What Is This Thing Called Love?
Parashat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, Leviticus 16:1–20:27
Rabbi Stuart Dauermann, Ahavat Zion Messianic Synagogue, Los Angeles
Many people skip over Leviticus, assuming these archaic chapters are irrelevant to our lives. This week’s parasha proves such people to be mistaken. Read coherently, and taken seriously, even two verses in today’s parasha can transform our lives in service to God and mankind.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks opens our understanding:
At first glance, these laws have nothing to do with one another: some are about conscience, some about politics and economics, and others about purity and taboo. Clearly, though, the Torah is telling us otherwise. They do have something in common. They are all about order, limits, boundaries. They are telling us that reality has a certain underlying structure whose integrity must be honored. If you hate or take revenge you destroy relationships. If you commit injustice, you undermine the trust on which society depends. If you fail to respect the integrity of nature (different seeds, species, and so on), you take the first step down a path that ends in environmental disaster. (https://rabbisacks.org/love-not-enough-acharei-mot-kedoshim-5778/)
Two verses in Leviticus/Vayikra 19 turn us around and propel us forward.
Vayikra 19:18 reminds us how the good life includes loving our neighbor as ourselves. In Torah’s historical context, one’s neighbors would be our fellow community members, joined to us by covenant, expressed or implied. This remains true today whether speaking of religious covenants that Jews share in common, or secular covenants like the Constitution of the United States, or contractual arrangements with members of housing cooperatives.
In Luke 10:25–37, a scribe questions Yeshua on the extent of our obligation to love our neighbor as ourselves, asking, “Who is my neighbor?” The scribe may want to limit the term to his own crowd, countrymen, or cronies. Yeshua’s response is the parable of the Good Samaritan, insisting that our neighbor is anyone we treat in a neighborly fashion. Yeshua’s point? The responsibility for treating others with love always falls on our shoulders, and godly people are those who apply the term “neighbor” in a liberal rather than restricted manner.
A second verse in Leviticus drives this point home.
Vayikra 19:34 tells us we must not only love our neighbor as ourselves, but also “treat the foreigner staying with you like the native-born among you — you are to love him (the foreigner, the stranger) as yourself . . . I am Adonai your God.”
If we are paying attention, we may protest that God is being politically intrusive. He is. He is messing with our categories of obligation, just as Yeshua did with the inquiring scribe. The circle of obligation extends beyond our preferences, prejudices, and comfort zone.
We’ve been talking about loving both neighbor and stranger. But what is this thing called love?
What Torah means by this kind of love is best conveyed by the Hebrew hesed, a concept so rich it defies simple word-for-word translation into any other language. You will see it translated as mercy; other times, as kindness, lovingkindness, goodness, and covenant faithfulness. But even then the dynamic nature of hesed pulls against the confines of the words we choose as equivalents. They are not equivalent because none of these words help us feel the warmth and sense the scope of the Hebrew.
Rabbi Sacks warms up our cold and narrow definitions:
Hesed is about emotional support, loving-kindness, love as compassion. It is what we mean when we speak of God in Psalm 147 as one who “heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.” It includes hospitality to the lonely, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, raising the spirits of the depressed, helping people through crises in their lives, and making those at the margins feel part of the community. (https://media.rabbisacks.org/20210706224059/Unit-6-Advanced-Level-Student.pdf?_gl=1).
Hesed is always on the move, proactively involved in meeting the needs of others. That’s what Avraham did when he went forth to meet three traveling strangers and feed them lavishly in Genesis 18, just one biblical example of hesed on the move.
We might define hesed as “familial responsiveness,” that is, responding to others and their needs as if they are members of our family to whom we owe our engagement and concern.
The scholar Catherine Doob Sakenfeld takes us deeper still. Here is a list of hesed’s characteristics, adapted from her work, Responsiveness in Action: Loyalty in Biblical Perspective:
Hesed/Familial Responsiveness is made manifest in concrete action.
Hesed/Familial Responsiveness is to another person (or persons) in relationship with the one who takes action; it is not simply a commitment to an idea or a cause.
Hesed/Familial Responsiveness is offered to a person in need by a person seeking to fill the need. Narrative texts in the Bible tend to focus on dramatic needs, but even the smallest need in the most everyday situation might become an occasion for showing hesed.
The need places the potential recipient in a position of dependence on the one in a position to demonstrate hesed.
There are no societal legal sanctions for the failure to demonstrate hesed; thus the doer is in a situation of free decision.
Hence, hesed is shown in a freely undertaken fulfillment of an existing commitment to another who is now in a situation of need.
Sakenfeld’s first point speaks of making hesed manifest through actions that display hesed.
Such actions are termed “g’milut hasadim,” (lit., “the bestowal of lovingkindness”), the most comprehensive and fundamental of all Jewish social virtues, which encompasses the whole range of the duties of sympathetic consideration toward one’s fellow man. (https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gemilut-hasadim)
We see a cluster of such g’milut hasadim in a narrative of Kefa’s ministry in the Book of Acts. In rapid succession, Kefa heals a paralyzed man named Aeneas (9:33–34), and then the scene shifts to Yafo, where a woman named Tavita is known for her acts of tzedakah (financial help to the needy) and other good deeds (9:35–36). She takes ill and dies and the women of the community wash her body in preparation for burial (9:37). Two men ask Kefa to come to Yafo, and there the women show him garments Tavita had made for others in the community, most likely poor women she was helping (9:39). Kefa prays for Tavita and raises her up (9:40–42). All of these actions are g’milut hasadim, deeds of familial responsiveness, demonstrating hesed. Scripture highlights the importance of hesed on the move by clustering these examples together.
For us, as for the scribe who queried Yeshua, perhaps the hardest thing about hesed is welcoming and serving the stranger. The more different from us the stranger is in appearance, station in life, and opinion, the harder it is to touch their needs with our provision and concern.
But can we be true children of the Avraham of Genesis 18 without welcoming and serving the stranger through deeds of hesed?
Priest and author Henri Nouwen, in his book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, takes us still deeper.
Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is . . . obligatory for us [as God’s people] to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings. The movement from hostility to hospitality is hard and full of difficulties. Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy to suddenly appear, intrude and do harm.
These are the strangers, the foreigners, whom Torah demands we love as we love ourselves, just as we would love the members of our own family.
Hesed is treating others with familial responsiveness, whether close-in cronies or strangers from afar.
What is this thing called love? It is following in the footsteps of Avraham. It is imitating the kind of familial responsiveness we saw Kefa and the community demonstrate in Acts 9. It is treating even strangers like family and proactively seeking to meet their needs.
Hesed-love for others makes demands upon us while reducing the demands upon them.
Of all the fruits of the Spirit, this is the sweetest.