Where “We” Begins.

When it comes to the commandment “love your neighbor as yourself,” many people are lost at the very first words: what exactly counts as love? Everyone has his own story, his own reactions, his own experience. Sometimes it coincides with the experience of others, sometimes not. So searching for a universal definition is futile. But the very wording of the commandment already points the way: it is not about feelings, but about a way of relating.

To love oneself means to feel one’s own wholeness, to wish oneself well and, where possible, to lessen one’s own pain. This is not a heroic feat but an automatic mechanism that a person uses from birth. And it is precisely this mechanism that the Torah proposes we rely on: try to see in another person not a chance companion, but someone whose well-being should not be a matter of indifference to you.

This does not require strong emotions. In everyday life we constantly show that we can widen the boundaries of our “self.” We empathize with the characters of books and films, root for athletes, rejoice in our friends’ successes. This is not magnanimity — the psyche simply sometimes includes other people in its inner space.

The same happens with friendship. In different countries the word “friend” means different degrees of closeness, but in any case it is a person we naturally care about. Often, years later, people are drawn back to former classmates not out of nostalgia, but because there was a period of togetherness in their lives that never entirely evaporated. Yes, school experiences varied — but that does not prevent one from looking back on the past with warmth.

Two simple but important conclusions follow from this. First: we do love ourselves — even if we sometimes doubt it in words. Second: it is better to begin loving one’s neighbor not with an abstract “all people,” but with those for whom we already feel a natural affection. There everything is clearer: you wish good both for yourself and for him; you do not try to gain at his expense; you try to arrange things so that both of you are well off.

This can be compared with more tangible cases. If a person has two children, he does not set them competing for who gets more attention; he cares for both at the same time, and love for one does not imply harm to the other. Or more simply: we have two hands — and if one hurts, we do not console ourselves that the other is healthy. The pain of one concerns the whole body.

So it is with one’s neighbor: if you include him in your “extended self,” his pain stops being “someone else’s.” That is precisely why Jewish ethics advises beginning love with action. Do good for another — and he will gradually stop being a “detached object.” We invest strength, time and care in him — and thereby begin to see him as part of our own world. Then the wish for his good arises not out of duty but out of natural logic: “I feel bad when he suffers.”

This is not about self-sacrifice or giving up one’s own interests. It is about the ability to widen the frame of what we call “I” so that it holds not only our own well-being but also the well-being of another person.

That is what I wish you: that there be people near you whom you sincerely care about. That you find room both for your own interests and for those who matter to you. And then the circle will gradually widen — from friends to loved ones, from loved ones to those whom you will be able to see not as an obstacle but as part of a shared “we.” That is the practical content of the commandment, without romantic embellishments and without complicated formulas.