How Do You Love Your Neighbor Like Yourself?

Rabbi Aryeh Levin was known as the righteous man of Jerusalem. He was incredibly pious, kind, and a great scholar. He lived in the quaint area of Nachlaot, right behind the busy open market. There was a young man who grew up in the neighborhood whom Rabbi Aryeh knew well but he felt the boy was avoiding him.

One day, they bumped into each other in the narrow alleys of Nachlaot and Rabbi Aryeh confronted him and said, “I can’t help but feel you are avoiding me, tell me how are you?”

The young man sheepishly replied that it was true, he was avoiding the great rabbi as he had grown up observant but had chosen to walk away from observant life altogether.

He said, “Rebbe, I was so embarrassed to meet you since I have taken off my kippah and am no longer observant.”

Rabbi Aryeh took the young man’s hand into his own and said, “My dear Moshe. Don’t worry. I am a very short man. I can only see what is in your heart, I cannot see what is on your head.”

The Torah commands us to “love your neighbor like yourself (in Hebrew the word “yourself” is “Kamocha”). That doesn’t mean love your neighbor as you love yourself, which is unrealistic, if not impossible.  It means love you neighbor—why? Because he or she is like you, similar to you.  You both possess the same spark of life, the same Godly soul, you both have strengths and weaknesses, you both have virtues and faults, you both have things to be proud of and areas to work on.

You can’t love others, certainly not all others as much as you love yourself, but you certainly can learn to love more.  How?  “Like yourself” – because if you can cut away their different kippah or their lack of a kippah, if you ignore how they dress differently, act differently, think differently, if you cut away their idiosyncrasies and habits that drive you crazy, you will find they are just like you.

The great Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva witnessed thousands of his students fail this lesson. They focused on their differences rather than choose to embrace their similarities and the result was that they couldn’t see themselves in one another, they could not relate or identify. They saw their fellow student as different, the other, and that caused them to disrespect one another. Rabbi Akiva attended thousands of funerals and delivered thousands of eulogies as his students were cut down by a punitive plague and he turned around and taught, “’Love your neighbor like yourself’ is the primary principle of the Torah.

It is not a coincidence that the same Rabbi Akiva is quoted in Ethics of the Fathers, the Mishnaic collection of ethical sayings, as teaching, “How precious is every person because we were all created in the image of God.”  Internalizing that is the secret of loving everyone.

You may not have the capacity to love others as much as yourself, but you can do a whole lot better at loving others, especially those who are different than you, by focusing on how they are similar to you, despite their differences. Peel back the layers of that which separates you from others until you find common ground and that connects you. That is the full expression of loving your fellow Jew.