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Get StartedLoving Your Neighbor As Yourself
Do I Have to Get Along with Everyone?
"Ve'ahavta l're'echa kamocha" – "Love your neighbor as yourself" – that’s an easy mitzvah, right? Errrr, not so much. To love your neighbor as yourself… that sounds like a pretty tall order! How many of us can actually say: “Yep, I love my neighbors as much as I love myself”? And yet it’s a mitzvah in the Torah! So are we all just failing horribly at keeping the Torah?
Could be. But maybe not. What if this mitzvah doesn’t quite mean what it sounds like it means? What if there’s a nuance to it that we’re missing?
We hear this mitzvah quoted all the time as a standalone sound bite, but in the Torah, it is a part of a conversation, a flow of logical ideas. To truly understand "Ve'ahavta l're'echa kamocha," we can't just examine it alone. We’d have to open up the Torah to Leviticus 19 and read this mitzvah in its context. When we do, perhaps we'll be able to see it in a whole new light.
Beth Lesch
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