What Good Are 613 Commandments If We Fail the One?

There is a comforting story we tell ourselves. It holds that suffering ennobles, that the persecuted become the most reliable guardians against persecution, that a people who endured the full inventory of human cruelty would, of all peoples, carry its lesson in their bones. It is a beautiful idea. You would think that history’s foremost victim of intolerance would have learned, better than anyone alive, the virtue of tolerance.

You would be wrong.

Consider the standard our own tradition set, and how high it set it. A gentile came to Hillel and asked to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel did not recite the Shema or the Decalogue. He said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” The audacity of that answer is easy to miss. The entire revelation — the covenant, the law, the long argument with God that constitutes Jewish civilization — reduced to a single sentence of restraint. And note that Hillel chose the negative form. Not “love your neighbor,” which is aspirational and cannot be commanded into a heart, but “do not do what is hateful to you,” which is a floor. It is the minimum. It is the least we owe one another, stated as the irreducible condition of everything else.

And we do not keep it. We fail at it most reliably, and most consequentially, among ourselves.

The rabbis were merciless about this, because they had watched it happen. The First Temple, they taught, fell to the three cardinal sins — idolatry, bloodshed, forbidden unions — and the sentence ran out in seventy years. The Second Temple fell to sinat chinam, baseless hatred between Jews, and that exile has lasted two thousand. The detail the Talmud insists on in Yoma is the one we least want to hear: the generation that lost the Second Temple was occupied with Torah, with the commandments, and with acts of loving-kindness. They were observant. They were learned. They were charitable. And it did not save them, because they hated one another without cause. A society can keep the whole law and lose the thing the law was built to protect.

We are watching the rehearsal again. The bitterness of the judicial-reform years did not heal; it scarred. Religious and secular Israelis increasingly regard each other not as fellow citizens with a hard disagreement but as occupying powers. Haredi and hiloni look across a chasm of mutual contempt. The diaspora and the state, who need each other more than either will admit, drift into estrangement and caricature. None of this is a policy dispute that better policy will fix. It is a failure of the one commandment, and it is corrosive in exactly the way the rabbis warned.

There is a harder case still, and it has to be named plainly, because a Jew is the only person with standing to name it without malice. A state that came into being because intolerance nearly annihilated its people carries, of all the states on earth, the heaviest obligation toward the stranger within its gates — toward its Arab citizens, toward those who have no power and no patron. Where Israel falls short of that obligation, it is not merely making an error of governance. It is betraying the premise of its own existence. The refuge built against intolerance does not get to practice it.

Here I have to refuse a temptation, because there is a libel that lives next door to this argument and I want no part of it. None of this means that Jews cause the hatred directed at them. Antisemitism is older than any Jewish conduct, indifferent to it, and impervious to refutation; the hatred precedes the pretext and survives the disproof every time. To say that our internal failings explain the world’s loathing is to flatter the bigot and slander his victim. That is not the claim. The claim is harder and it points inward. The antisemite’s caricature — the clannish, tribal Jew who extends his concern no further than his own kind — is a lie. And the way you refute a lie is not by protesting it but by living its opposite. We do not answer to the hater’s court. We answer to a higher one. The question is never whether he is right about us. The question is whether we are who we say we are.

The same distinction governs anti-Zionism, and most of it fails the test. The great bulk of anti-Zionism is not a response to anything Israel has done; it denies the Jewish people the single thing — national self-determination — that it grants without hesitation to every other people on the planet, and that selective denial is its own intolerance, dressed for the occasion as conscience. But there is a thin and honest sliver of criticism that is not that, the criticism that asks whether the Jewish state lives up to the Jewish ethic. That criticism we should not be leaving to our enemies. We should be making it ourselves, more searchingly than they ever could, precisely because we are the ones bound by the covenant and they are not.

Which returns us to the arithmetic, and to your question. Tradition counts six hundred and thirteen commandments. Rabbi Simlai taught that David reduced them to eleven, Isaiah to six, Micah to three — do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God — and that the prophets pressed further still, until what remained was nearly a single word. Hillel reduced the whole of it to one line of restraint. The magnificent architecture of halacha, the libraries of commentary, the millennia of devotion: all of it rests on one foundation stone, the prohibition on doing to another what is hateful to yourself.

So ask the question without flinching. What is the value of six hundred and thirteen commandments scrupulously kept if the one they were all built to guard lies in ruins? The answer the rabbis gave is not theoretical. They told us what it costs. It cost us the Temple, and it cost us the two thousand years that followed, and it nearly cost us the whole enterprise. We were not chosen to suffer; on our own account, we were chosen to demonstrate something — that a people can order its common life around a law higher than power. That demonstration does not fail when our enemies hate us. Their hatred proves nothing about us; it never has. It fails only when we cannot keep, among ourselves and toward the stranger, the one commandment we told the world was the whole of the Torah.

The cure for intolerance was placed in our hands before it was placed in anyone’s. We have not yet learned to take it.