A friend of mine once refused to go out with a guy because she was appalled by the kind of shoes he wore. Fortunately she was persuaded to meet him. They eventually married and now have two children. Still, my friend’s shoe fixation could have prevented the discovery of her beshert, her intended soul mate.
Although potentially catastrophic, her over appreciation of footwear has a bright side. It teaches us a graphic lesson about an all too common behavior: when we relate to someone based on his exterior we risk missing the real person inside. It’s not so easy, though, especially when we meet someone for the first time, to see past the public persona.
Yet the Torah expects us to. “Love your fellow as yourself,” it asks us – every fellow Jew, even someone we’ve just met. But can we love someone even before we get to know him or her?
The Lubavitcher Rebbe showed this is possible. The Rebbe, in his eighties used to stand up to eight hour every Sunday greeting a continuous line of people who came to him for advice or a blessing. When asked how he was able to do this, he replied, “When you’re counting diamonds, you don’t get tired.”
Souls were the Rebbe’s diamonds. He loved every Jew he met because he zeroed in on each person’s soul. The language the person spoke, the way he looked, his education level, his prominence all shrank in importance in the Rebbe’s estimation. What mattered to him was the divine soul, a part of G-d residing in every Jew.
Because the Rebbe shared this secret with us he must have believed that we, too, could love every Jew by lowering our valuation of the body – the biosocial aspects of a person, external to his essence – and giving precedence to the soul.
Divided Bodies
All my friends seem to be just like me. We all bought the same smart phone, we all like the same ’70s rock music, we all follow the same sports, we share the same sense of humor, understand the same literary and historical references, go to the same restaurants, vote for the same political candidates. My friends are even the same size as me. (OK, there was one little, short guy we made an exception for because he’s got such great albums.)
There’s a problem, though, with this cozy arrangement. While these interests bind my group of friends, they lock out anyone of a different type. That’s because the idiosyncrasies we share in common are manifestation of the body. And the body separates us.
G-d endows each of us with a different blend of physical features, inclinations, talents, strengths and weaknesses. But what makes each person unique undermines our ability to unite with one and other. Just think of all the jealousy, competition, lost friendships, divorce, prejudice and war triggered by excessive concern over outward differences between people, groups or nations.
In the Torah, for instance, when G-d wants to squash the attempt of the builders of the
Even a friendship between two people who speak the same language – both literally and figuratively – can be undone by personal differences between them. When one person no longer shares the same things in common with the other, a friendship may collapse because it depended on those interests to keep the relationship glued together.
As these examples attest, biosocial factors don’t make the strongest possible bonds. The body presents too many opportunities to examine the many differences among us. When the goal is to love our fellow in the same way that we love ourselves, a method of loving that highlights the differences between us is bound to fail. So loving every Jew requires employing something more universal and cohesive than the body as a catalyst.
As we consider this point, my social group is beginning to realize that choosing friends on the basis of favorite album doesn’t encourage a lot of diversity. Se we’ve started to broaden our concept of friendship. The result: guys have been hanging out around here who are a lot more well-rounded than we are. It’s just not an acceptable solution. Someone’s got to come up with a way to promote unity that doesn’t involve genes or breeding.
Soul Brothers
Unlike the body, which points up how we’re all foreign to each other, the soul demonstrates our equality. No one can see the soul. As far as anyone can tell, each person’s soul is the same as any other. While the body flaunts its distinctiveness, drawing comparison and judgment, a person’s soul, in its concealment and mystery, invites us to value its role as our connection to G-d without having to judge its performance compared to other souls. Cherishing the equalizing soul more than the body, then, enables us to love every Jew.
Although the apparent equality of all souls in their concealment encourages us to treat all Jews with love, the soul as illuminated by Kabbalah compels us even more so to love every Jew. As bodies, Jews are like everyone else. As souls, we’re unique. Besides the life-giving, natural soul G-d provides all created beings, the Jew possesses a second divine soul, which is a part of G-d. So spiritually all Jews, true brothers, descend from the same father.
That’s why the Baal Shem Tov said we must have self-sacrifice to love another Jew, even one we’ve never seen. When we respect a fellow Jew’s soul more than his body our love for him doesn’t depend on whether we’ve met him before. We know he has a brother soul. To love a Jew, say the last remaining Jew in
Biological siblings, despite the distance caused by their squabbles, ultimately feel the intrinsic bond that unites them. Similarly when Jews hear about a brother living in some far corner of the world, they experience a feeling of kinship, of familial love.
But when we finally get to meet that fellow Jew from a distant land, who would choose to obsess over his unusual shoes? Instead we would be moved to love him for that diamond inside him, the diamond whose worth is invaluable and whose beauty is incomparable, just like ours.
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