To Counterbalance Love

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May 06 2006
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The Talmud (Yevamos 62a) tells us that Rabbi Akiva’s students died because they did not treat each other with kavod
[respect]. We mourn their deaths during sefiras haOmer each year. Jewish history, unfortunately, has known many other tragedies; why do we continue to remember this one?


The answer emerges from an analysis of Rabbi Akiva’s famous dictum, “Love your friend as yourself – this is a major rule in the Torah,” and its relation to his students’ actions. If Rabbi Akiva put this concept of ahavas yisrael, love of fellow Jews, at the center of his philosophy, how is it possible that all of his own students neglected it?


The Talmud (Yevamos 62a) instructs men to “love their wives as much as themselves, and respect them more than
themselves.” Why must love be balanced by respect; isn’t marriage all about love, and doesn’t love automatically imply respect?


R. Zerachyahu haLevi explains that the word kavod is etymologically synonymous with nefesh, which means ‘soul’ or
‘self ’. Kavod means respect because we respect someone whom we perceive as having some self-distinguishing quality that sets them apart. Kavod is the acknowledgement and deference that we offer to individuality, to individual uniqueness, and to accomplishment. We don’t respect someone for being the same as everyone else, but for being his own self, for being different in a way that we value.


The difference between love and respect is that love is based on the feeling that we are really one. People marry  because they find in their partner a kindred spirit. People love their children because they see them as extensions of themselves. We love our fellow Jews because we feel kinship with people who share our own history and destiny.


Respect, on the other hand, is based on the dignity of difference. I respect someone because I recognize that he is different than me, and I consider that difference valuable.


Love without respect can be overbearing, even tyrannical. One can see that with children. A parent can love his children – and yet ruin them by constantly trying to make them more like him or her. This is even truer with a spouse. Marriage is such a close human relationship because it is based on love – on finding in each other kindred spirits. Therefore, it is especially important for that love to be balanced by respect, by kavod – by recognition that one’s partner is a different person. He or she need not like the same books or food that I do, nor have the same opinion. Because I love them, I may be driven to make them more like me, but that is destructive; that is the tyranny of love. Love must be tempered with kavod; we must value our differences as much as our similarities.


This is where Rabbi Akiva’s students went wrong. They did not neglect their rebbe’s teaching of loving each other as themselves. Rather, they took this rule too far. Because they put so much emphasis on love, they failed to balance it with kavod. They loved each other, but they didn’t respect each other’s individuality and differences.


In contrast, our failing – the failing that led to the destruction of the Beis haMikdash and its continued desolation – is sinas chinam, unwarranted hatred. This is why we mourn for Rabbi Akiva’s students. With them, we lost a reservoir of ahavas yisrael, love of fellow Jews, which might have saved the Jewish people.


A generation after the churban – after that eruption of civil strife and sinas chinam that destroyed everything – a group of scholars arose, a potent force within the people, who adopted as their motto the cardinal principle of Rabbi Akiva, the principle of ahavas yisrael. They represented so much potential and promise. But they went too far. They excelled at loving others as themselves – but not at respecting them more than themselves. Our mourning is for that loss.

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    Learning on the Marcos and Adina Katz YUTorah site is sponsored today by Judy & Mark Frankel & family l'ilui nishmos מרדכי בן הרב משה יהודה ע"ה and משה יהודה ז"ל בן מאיר אליהו ויהודית