A Teaching on Loving Thy Neighbor as Thyself from Our Bat Mitzvah
This past Shabbat, in the first Shabbat service held in our sanctuary in over a year, we celebrated the Bat Mitzvah ceremony of Sam G. It was the first of seven B’nei Mitzvah ceremonies we are celebrating at SHS over the course of the ten weeks. (Recall that last year we had to postpone several B’nei Mitzvah, leading to a really busy spring!)
Sam’s parashah (Torah portion) included one of the most noteworthy verses in all of Torah: v’ahavta l’rei’akha kamokha. “Love your fellow as yourself,” or, as familiar to many of us under an older, classic translation, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18).
As Sam so pointedly asked in her D’var Torah (teaching), what does this verse really mean? How can we give it teeth? How can we prevent it from slipping into cliché?
Sam offered an incredibly poignant example that had taken place in her own life: as someone who has encountered a challenging medical condition in childhood, Sam embarked on a Bat Mitzvah project of providing counsel and support to younger children encountering the same condition. For Sam, this was an opportunity to literally provide ahavah—love—to someone in a manner that she sought love herself.
What an insight.
How challenging it is for so many of us to even identify the ways in which we need love, let alone to be able to offer that love to others in turn. So often, if there’s a way in which we find ourselves especially in need of support, it can be especially hard for us to offer that sort of love to others in turn. “Why should they get that kind of love and support? I’ve been able to make do without it. I’ve been able to be totally self-sufficient. They should have to, too.”
Sam had the humility to acknowledge that she had received that support and how grateful she was for it. But her teaching reminds us how challenging it can be, how much we tend to operate from a model of scarcity, when we haven’t received love and care in the ways we need.
Instead, the Torah, and Sam, teach us that loving our ourselves, tapping into the ways in which we have already received that love, or directing love towards ourself in new ways, can put us in a position to be overflowing with love, directing it towards others in whom we see ourselves—which, given that we we all created in the image of God, that we all have imprints of the Divine within us—should be everyone.
Sam was able to do that through her Bat Mitzvah project. What a blessing that found herself experiencing love and that she was able to channel that infinite flow towards others who needed it in turn.
