Chapter 32: Ahavas Yisrael: Brothers in the Soul

Chapter 31 taught a way to joy: see the body and the animal soul as lowly, and rejoice in the soul alone. Now the Alter Rebbe shows that the same outlook opens a second door, real love for every Jew.

“Love your fellow as yourself” sounds simple, but feeling it is hard. It is easy to love great people, or people who have done us good. The mitzvah asks for love “from the greatest to the smallest,” meaning every Jew, whatever his spiritual standing. The Alter Rebbe offers no new technique. Once a person’s center has moved from his body to his soul, this love stops being a strain and becomes a straight and easy path.

Why does putting the soul first make love easy? Because bodies are separate. Here is my body and there is yours, and my needs are not your needs. Souls are not separate. At their source all Jewish souls come from one Father, so Jews are brothers in the full sense of the word. Only the bodies divide.

The phrases describe two levels. “Who can know their greatness” admits that souls do differ, but no one can tell how, so no one has grounds to feel above another. “All alike” and “one Father” go higher, to the source itself, where the souls are simply one.

The body and the animal soul can love too, but only on condition: I love you for what you give me, your charm, your help, your company. That is “a love that depends on something,” and when the something goes, the love goes with it. Love that depends on nothing comes only from the soul, which does not ask what is in it for me.

Hillel told a man who wanted to convert that the whole Torah is “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” and the rest is commentary. How can a mitzvah about other people sum up the whole Torah, with tefillin, Shabbos and kashrus? The Alter Rebbe answers on two levels.

First, the foundation and root of the whole Torah is raising the soul above the body, and all the rest of the Torah serves that aim. Love for every Jew is where it shows, because a person can love every Jew only once his soul, not his body, is in charge. The love is the sign that the Torah’s purpose has been reached, and the rest of the Torah teaches how to get there.

Second, the Torah draws G‑d’s infinite light into Knesses Yisrael, the shared source of all Jewish souls. G‑d, who is One, rests only where there is oneness. Where Jews are divided the place is “flawed,” and so we ask to be blessed “all of us as one.” Love among Jews is not only the fruit of the Torah’s work. It is also the vessel for its blessing.

Now a hard question. If the soul’s love reaches every Jew, how can the Gemara call it a mitzvah to hate a sinner, and even to tell one’s rav to hate him? The Alter Rebbe limits that rule tightly. It applies only to “your fellow in Torah and mitzvos,” a peer who knows what you know. It applies only after you have kept the mitzvah of rebuke with him, a mitzvah owed to just such a peer. And it applies only if, after all that, he still has not changed.

Rebuke, as halachah defines it, is private and gentle, said for the other person’s good, and repeated more than once. Only when a peer who knows exactly what he is doing has been spoken to this way and still refuses does his sin become a knowing rebellion, and then it is a mitzvah to hate it.

Everyone else is covered by Hillel’s teaching from Aharon. A Jew who was never taught what the Torah asks, or who does not know what you know, is not the rebellious peer of the Gemara. His wrongdoing may come from ignorance or weakness, and he is owed compassion, not hatred.

The Mishnah calls people far from Torah “creatures,” as if the only thing to say for them is that G‑d created them. Even so, they are to be drawn with thick cords of love, and perhaps that love will bring them close to Torah and the service of G‑d.

The last words matter: “And if not, he has not lost the reward of the mitzvah of loving one’s fellow.” Love is not a tool that counts only when it works. It is a mitzvah in its own right, kept whether or not he comes closer. A person wants his fellow to come close to Torah because he loves him, not the other way round.

Even the peer whom it is a mitzvah to hate must also be loved. Can a person hate and love the same man? Yes, because the two feelings have two different objects. The hatred is for the evil in him, the part that drove him to act against his own soul. The love is for the good hidden in him, the spark of G‑dliness that gives life to his G‑dly soul. That spark is present in every Jew, even the most wicked; it is only hidden.

But we meet the whole man, not his parts. When he asks for a favor, which feeling answers? Here the Alter Rebbe adds compassion. Think of his G‑dly soul held captive by the evil that rules him. Compassion does not deny the evil. It sees it and feels sorry. So the hatred stays fixed on the evil alone, and the person himself is met with love.

That is the meaning of “Yaakov, who redeemed Avraham.” Avraham stands for love and Yaakov for compassion. When love is locked away, compassion sets it free.

This bracketed note answers an obvious objection: King David spoke of “utmost hatred.” That verse, the Alter Rebbe says, refers only to minim and apikorsim, heretics and deniers who “have no portion in the G‑d of Israel.” Only toward them is the hatred complete, with no love beside it. Every other sinner, as the chapter has just shown, is still embraced by the mitzvah to love.

The category is narrow. In halachah, a heretic or denier in this sense knows what he is rejecting: he was taught Torah, understood it, and chose to deny it. A Jew who never learned, or grew up far from Torah, is not in it; his mistaken beliefs come from not knowing, and the mitzvah toward him is to draw him close with love. In our times, as the Rebbe often stressed, people who truly fit the definition are very rare.

“No portion in the G‑d of Israel” explains the exception. Such a person still has a G‑dly soul, but he has cut himself off from it so completely that nothing of it shows in him; it is buried, not gone.