In my post of March 1 on the issue of commanded love I noted that some have identified the Ethic of Reciprocity as actually being:
“And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
I emphasize being as opposed to, say, proceeding from.
And the question of the identification of that (seeming) command as being the Ethic is as opposed to the Ethic being:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I concluded in that post that “It is a ‘do or don’t do’ issue for us, not a love or don’t love issue.”
I want to revisit that subject and look at it a little differently without changing the conclusion.
I’ve commented in other posts about the ambiguity of Biblical Hebrew. One of the sources of that ambiguity is found in the structure of verb forms. There are only two: the perfect and the imperfect.
Verbs in the perfect form generally relate to action that has been completed.
The imperfect form deals with action that has not been completed. The imperfect form can be used to convey a wide variety of meanings: will, shall, might, could, is being, etc. All require the use of imperfect verb forms. The context of use will help to understand which possibility is being expressed but some degree of ambiguity often remains.
Leviticus Chapter 19, in which the text usually translated as “And you shall love…” is found, contains a lengthy list of actions and practices that the people are clearly commanded to either do or refrain from doing.
There is little doubt that its statements regarding sacrificial offerings, harvest practices, stealing, false swearing, perversion of justice, treatment of animals, prohibited sexual practices, etc. are intended to be read as commands.
Among those commands, which deal with concrete physical actions, however, we find these four phrases (as they are typically translated):
“You shall be holy for I the Lord your God, am holy” (19:2)
“You shall fear your God” (19:14)
“You shall not hate your brother in your heart” (19:17)
“You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself” (19:18)
These phrases do not deal with concrete physical action and yet they are typically translated in the same imperative form used in understanding the list of items within which they are sprinkled, which have a clearly different character.
The commandment in Deuteronomy that we must:
“Love the Lord, your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and all of your might”
presents this same problem for many. An often-cited explanation is that we demonstrate the commanded love though our actions. Alternatively, that the love commanded is the result of taking commanded action.
What happens to our understanding of Leviticus 19 if we read those four phrases as describing results rather than commanding emotion? Can we understand these as results produced by our taking the physical actions clearly commanded in all the other verses?
If you do this and this and this and this and this, then:
…you will be holy
…you will fear
…you will not hate
…you will love
The doing of that which is commanded, then, conditions us in a way that results in our attaining the love and holiness promised; because “you will…” can also be understood as a promise.
Two teachings that I have encountered in the past couple of days reinforce my belief that this notion of result rather than command is more appropriate here.
I watched a video presentation by Eckhart Tolle in which he discussed the “love your neighbor” verse. His view is that the ability to love one’s neighbor as oneself depends on the individual’s state of consciousness. One who is in a state of pure “presence”, in his words, can look deeply into other beings in a way that allows one to know that they share the same essential beingness or presence.
He says that to love one’s neighbor as oneself is not to love another “as much as” or “in the same way as” one loves oneself but rather that one recognizes the shared essence in each. That recognition of commonality or oneness is, in his view, what is meant by “love”.
That fits the model of a quality that is the result of a process or event that conditions or transforms consciousness.
Coincidentally, in the cycle of Jewish weekly bible readings, we are in the week of Parashat Shemini. I was reading an essay on this portion by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks from his series “Covenant & Conversation”. In that essay, in comments on the mechanism of holiness, he writes:
“The holy is where God is experienced as absolute presence.”
That these two spiritual leaders find the quality of presence to be integral to holiness and to love, only reinforces the idea that truth can be reached from many different starting points but the paths toward it can and do converge in the end.
It is not love of one’s neighbor that is commanded.
The ability or capacity or condition of loving one’s neighbor is what is promised as a result of doing the things that are commanded; of living as we are commanded to live.
©Charles R. Lightner