Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Erin Collins Bat Mitzvah
Who is the Neighbor We’re to Love?
March 8, 2003
Who Is the Neighbor We’re to Love?
In a classroom almost two thousand years ago, a teacher asked his students: “What is the most important verse in our entire Bible?”. A hand shot up, a voice cried out: “Leviticus, Chapter 19, Verse 18 – Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The teacher was impressed and commended the student. “That is a very good answer. Certainly a very important verse.” But then another hand was raised and another voice: “But Rabbi, who is thy neighbor?”.
Now that is a very good question. Who is our neighbor? Because, after all, doesn’t almost everyone believe in loving his neighbor? Even Hitler taught people to love their neighbors, that is, if their neighbors were Aryan, Fascist, German. Supporters of apartheid in South Africa preached love of neighbors if they were white in color and Dutch Reformed in religion and Afrikaans in language.
But is the definition of neighbor just those who live next door? Just those who live in our town? Just those who are our color or attend our house of worship or belong to our political party?
So the rabbi asked the questioner: “What would you say is the most important verse in the Bible?” And this second student answered: “To me the most important verse in the Bible is in Genesis 1:27 – And God created man in His image, in the image of God, He created him; male and female, God created them. This verse,” the student defended, “tells us who our neighbor is – all people are neighbors because all people are created in God’s image.”
There are several interesting Talmudic commentaries upon that Genesis verse which support the student’s enthusiasm. One of them tells that when God was ready to create man, God took a bit of earth from each continent and a bit of water from every lake and with this clay made man, so that no people might claim “this is where man was created. We who live here are, therefore, of finer stock.”
Another commentator noted that whereas animals and birds and crawling things seem to have been created in large numbers, Adam was the one and only human created in the beginning. Why did God create but one human? To make it impossible for any person to consider himself superior to another by virtue of ancestry. All people are descended from one couple, so no one can say “my family is better than yours, my family tree is older.” We are all descended from great-great-great-great-great grandpa Adam.
Another rabbi of old made man’s creation in God’s image the source of man’s right to be different. He compared an earthly king and the Sovereign of the Universe. A human monarch issues coins upon which he stamps his image and, no matter how many coins he issues, they are all alike. But when the Sovereign of the Universe stamps the Divine image upon men and women – millions of them, billions of them – no two are exactly alike.
This is where democracy and totalitarianism differ. Tyrants of the left or right wipe out all who persist in differing so that their subjects begin to look like identical coins – talking alike, voting alike, even thinking alike. On the other hand, democracy protects our right to differ; it even encourages individualism.
In Nazi Germany, dissenters were sent to the concentration camps, in Communist China they were brainwashed; in America they go to the ballot box and, if they are outvoted, they wait four years and try again.
Genesis 1 has left its stamp upon our lives, our ethics, our politics. It makes all people neighbors, and the love of neighbor must therefore include all people.
The opposite of such a sense of neighborhood is prejudice. Prejudice is the hatred of people without cause. Prejudice is rather like poison ivy – the poison is not on the person who touches the ivy, but in the ivy. For example, we buy a dress that does not fit or a workman does a poor job for us or someone fails to pay what he owes us. Compare our reaction in such situations when the person who we think has done us ill is a member of our own faith community or when he is a member of some other religious or racial group. In the first instance, we criticize the individual – he is dishonest, she is inefficient, he is a cheat.
But in the second instance, when the person is of another faith community or racial group, how often do we say “just like a __” and you supply your own noun. We no longer think of him as an individual, we think of him as belonging to a group. The prejudice was already there, just like poison on ivy. What we did was to brush against it.
And the same truth can be seen from another angle. We meet and get to know and admire someone from a group we dislike. What do we say? Do we say, “gee, I was wrong about the group”? Not if we’re prejudiced. If we are prejudiced we say, “I don’t like ______” and again you supply the group – “but you are different”. Again we reveal the true character of prejudice. What we imply by such a statement is “I do not like your people and I am not going to let your good qualities disturb my prejudice. I am going to like you, but still dislike them.”
Prejudice is a poison, and it is completely irrational. Its unreasoning blindness is illustrated by a true story a mother related about her six-year old son Billy. He came into the house one day from play and announced to her: “Donny is silly.”
“Why is Donny silly?”
“He just is. Yesterday he said I was his best friend. Today he said he doesn’t like me any more. When I asked him why, he said it was because I am Jewish. Isn’t that silly?”
Yeah, it is silly – but what a vivid example of prejudice it is. Billy was no different that day than he had been the day before. He was the same child with the same good and bad qualities. But, Donny had changed. Donny had been taught to hate a name, a label, a group, and so now he did not like Billy any more.
Prejudice is not rational. When Hitler was losing the war against the Allies, two choices confronted him: step up his efforts against the Allies and possibly win the war, or divert all his military resources toward exterminating the Jews and surely lose the war. Hitler chose the latter.
Prejudice is also a two-edged sword which ultimately destroys not only the irrationally prejudiced, but those who let themselves be led and misled by them.
The biblical story of Esther illustrates several of the things we have just been discussing, and I guess that is why prejudice is on my mind. In just nine days, Jews throughout the world will celebrate the holiday of Purim. Purim is based on the biblical story of Esther. Haman was already prejudiced against the stranger, the minority, the Jews of Persia. The poison in him was aroused by the fact that Mordecai, out of religious conviction, refused to bow down to him. So Haman chooses not to punish Mordecai alone, but rather destroy his entire people who are different from the good Persians. Haman reserved a special end for Mordecai, building a gallows 30 cubits high for him to hang on. Exterminate all of the Jews of the vast Persian Empire because they are different. This is a prime example of that big word which appears in our Holyday liturgy – Xenophobia – the dislike of the unlike. And the only Jew with whom Haman had personal contact, he wanted to make a public spectacle of his death. How does this story end? Haman was hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordecai, and 75,000 of those who had followed Haman were slain.
Prejudice is a two-edged sword. In history, prejudice has not only destroyed those who held it, but endangered whole nations.
A modern Haman came to the German people 70 years ago and agitated. “There is a certain people . . . and it profits not the German nation to suffer them . . . Let them be destroyed and I will add to your coffers.” Enough people listened to give Adolph Hitler his chance at power and with that power he almost destroyed the Jewish People; but he also destroyed much of the German nation – the tolerant with the prejudiced, the innocent with the guilty. Their cities were bombed to rubble, their factories reduced to dust, their young men slain on the battlefields, and their children in bomb shelters.
We need to learn from these examples, friends. Intolerance is like a poison in the blood stream, a cancer in the body politic. When the panderers of prejudice come to us and play on our dislike of some racial or religious minority, they are not seeking our welfare – they are seeking their own power and with that power they will destroy all of us.
Tolerance or, what I would much prefer, mutual respect, brotherhood and sisterhood are not luxuries like air conditioning in a car which makes driving more comfortable. They are lubrication without which the car cannot run at all for very long.
How, then, can we learn to love our neighbor as ourself? Both by attitude and by action. Let me illustrate the attitude by a parable and the action by a true story.
The parable. I love my mother, I truly believe she is the most wonderful mother in all the world, and I would not trade mothers with anyone. And yet, while I love my mother dearly and think that no one else can compare with her, I know that others love their mothers too, and that they too believe their mother to be the most wonderful mother in all the world and that they likewise would not trade mothers with anyone.
I do not begrudge anyone his love for his mother. I respect him for it and once a year all of us observe Mother’s Day – all of us together –
and we give our mothers gifts and cards, and join hands in expressing our love for them.
Even more importantly, we learn through our love of our own mother to respect motherhood as such, and we pass laws to protect working mothers and set up institutions to be motherly to those who have lost their mothers. In short, my love for my mother does not separate me from the children of other mothers, but brings us all closer together in honoring our mothers.
The application of this parable seems obvious. I love my mother faith, I love the ways of prayer that I learned from my parents, the ideals that I absorb from my religious school teachers and from my rabbi. I am moved and stirred by the Holydays of my religion. I sincerely believe that my mother faith is the best faith in the world, and I would not trade faiths with any person I know.
And yet, even while loving my mother faith and believing it to be the finest faith in the world, I know that others love their mother faith and that they too believe it to be the most wonderful faith in the world, which they likewise would not trade with anyone else.
And I respect their love for their faith. Just as we have tried by law to protect motherhood, so have we – by our Constitution – protected mother faiths and declared it to be a fundamental right that each person may live by whatever mother faith he or she chooses.
Though our mother faiths differ, though our worship and our beliefs and our observances vary, we can live with mutual respect. In those areas of agreement there is much we can do together – church and mosque and synagogue to bring the message of God’s parenthood and human brotherhood and sisterhood to our society and to our world.
Let me tell you the story of one boy who experienced trouble with this society. A Jewish boy was on the first team of his high school football squad. He asked to be excused from practice the day before a big game because it was Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. The coach was insistent – no excuses, we’ve got a big game coming up, you’ve got to be here Yom Kippur or no Yom Kippur.
“But it is our holiest day of the year, Coach. It’s like Easter to you. I’ve just got to be in Temple.”
“Sorry. No excuses. Either come to practice or turn in your uniform.”
Sadly, the Jewish lad went off to the dressing room to turn in his uniform. But he had been there only a moment when the whole team came piling in. Leading them was a dear friend of his, a Catholic boy, who said to his teammates: “Fellas, this is all wrong. He’s not going off some place to have a good time. He’s going to practice his religion, to pray. That is an American right. Fellas, I’m going to turn in my uniform too.”
At this show of team solidarity, the coach changed his mind, and they all played the game together the day after Yom Kippur.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It is not vague or idealistic or off in the clouds. It is where we live, where we work and where we play. Everyone has opportunities to demonstrate his convictions, as did that Catholic boy. It takes courage, but all of us who talk of good neighbors, teamwork and mutual respect must also choose to act as neighbors, teammates, unique children of one God. Amen
This message is based on the writings of Rabbi Robert I. Kahn, whose memory is truly a blessing.
