Loving Your Neighbor: The Rabbi's Gift to a Monastery (Kedoshim 5774)

This week's Torah portion includes one of the most stirring and yet difficult to enact mitzvah in all of Torah:  "You shall love your friend/neighbor as yourself."  (Leviticus 19:18)  I doubt that the Torah focus here is on mere feelings of affection.  Still it is difficult to imagine how one might enact this mitzvah in daily life?  How much more difficult it is if we do not already love and value ourselves.   

The 19th century Haktav v'Hakabbalah (Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi ben Gamliel) offers a list of daily life ways to enact this mitzvah.  He goes beyond treasured friends to include all others with whom we interact.  His list includes: 

• Affection for others should be real not feigned
• Always treat others with respect
• Always seek the best for others
• Give others the benefit of the doubt
• Do not consider yourself better than others

(cited in Artscroll "The Chumash" (Nosson Scherman, ed) p 662.)

He seems to be teaching that the essence of this mitzvah is framing our consideration of others in terms of respect, care, and generosity, then acting on that framework.  That lesson resonates with the popular story called "The Rabbi's Gift."  The setting and tone of this story belie the fact that its earliest source was (only) 1979. There are a number of versions; here is my adaptation based on Francis Dorff's original.  

A thriving monastery has fallen on hard times. People no longer came to be nourished by prayer and learning.  Only a handful of old monks shuffled through the cloisters with heavy hearts. On the edge of the woods near the monastery a rabbi had built a little hut. He would come there, from time to time, to meditate and pray. 

One day the abbot decides to visit the rabbi and open his heavy heart to him. The rabbi greets him with outstretched arms.  They embrace like long-lost brothers. They sit and share their stories with each other.  The abbot shares his pain over the hard times endured by his monastery.  He asks the rabbi for advice. The rabbi answers, "I will give you a teaching, but you can repeat it only once. After that, no one must ever say it aloud again."  

Then the rabbi continued telling the abbot, "The Messiah is among you."  

After a while the abbot left and puzzled over this advice as he walked back to the Monastery.  The next morning, the abbot called his monks together and told them the rabbi's teaching, "The rabbi said that one of us is the Messiah." The monks were startled.  "What could it mean?" they asked themselves. "Is Brother John the Messiah? Or Brother Matthew or Brother Thomas? Am I the Messiah? What could all this mean?" 

As time went by, though, the monks began to treat one another with a new and very special affection.  A gentle, warm-hearted, concern began to grow among them which was hard to describe but easy to notice. They began to live with each other as people who had finally found the special something they were looking for.  Over time when visitors came to the monastery they found themselves deeply moved by the life of these monks. Word spread, and before long people were coming from far and wide to be nourished by the lives of the monks and to experience the loving regard in which they held each other. Soon, others were seeking, once again, to become a part of the community, and the monastery community grew and prospered. 

May we have the wisdom this Shabbat and in the weeks ahead to feel affectionate regard for those others who we encounter on the path of life and the strength to treat them with ultimate regard and respect.