![]() Imagine the spiritual enhancement to prayer if you reminded yourself: This is not only about me. Just imagine how davvening would be transformed if you began each new day by promising, aspiring, worshipfully, prayerfully, to love your neighbor as yourself. Hasidic prayer books, like those of Chabad, very influenced by Kabbalah, often include it.Īnd we all should. ![]() You’ll find it in Conservative prayer books, beginning with Siddur Sim Shalom (1985), but not in most Orthodox ones, like Artscroll or Rinat Israel. Yet, this beautiful teaching did not take root over time. Abraham Gombiner quoted Lurianic sources to favor this new moment of meditation before prayer. From Vital’s circle in Palestine and Syria, by the mid-17 th century, major Polish legal authorities took it on. This ritual innovation spread far and fast. My teacher of blessed memory exhorted me very strongly regarding loving all the comrades in our fellowship.” In all your prayers or behaviors or speech, you should bind your comrades to yourself. If one of the members suffers some pain, all the members must join themselves to their suffering, whether it regards physical illness or children, God forbid, and pray on their behalf. This is especially true when people attain knowledge and insight to understand their fellows on the level of the soul. “Especially when a group studies Torah together in love, all the members should have the intention of binding themselves together, considering themselves as limbs of a single organism. You should have the intention to love every Jew as you love your own life, for this way your prayer will be bound together with the prayers of all Israel, ascending to heaven and bearing fruit. “Before beginning the order of prayer in synagogue, a person must accept the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Hayim Vital, the Ari insisted that before beginning morning prayers – or according to some reports, before entering the synagogue – all his students should state “I hereby accept the creator’s commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.” To that end, according to his leading disciple, R. “For us,” says the Zohar, “the matter depends on love.” Like earlier Kabbalists, he stressed that learning mystical secrets was possible only when students shared emotional bonds. The Ari’s students in Safed in the Galilee formed a tight group of about 35 or 40 people – at least we know the names of that many, perhaps others participated but were forgotten. Isaac Luria, known as the Holy Ari, formalized its daily recitation. But you could be a very diligent davvener and shul-goer and not recite this verse very often. If you observe holidays and recite traditional prayers you cannot possibly forget cosmic creation, the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, the connection between an exiled people and its ancestral homeland, the need to repent, to study Torah and to keep Shabbat. So perhaps it is a little odd that – unlike Judaism’s other major themes – it lacks any formal ritual reinforcement. The ancient sage Rabbi Akiva thought “love your neighbor as yourself” was the most important mitzvah in the whole Torah ! Other sages favored other verses, but any way you slice it, you cannot imagine any Judaism without it. The Torah wisely commands us to love our clan within a special relationship because of how much we share and commands us to love others in a different way, no matter how little we share. The chapter goes on to command loving the stranger as yourself. Isn’t that divisively tribal? Shouldn’t you love everyone, not just your own folk? I think this objection is misplaced. “Do not hate your kinfolk in your heart … Love your neighbor as yourself.”Īncient gentile Christians – and many modern American Jews – bristled at this mitzvah of loving your fellow Jew. H’s religious outlook is manifest in its most famous statement : Indeed, our parasha begins: “Speak to the entire community of the children of Israel and say to them: Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Rather, this week’s parasha is built from another source Knohl calls H, for the “holiness code.” Where P focuses on ritual details and the sanctity of temple priests, H locates sanctity among the people generally, not just the devoted elite, and therefore addresses social and ethical – not just ritual – behavior. Israel Knohl of Hebrew University, Leviticus reflects not only a single priestly source, called P for short. Modern Bible scholars distinguish among the Torah’s component parts, whose religious views are not always identical. Let’s look at this section’s most famous verse and its place in prayer. ![]() This week we read Parashat Kedoshim, which lies near the physical center of a Torah scroll and constitutes the spiritual center of biblical religion. ואהבת לרעך כמוך/ Ve’ahavta le’reyakha kamokha / “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself”
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