The Greatest Principle of the Torah

[This first appeared on my Livejournal on 30/4/2008]

This week’s parsha contains one of the most famous phrases in the Torah: “love your neighbour as yourself” (Vayikra/Lev. 19.18). There is a well-known comment on this in the Midrash: “Rabbi Akiva said: This is a great principle in the Torah.” However, less well-known is the remark that follows it: “ben Azzai said: ‘This is the book of the generations of man’ (Bereshit/Gen. 5.1) – this is an even greater principle.”

At first glance, ben Azzai’s comment seems incongruous, even bathetic. Rabbi Akiva asserts one of the most powerful ethical messages of the Torah, and ben Azzai counters with a verse about genealogy! A closer examination of the verse in Bereshit helps provide some context. The verse reads in full: “This is the book of the generations of man: on the day God created man, [God] created him in the image of God.”

In What’s Bothering Rashi on the book of Vayikra, Rabbi Avigdor Bonchek suggests that ben Azzai’s comment is really a gloss on Rabbi Akiva’s comment. Rabbi Akiva says a person should love his neighbour as himself, but what about a depressed person who does not love himself? Ben Azzai says he should love his fellows anyway, because they are made in the image of God.

While this is a valid and useful interpretation, I want to suggest another reading of ben Azzai’s comment. Many critics of Judaism argue that however tolerant and compassionate its ethical code might seem in principle, in practice it is highly circumscribed. It limits compassion to one’s neighbour, which, it is argued, is a codeword for a fellow Jew, not a non-Jew. We know that Roman contemporaries of Rabbi Akiva and ben Azzai, such as the satirist Juvenal, made similar claims to this*. Ben Azzai therefore seeks to define the term “neighbour”. He uses the verse from Bereshit to widen the application of “love your neighbour” to all mankind. All mankind are made in the image of God, so all mankind are worthy of love.

* “Juvenal wrote that there was a secret book originating from Moses and according to which Jews should not show a traveller the way unless he was a Jew too, nor should anyone but a coreligionist be guided to a water place.” Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism, p. 43