com/article/love-your-neighbor-how-it-became-the-golden-rule)

If we can find spiritual inspiration even in the traumas and dysfunctions captured in the stories of Torah, and if we can find our pathway forward through the terrible devastation of October 7th, it will be because we have a guiding light in the darkness. We find the joyful sparks of the sacred amid the grey, hurting trauma, and we are able to stand on one foot and find a way to return in our hearts to an ethical humanity, one that does not do unto others what we do not want done unto ourselves.

May this coming year bring us ways to continue to love, to love ourselves, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.