GEN973 Judaism is supremely a religion of love: three loves. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” Deuteronomy 6:5;” You shall love your neighbor as yourself” Leviticus 19:18; and “You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt” Deuteronomy 10:19; see also, Leviticus 19:33-34. Not only is Judaism a religion of love - it was the first civilization to place love at the center of the moral life. C. S. Lewis and others pointed out that all great civilizations contain something like the golden rule – act toward others as you would wish them act towards you, C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: McMillan, 1947), or, in Hillel’s negative formulation, do not do to others what you would hate them to do to you Shabbat 31a. This is what game theorists call reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat. Some form of this (especially the variant devised by Martin Nowak of Harvard called “generous”) has been proven by computer simulation to be the best strategy for the survival of any group. See for example Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield, Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Mathematics (or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2011. Judaism is also about justice. Albert Einstein spoke about the “almost fanatical love of justice” that made him thank his lucky stars that he was born a Jew. Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, trans. Alan Harris (San Diego: The Book Tree, 2007), 90. The only place in the Torah to explain why Abraham was chosen to be the founder of a new faith states [this verse]. So why the combination of justice and love? Why is love alone not enough? … You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial. Love is particular, justice is universal. Love is for this person, not that; justice is for all. Much of the moral life is generated by this tension between love and justice. It is no accident that this is the theme of many of the narratives of Genesis. Genesis is about people and their relationships while the rest of Torah is predominately about society. Justice without love is harsh. Love without justice is unfair, or so it will seem to the less-loved. Yet to experience both at the same time is virtually impossible. As Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, put it when he discovered that his son had stolen an object from a local shop: he could look at him from the perspective of a judge (justice) and as his father (love), but not both simultaneously. Jerome Brunner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 51. At the heart of the moral life is a conflict with no simple resolution. There is no general rule to tell us when love is the right reaction and when justice is. In the 1960s the Beatles sang “All you need is love.” Would that it were so, but is not. Let us love, the let us never forget those who feel unloved. They too are people. They too have feelings. They too are in the image of God. SACKS 41-45