In the second of our two parshiyot this week, we have the famous injunction – ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha, love your fellow as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). It is to that love that we are headed. But first I’d like to take a look at the less well known first half of that very same verse – lo tikom velo titor. Do not take revenge and do not bear a grudge.
The Talmud brings examples of what is entailed in each of these prohibitions. Nekimah, revenge, they say, is like when Reuven comes to borrow a sickle from his neighbor Shimon, and Shimon says no, and then the next day when Shimon wants to borrow an ax from Reuven, Reuven takes revenge and says no, you didn’t lend to me so why should I lend to you. Netirah, a grudge, they say, is like when Reuven again asks to borrow something from Shimon and Shimon again says no, but this time, when Shimon comes the next day looking to borrow something from Reuven, Reuven’s response is – well, yes, I’ll give it to you, because, unlike you, I’m actually a kind neighbor (Yoma 23a).
Holding on to Past Grievance
What the two cases share is a holding on to the past, a hardening of your heart against this person based on a previous interaction. That hardening might mean you actually refuse to lend them something or it might mean you end up giving it to them, but either way, there is energy around this second interaction that is not clean but very much muddied by the past, a kind of simmering resentment and aggression.
Turning inward, I invite you to check inside for any way that this applies to you in your relationships, even subtly, a holding on to past grievances, nursing some earlier perceived insult, so that future interactions still have that tinge of piled up irritation. It’s like the memory of all past grievances are present in this current moment of interaction, as if your heart has accumulated layers of defense that close it off from truly seeing, meeting and opening to this person.
Noticing, too, how easily we accumulate grudges, often wrongly interpreting something someone says or does through our own skewed view. Elsewhere, the gemara tells a story of a rabbi who felt hurt by another rabbi because he thought he was sneering at him when in fact he had a cleft lip. The aggrieved rabbi actually went on to cause the other one to die (Bava Kamma 117a). We hold onto our hurts so intensely that over time, what grows inside can become a kind of sinat hinam, baseless hatred.
Perpetuating Aggression
Sometimes, of course, the hurt may not be imagined, but very real. People do hurt us or are less than kind to us. Maybe Shimon really was a jerk. But even so, noticing how Reuven’s vengeful reaction is likely to only increase the antipathy between these two neighbors so that one can imagine that, over generations, this small hurt could turn their families into sworn enemies.
Taking a moment to notice the way that revenge and grudge holding perpetuate aggression and hatred in ourselves and in our world, how it keeps making things worse. You hurt me so I hurt you. And then since I hurt you, you hurt me back again, causing me to hate and fear and distrust you even more. Over and over again. Never ending cycles of violence and hatred and trauma. The Passover song Chad Gadya tells this story in its own way – the fire burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the little goat. A chain of violence, each aggressive act leading inexorably to the next one. The Israeli singer Chava Alberstein, in her version of this Chad Gadya song, adds these lines: “On all other nights I have asked only four questions. Tonight I have another question: How long will the cycle of horror last? Hunter and hunted, beater and beaten, when will this madness stop?”
There is great sadness here, and we can feel really stuck in this dynamic, both personally and collectively, stuck in reactivity and endless cycles of aggression, feeling like it is impossible to get out, like there is a closed door before us, or like we are in a never ending loop, a vortex that draws us ever downward, like quicksand. How can we ever escape?
Enter God
As always, I believe that it is precisely into this space of impossibility that God enters. In the human sphere, there is indeed no way out. All is tit for tat. I treat you the way you treated me, I offer you back what you offered me, un-generosity meets un-generosity., aggression meets aggression. Revenge makes sense on this plane; it is just the same conduct sent right back to the other person.
But what happens if we bring God into the picture? After the prohibitions against revenge and grudge bearing, we have the instruction – “love your neighbor as yourself” and then the coda to the verse, ani Hashem, “I am God.“ God enters here – together with love – as an antidote to the revenge of the first half of the verse, entering with a love that encompasses both you and me, self and other, Reuven and Shimon, big enough to hold us both and never run out.
Divine Love
Maybe letting some of that divine love into your system now as a balm to your aggrieved parts, feeling into that love’s breadth and expansiveness, like a vast ocean that keeps flowing and flowing. I don’t have to hoard sickles or axes; there are plenty to go around. Letting yourself float in that ocean and relax in its bounty, taking in some nourishment, letting go for this moment of any concerns about who said or did what yesterday or the day before. Just resting here for a moment.
Not Tit For Tat
Sensing how, on the divine plane, things are not tit for tat. We don’t earn Your love, God, through our actions. You just overflow with it for no reason, ahavat hinam, baseless love, for free, simply because it is Your nature to love. There are no conditions. It’s like the rain that pours down equally on the righteous and unrighteous. It is free. It is grace. Hinam.
Can you feel how this type of love is the opposite energy of revenge? Revenge is exacting, it is calculating, it is reactive and conditional – if you do this, then I will do that, returning your energy right back to you. But God’s love is not like that. It is generous and forgiving, offered freely without accounts. Here is how the 12th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts it: “Often I wish my enemies and those who try to hurt me an equal harm, like to like – as anger meets anger and hate meets hate – but You keep reminding me, early and late, that love is unlike meeting like (Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, p. 78). Love is unlike meeting like. Someone does not lend you their sickle and you still love them, not just on the surface, but deep down. To meet stinginess with generosity. To meet hatred with love, as if you are embracing the other completely, holding them as they are, flaws and all, loving them still.
I believe this divine love is the magic ingredient, the one thing that can finally stop the cycle, that can dissolve the hurt and the pain, the fear and the mistrust, the anger and the aggression and the urge for revenge, the one ingredient that can melt our stone hearts and draw us back to one another.
Beginning Again
This divine love, it also helps us let go of the past so that we can begin again, unmuddied. We carry so much weight of memory in our bodies, of past grievance and trauma, of all the ways that people have hurt or disappointed us. It’s like we are stuck under the weight of all of that, living an extremely curtailed life based on the particular circumstances and conditioning of our history. Can you feel that weight in you, that stuckness, the way it narrows your perspective and sense of possibility?
But God is freedom, God is hope, God is possibility, the possibility for something different to unfold in you and in the world, God is the option of letting go of all that weight, releasing it into the the wind and becoming as light as a feather, flying like a bird, free to choose a new way, not laden down by a lifetime of woundedness, by centuries of hatred, but weightless now, free to love for free, for no reason, free to overflow as God does in all directions, making no distinctions, just love for free flowing out in this moment, fresh and new. It has to be so with God.
Fresh and New
God is this fresh new day that arises, each new sunrise totally new, all options still open. Hamehadesh betuvo bekhol yom tamid ma’aseh breishit. The One who in goodness renews the work of creation each day. God makes the world afresh each day, and you and me afresh each day. We can wake up that new and pure, like a green shoot poking up through the earth, like newborn babies, not hurt or conditioned or holding tight against something or someone, just pure love born into the world, facing our loved ones afresh with a smile, seeing them again now as if for the first time, without the baggage of what transpired yesterday or years ago in our childhood. Life is too short for that. Let yourself be born in this moment into a love that is that free, that irrational, that unconditioned, that all encompassing. Releasing all the thoughts and categories and judgments about all the people in your life and in the world at large – all those grievances and judgments take up so much space and energy – and filling up that enormous vacated space inside you with only this one love, this one free incomprehensible divine love, for self, for other, and for ger, for stranger (Leviticus 19:34).
Until We No Longer Know
Ad delo yada, we say on Purim, until we no longer know the difference between Haman and Mordecai, between friend and foe, until we let go of history, of past grievance, of being so sure who is right and wrong, until we let go of all that judgment and distinction and tit for tat and open into something unknown, something beyond, something divine. This Purim notion is a reaching towards a messianic era. Reach out for that right now. Dare to hope, dare to reach, dare to imagine us all swimming together in the ocean of God’s love. I don’t know how we get there, but I know that orienting in that direction will help us, is the part we play in bringing it forward.
I Have That Divine Capacity In Me
Ani Hashem, the parsha says again and again. I am God. I wonder about those two words as a kind of empowering mantra for us. We are so stuck sometimes in our human constraints, thinking – I can’t do it, I can’t love that deeply and freely, I can’t let go, I can’t trust, all of the things that are hard for us. And then the energy of Ani Hashem comes along. I am God, God says to us. There is this other force in the universe, and it is also in you, in each of us, in each of our I’s. I am God. This divine love is not just something out there, but something very close to me, inside me, in my I, my Ani.
Yes, you are the one that holds a grudge sometimes, but you are also Ani Hashem, also a piece of God. You have that love in you, that capacity to be born afresh at each moment. Be born afresh right now. Be born afresh right now into this unconditioned love.
Shiru lashem shir hadash. Sing out a new song – to God, for God (Psalm 96, 98, 149). That is our call, not to sing the same song we’ve held in our bodies for so many years, the same song we’ve been handed down for millenia, but to sing something fresh and new, like the world created anew each morning, full of hope and promise and the kind of love that doesn’t keep accounts, but overflows in all directions. Become that love. You were born to be that.
Photo by andre furtado at Pexels
Thank you! I enjoyed reading this and look forward to reading the next Parshios.