Not Vengeance, Not a Grudge, But This: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself
"Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Leviticus 19:18 gives one of Scripture's most famous commands — and gives it as the answer to a specific problem: what do you do when you've been wronged? Centuries later, two teachers from very different traditions — Rabbi Akiva and Jesus of Nazareth — would independently point to this verse, paired with the Shema's command to love God, as the foundation everything else in the Torah rests on.
Love Your Neighbor As Yourself
Read the whole verse, not just its famous second half. "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The command to love is given as the alternative to two specific behaviors: taking revenge, and holding a grudge. Before "love your neighbor" can mean anything abstract, it means this concretely — when you have been wronged, you do not repay it, and you do not let it fester unspoken into resentment.
This is the Torah's characteristic move: it does not leave "love" as a feeling to be sorted out privately. It defines love by its opposite — the absence of vengeance, the absence of a held grudge — and then names the positive disposition that fills the space those absences leave behind. "As thyself" sets the measure: whatever consideration, patience, and freedom from resentment a person extends to their own failures and needs, that same consideration is owed to the neighbor.
With All Your Heart, Soul, and Might
Leviticus 19:18 is the horizontal axis — love directed toward the neighbor. Deuteronomy 6:5, the heart of the Shema, is the vertical axis — love directed toward God, "with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Together these two verses, drawn from two different books and two different contexts, span the entire relational world the Torah addresses: how a person stands toward God, and how a person stands toward everyone else.
Neither verse is presented in its own book as a summary of "everything else." Deuteronomy 6:5 sits inside the Shema's call to remember and teach God's commandments diligently (Deuteronomy 6:6-9). Leviticus 19:18 sits inside a dense chapter of specific social laws — gleaning, fair wages, honest judgment, not cursing the deaf. It would take later teachers, reading both books together, to notice what these two verses, placed side by side, could carry.
"The Great Principle of the Torah" — and "The Greatest Commandment"
Rabbi Akiva, one of the most influential sages of the early rabbinic period, called Leviticus 19:18 "the great principle [klal] of the Torah" — the verse that, more than any other, expressed what the entire body of commandments was for. Other sages of his era debated which verse deserved that title; Akiva's choice became the most widely repeated answer in later tradition.
In the Gospels, Jesus is asked directly: "which is the great commandment in the law?" (Matthew 22:36). His answer names two verses, not one: first, Deuteronomy 6:5 — "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart" — and second, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," quoting Leviticus 19:18 directly (Matthew 22:37-39). He concludes: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:40).
Two teachers, working in different generations and very different contexts, arrived at the same pairing — the same verse from Leviticus, set alongside the same verse from Deuteronomy, as the key to everything else. Whatever else separated their schools of thought, on this point they read the same Torah the same way.
Key Figures
Study Questions
Love of neighbor, in Leviticus 19:18, begins exactly where resentment would otherwise take root — and two teachers, centuries apart, agreed it was the key to everything else.
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