The Fundamental Principle of the Torah
This article talks about:
- The Heart of the Torah
- Inclusivity in Yeshua’s Teachings
- Love in Action
-By Pnina-
Probably one of the most well-known Bible verses both in and outside the Judeo-Christian world is ‘love your neighbour as yourself". Though its meaning seems obvious, there is much to learn from this short phrase, both from putting it in its original context and from seeing how Yeshua explains its meaning.
The Hebrew sentence ואהבת לרעך כמוך is only a part of Leviticus 19:18. The entire verse reads:
"You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself; I am the LORD." Chapter 19 of Leviticus contains a list of commandments, both relating to the relationship of a person with God and relationships between people. The underlying, foundational commandment is found in verse 2:
"You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy". This is the base for keeping all the rules that follow. Interestingly, the verses relating to interpersonal relationships all start with "you shall not", including verse 18. Why these negative commandments? To understand this important principle, we might turn to the explanations given first and foremost by our rabbi Yeshua but also by other Jewish Sages.
In Matthew 22, we read that the Pharisees come to Yeshua, and one of them, a learned Torah scholar, asks Him, with the purpose of testing Him, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Yeshua answered him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Torah and the Prophets." (vss. 37-40).
A similar claim is attributed to Rabbi Akiva, who lived not long after Yeshua. He said about the phrase ‘love your neighbour as yourself’: "This is a fundamental principle of the Torah’. Rashi, a Jewish scholar in the 11th century, explains these words and says that this is so fundamental that without love for your neighbour, you cannot fulfil all the other rules mentioned in Leviticus 19. Only if you love your neighbour are you able to not steal from him, not lie to him, and so on. Therefore, this is the fundamental principle of the Torah.
But the rules regarding behaviour towards our fellowmen do not end with the commandment to love. Two small but very important words follow: אני ה' I am the LORD. These words connect again to verse 2, where the people of Israel are instructed to be holy, for the LORD is holy. It also connects to the importance of Yeshua’s famous parable about the Good Samaritan.
To understand this commandment, it is important to take a closer look at the Hebrew words ואהבת לרעך כמוך. We already saw that the phrase is the second part of a verse, explaining why it starts with a vav in Hebrew, translated as ‘but’. You shall not do this and this, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself. Instead of focusing on the negative, even if we are trying to avoid it, our focus should be on the positive, on adding love, kindness, and grace to the world.
The verb to love, (Ahav) אהב, is a root found 251 times in the Hebrew Bible, often as an antonym for שׂנא to hate. The verb usually refers to affectionate love for someone or the deep desire to be intimately connected and united with someone. When referring to the LORD, the verb is used for His covenantal love for Israel, shown through His actions. In return, He asks Israel to show her love for Him by keeping His commandments. Yeshua commands the same in John 15:9–10: "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love."
The second letter in Hebrew that is important is the ל (lamed), which gets lost in the English translation. This letter is a prefix with the general meaning ‘to, for, in order to’. This little letter teaches us we need to love ‘to’ our neighbour, but what does that mean? It means that we are not only commanded to have some abstract feeling of love for someone, but that we actually need to make sure that ‘it is well to him’, or in better English: ‘it is well with him’. This already takes us from an abstract feeling or attitude to a level of action, making sure that the circumstances of life are good for our fellow neighbour, so that he may be well.
The next word, רעך, re’ekha (your neighbour, form re’a, neighbour) brings us to the question the Torah scholar asked Yeshua, "Who is my neighbour?" The word re’a is found in a variety of contexts: for instance, a close friend (Job 2:11), an acquaintance (Job 20:10), an ally (1 Sam. 30:26), a neighbour or fellow man (Prov. 25:17). In all those cases, the word applies to a fellow Israelite. Another word for fellow is עמית (amit), which occurs rarely in the Bible but seems to have a similar meaning as re’a. The sons of your people (בני עמך) is another term used for fellow men; it occurs in Leviticus 19 as well and clearly indicates the people of Israel. This is even more enforced by Leviticus 19:34, where we find a specific commandment to love the stranger (גר) אהבת לו כמוך, a similar phrase to the one in Leviticus 19:18. Therefore, it seems that the re’a, the ‘neighbour’ is a fellow Israelite.
The last word, כמוך (kamokha), is translated mostly ‘as yourself’, though the Hebrew can also mean ‘as you’. A possible meaning is that one should love his fellowmen as one loves oneself. As we are all created in God's image, loving ourselves means showing gratitude to God for giving us our lives. As David says in Psalm 139:14, "I will give thanks to you because I have been so amazingly and miraculously made". Only if we accept ourselves as beloved children of God do we have the ability to truly love someone else. This relates to the other possible meaning of the word ‘kamokha’: we are to love our neighbour since ‘he is as you’, meaning he is a human being, created by God, just like you.
The next two words, ‘I am the LORD’, frame this sentence. As the LORD shows covenantal love to His people, to both you and the other, we are to follow His example and show love to one another. He is the Creator of both you and him. He is the Father in heaven of both you and him, and therefore you should relate to this other person as your brother.
Coming back now to Yeshua’s parable, we can better understand the importance of His teaching. First, the one asking the question was a Torah scholar, someone who studied and knew the Scriptures very well. When Yeshua (or any other rabbi) quotes a few words of a verse, the Torah scholar would immediately know its continuation and context. He would have known that the verse is taken from a context of rules on how to relate to a fellowman, an Israelite, and ends with ‘I am the LORD’.
The simple meaning of the well-known parable is that ‘your neighbour' is the one who shows compassion, even if it is your enemy. As might be known to most, the Samaritans and the Jews were enemies. The Samaritans had been living in Samaria for some hundreds of years already and identified themselves as a distinct group from the Jews. Flavius Josephus calls them a Jewish sect. In Yeshua’s time, they had their own place of worship on Mount Gerizim for some time already, and until this very day, that is where the Samaritans have their place of worship.
It was generally believed in Jewish tradition that the Samaritans were descendants of the people living in Samaria and the new groups brought in by the Assyrians. After the Assyrian empire, under king Tiglath Pileser III, destroyed the kingdom of Israel in 732 BCE, they brought new groups of people. The Bible mentions in 2 Kings 17:24: "Then the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they took possession of Samaria and dwelt in its cities".
This is a well-known policy that the Assyrians used. After conquering large areas, they took the local elite into exile and put another conquered population in their area instead. In this way, it was hard for the local people to create new alliances and try to rebel against Assyria because their leaders had been taken away. Furthermore, the land did not lay waste, and the newly brought population, probably together with the remnants, would produce agricultural products that would be taxed and form a buffer zone between the Assyrian empire and their enemies.
This policy made it much easier to control large, conquered areas. However, as most likely not all people were exiled, some of the survivors of the conquest must still have been in the land, and the Samaritans themselves claim to be the descendants of the few people from the ten tribes that were not exiled.
In Yeshua’s days, the main conflict seems to have been over the claim that both groups were descendants of Jacob/Israel but not accepting the other as such. Both groups laid claim to the same heritage in Israel. The conflict seems to have intensified in Yeshua’s days, though there are indications that there were peaceful contacts between the Jews and the Samaritans as well.
On this background of conflict, Yeshua tells the parable of the Samaritan, passing by a robbed man and offering help to him after both a Levite and a Cohen had already passed but ignored the half-dead man. The Cohen might have had a ‘good’ reason, as it was forbidden for him to touch a corpse; otherwise, he would have been unclean for seven days and not able to serve in the Temple. Also, the robbers were probably still around, and stopping on the road would endanger the helper. However, the clear message is that one should not turn one’s head when seeing a person in need and that the true ‘neighbour’ is the one who helps.
But I think it is possible to take the meaning a step further. First of all, the Samaritan seemed to have understood that the little letter ל meant that he did not just help the man get to a safe place. He made sure he was well, he offered payment for the treatment, and he did all he could for the robbed man. That teaches us a practical way of showing love for one another.
The second, deeper meaning that might have shocked the Pharisees who were listening lies in the understanding of the phrase ‘I am the LORD’, in the original verse. The LORD mentions Himself in the verse. He includes Himself in the story of love between fellowmen. He commands us to love one another, and then He will also show His love to us. Only if we accept our brother as our brother can we accept Him as our Father, and He can accept us as His child. This does not mean that He does not unconditionally love us, but it means that He asks us to be like Him: Be holy because I am holy’. Yeshua said, "This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you." John 15:12-14).
Generally, this is a radical statement. However, for the Jewish people in Yeshua’s day, this statement was even more radical. The people understood the verse 'love your neighbour' to mean ‘love all your fellow Israelites’, which is not an easy task. But Yeshua’s parable takes it a step further, showing that the Samaritan, the non-Jew, is also part of the story. He is a brother because the LORD is His Father. The message is inclusive of all human beings, as all were created in God's image.
As we see later in the letters of the Apostles, this concept of including the gentiles was not easy to understand for the Jewish people at the time, but it is the message that Yeshua brought to the world: inclusiveness for everyone.
The commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves is unique to the Bible. Many of the Torah commandments have similarities to rules and laws found in texts from the ancient Near East, but for this commandment, there are no parallels.
The closest instruction is found in "counsel of wisdom", dated to sometime before the year 700 BC, where the reader is instructed to do good to his evildoer. Interestingly, this text comes from the Assyrian and Babylonian worlds, from the people who destroyed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and exiled their people.
In the Torah, there are already examples of caring for the animal of the enemy (Ex. 23:4-5) and giving bread and water to the person who hates you if he needs it (Prov. 25:21). Doing good to one’s evildoer is a commandment also taught by Yeshua in Luke 6:27, but He adds the commandment of loving the enemy.
This goes a step further than loving your neighbour. Even though it might be difficult, we as humans are able to show love to someone from our own group. But loving someone who hates us can only be done through God’s love in us, through Yeshua. Accepting our enemy as our brother because God loves him as much as he loves us requires a heart changed by God’s Spirit.
Though this is not the platform to discuss politics, I think that the obvious parallel that can be drawn to our times is our attitude towards the Arabs living in the land of Israel. The conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans in Yeshua’s days was as much a fight between brothers over the heritage as is the modern-day conflict. As the Torah scholar testing Yeshua needed to look into his own heart, we also need self-reflection. Do we have the heart that Yeshua had for other people, whether our friends or our enemies? Do we want them to be saved and to be part of the kingdom of God? Yeshua gave His own life for all, for the religious leaders that came to discuss the meaning of Torah laws, often with the intention to test Him, for the Samaritans that were rejected by the Jews, for the tax collectors, the Roman soldiers, the fishermen, the widows, the rich, the poor, and also for us. And we, as His followers, are asked the question: "So which of these three do you think was the neighbour to him who fell among the thieves?’ And the man said, ‘He who showed mercy on him’, then Yeshua said to him, ‘Go and do likewise". The commandment is not to love in an abstract way. The commandment is to go and show mercy, to do all that is in our power to make sure the other is well.
This attitude in our hearts is not only our personal responsibility but also our communal responsibility. John 13:34–35 teaches: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." When we cherish His commandments and act accordingly, many will see and glorify our Father, Who is in heaven.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pnina has been living in Israel for the past five years while also studying Biblical archaeology. She likes to explore the land of Israel, uncover its past, and enjoy the variety in nature, people, and stories that the land is blessed with.