You Shall Love Your Neighbor as a Phantom

- Kabbalah -

You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

“Surely, as a shadow, man walks.”
Psalm 39

We all believe we know what this phrase means. We have heard it countless times, even those of us who practice no religion, and from so much repetition it has stopped meaning anything: it is just one more saying.

But if we listen to it as if for the first time, something does not fit. It is written in the future tense, and yet it is an order: you shall. One can command people not to steal or not to kill. Can love be commanded? Love seems to be the only thing that obeys no rule: it comes or it does not, without asking permission. And yet the phrase does not ask for it: it commands it. We have all felt love for someone, and of that we can speak. But this phrase also sets a measure. It does not say “love a lot” or “love everyone.”

The difficulty lies precisely there, in its final words: “as yourself.”

And how does one love oneself? We are self-indulgent: we sleep too much, we eat what is bad for us, we grant ourselves small pleasures in secret. And yet we are also relentless. We forgive ourselves mistakes we would not forgive in others, and we condemn ourselves for others we would gladly forgive them. We think we master our emotions, and suddenly they are the ones mastering us. Something attracts us, something repels us, and we do not always know why. And above all:

We believe we know ourselves.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest sins of human beings: to assume that, simply by existing, we know who we are. On top of it rises an even more harmful arrogance: believing we know who the other is.

But what do we really know?

Imagine that we stand at the center of a small sphere, barely two meters in every direction. Our eyes take in less than half of it, and almost everything they take in is blurred. If we stretch out an arm, what we see well fits in the palm of the hand, and what we see in full sharpness, in a single fingernail. The brain fills in the rest. Our ears pick up sounds we can barely tell apart; our skin, signals that never reach our attention. And in that same space the air moves, light bounces, millions of things happen at once without our noticing.

If we could compare what consciousness grasps in an instant with everything happening inside that small sphere, from the atomic level to the sensory, the result would be a number almost impossible to pronounce:

0.00000000000000000000000596%

It is not a real measurement, but it gives a clear image of the magnitude of what we do not know. And even so it falls short, because the body is not in that count. Our own body, which we do not control, regulates almost everything that neither hurts nor is felt without telling us; it happens in us without our knowing. And it holds more mass than all the air around it.

We do not even know for certain where it is. The signal leaving our feet takes a few hundredths of a second to reach the brain, and the brain needs even more time to turn it into perception. What we feel as the present has already passed. So as not to live in delay, the brain does not wait: it reconstructs where the hands, the feet, the ground were, predicts where they will be an instant later, and corrects itself when it is wrong. The body we believe we inhabit is, to a large extent, a hypothesis. Lacan did not start from neurology, but he reached a similar intuition: the unity of the body is an image, which is why he places it in the Imaginary. If someone could see us as we are, they would not see the closed figure we believe ourselves to be, but a presence without outline: something that is there and not there, that acts and feels, but that no one, not even the one being seen, can locate with precision.

We live immersed in a world that runs on inertia, on autopilot, and we are ignorant of almost everything outside our narrow window of information, and of what happens inside us as well. As bodies, however, we are not separate from that world: the universe completes us, we are made of its matter, it passes through us and is part of us. But even if we could register everything, it would not be enough. Language itself prevents it: the word, the last thing we believe we master, never manages to say completely what it names; it always leaves a remainder. And we also need another who interprets, to confirm, more or less, that what we say makes sense. Lacan calls us barred subjects ($): immersed in language, we never fully coincide with what we say we are.

Lacan goes further still. For him, a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. When I say “I am a teacher,” “I am a father,” “this is who I am,” that word names me, but in the same movement it replaces me. I appear in one word and fade beneath the next. He calls this vanishing aphanisis, “disappearance,” or, borrowing from radio, fading: the signal dying out as it is heard.

We are not in any word: we are in the interval between words.

And if we vanish in every word that names us, we need another to see us appear. That is why we need others: we look in their gaze, in how they treat and mistreat us, for confirmation that we exist.

Being confirmed in the world is a need.

And yet, from that tiny window, the size of a fingernail, the size of a word, we judge ourselves, we judge others, the universe and even God, deciding whether He exists or not. From there we decide who we are, what we deserve and who is worthy of our love, beginning with ourselves. So,

how can I love myself fully if, to a large extent, I am a stranger to myself?

And not only I: the other is also a universe I cannot see.

The “as” in the phrase begins to wobble. It assumes a pair of scales: in one pan, the love I have for myself; in the other, the love I owe my neighbor. But scales, which are made for measuring, are of no use here: I do not know what they measure, because I do not know what is in either pan.

Measuring the other

Yehuda Ashlag, one of the great Kabbalists of the twentieth century, explains love of one’s neighbor through a story from the Talmud that is disconcerting. In an updated version, it would go like this:

A millionaire loses everything. For years he was driven around by a chauffeur who waited for him at the exit and opened the door for him when he arrived. That custom made visible his position and the recognition he enjoyed.

How should we treat him when he falls into poverty?

What seems reasonable to many of us would be to help him with shelter, food and clothing. Not so: the tradition holds that he should also be given the car and the chauffeur. And if no one can be found to drive for him, one should do it oneself, respecting what that man considered part of his needs.

I admit that the first time I read it, my reaction was rejection. But the purpose of the story is to expose something hidden: we measure the other by our own yardstick.

When I decide that someone needs only what I would need in their place, or even less, I am not seeing them, but myself in their situation. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself would not mean giving them what I would like to receive, but recognizing, before giving anything, what has value for the other, even if it means nothing to me. It is no accident that the phrase begins with the other and not with me: the self comes afterwards, only to adjust itself to that measure.

Giving him the car and the chauffeur is not indulging a whim: it is keeping him from losing his dignity all at once, while he slowly learns to be someone else. But the teaching also recognizes a limit. If what someone asks for harms them, like someone asking for money to keep drinking, giving them what they ask is not loving them. For Ashlag, loving one’s neighbor means holding the other up in their fall so that they can recover, not granting their request.

We often give what is comfortable for us to give. Advice, when the other wants to be heard. Solutions, when they seek recognition. Money, to avoid committing ourselves.

Giving can also be a way of imposing.

The art of receiving

So far we have looked at the fallen man from the side of the one who gives. But the one on the other side sees things differently. For someone used to having, receiving can be humiliating. Ashlag speaks of that shame in another scene:

A wealthy man invites a poor man to eat. The guest is hungry, but he refuses the food because he is ashamed to receive without giving anything in return. The host insists, and the guest understands that accepting brings joy to the one who invites him. So he eats. The dish is the same and so is the hunger; what has changed is the intention. Now he receives in order to give the other pleasure. Ashlag calls this receiving in order to bestow.

For him, the shame of receiving without giving holds a central place in Kabbalah. It is what the tradition calls the bread of shame: bread received without feeling one has earned it, without having worked for it. Behind that shame lies an idea we know well: that we must earn the place we occupy in the eyes of others, prove that we are worth what we receive. That we are loved to the extent that we give, and that this love must be deserved. It is the same pair of scales, now on the side of the one who receives.

Learning to receive from the heart and without shame is a spiritual act, in fact the first one, because before giving, we have all received: life, a name, a language, a culture. Receiving is even more important than giving: whoever does not know how to receive always gives incompletely. Among all the laws of the Bible, the ancient sages chose the phrase this essay starts from as the greatest, and centuries later the Kabbalists placed it at the center of their teaching. Its hidden message, behind the command “you shall love,” lies not in giving, but in knowing how to receive in order to give.

Knowing how to receive means admitting that we are not self-sufficient, that we are a place through which things, people and emotions pass, that everything passes through us and moves on, and that, at bottom, we own nothing.

But receiving also involves the humility of accepting something we do not control: the other may offer us anything (love, recognition, gifts or care) without our knowing exactly what they see in us or why they give it. Accepting that kindness without asking whether we deserve it is part of the awareness of belonging to the whole, and of shedding the arrogance of believing that we see what we do not see and know what we do not know. Other people’s gaze never fully coincides with our own.

And perhaps one of our most persistent difficulties is wanting them to coincide.

Loving oneself

How does one love oneself?

Lacan found in the mirror one of the first paradoxes of our identity. The child recognizes a unified image of its body while it still cannot master its movements, and identifies with it. That image is our first phantom: a figure that seems fixed and whole, and that we take to be ourselves. But experience never confirms that unity: we desire what harms us, reject what we need, and sometimes even find a certain satisfaction in our own suffering, what Lacan calls jouissance.

We never finish knowing ourselves because we never finish becoming ourselves.

And yet we take a failure, a wound, a word spoken years ago, and turn it into a sentence: “This is who I am.” That sentence is what Lacan calls a fantasy, a word that shares its root with phantom: a scene that becomes fixed and from which we go on desiring, suffering and judging ourselves. Self-love consists in giving up the demand to know oneself completely, in order to grant oneself the right to exist. That is not giving up responsibility: I can acknowledge that I did harm and accept its consequences without turning it into the definition of who I am.

Loving myself does not require knowing who I am in my entirety.
It requires not reducing myself to the little I know of myself.

Some time ago, someone I loved deeply hurt me. Later, the same scene repeated itself in another body. This is how phantoms return: not as memories, but as scenes that repeat themselves with other faces. The first gave me love in private, but not in public; the second, in public, but not in private. I realized that, after the wound and the breakup, I expected the same thing from both: that they would see their own fractures, the way cracks in a glass show against the light, and tell me “I’m sorry.” And worse: I believed those words would make me whole. They were two impossibilities. No one likes to look at their own fractures, and nothing anyone says will make us feel whole. They never apologized, and I no longer need them to: no gaze can prove who I am, or confirm that I exist, or sustain my desire.

Loving those who hurt us

But no longer waiting for an apology is not yet loving the one who hurt us. The hardest question remains: how do we love someone who has harmed us?

The phrase this essay starts from had, curiously, already foreseen it. It is almost never quoted in full. The verse begins earlier:

“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

The verse is not born thinking only of the kind neighbor, but also of the one with whom there is an offense. Jesus would take it further: “Love your enemies.”

Loving those who hurt us must not mean accepting the harm or exposing ourselves to it again. A limit is not the opposite of love: it is what keeps one from being reduced to the other’s object. And the harm does not need to be acknowledged by the one who caused it in order to have been real.

Perhaps they acted out of fear, out of pride, or out of contradictions they themselves do not understand; we will never fully know. Forgiveness begins there: in giving up the need to know, without declaring the other innocent or forgetting what happened. Whoever hurt us is not only the harm they did, just as we are not only our wounds.

And letting go does not always mean coming closer. Sometimes it means stepping back, without going on living inside the relationship that made us suffer.

As yourself

Let us return to the phrase: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Its difficulty lies not so much in love as in that “yourself” we take for granted. And what it teaches is to give and to receive without turning the relationship into bookkeeping. Because to keep accounts one has to believe one knows: who the other is, what what I give is worth, how much they owe me. That was the pair of scales from the beginning, the yardstick by which we measured the millionaire, the shame of the guest. Revenge is paying back; a grudge is keeping score. Loving is no longer measuring the other by what they give us, without ceasing to recognize what they do to us. And when there is a debt, that form of love is called forgiveness.

The word forgive keeps this in its origin. It is the old English rendering of the Latin perdonare: for-, like per-, means “completely,” and give translates donare, to give as a gift, expecting nothing in return. Latin built another word from the same pieces: perdere, from per and dare, “to give,” which means to lose: to give completely, until one lets go. In Spanish the two words still live side by side, perdonar and perder. What forgiveness gives, and in a way loses, is not what was taken from us, but what we believed we were owed:

the apology, the recognition, the reparation we imagined could give us back who we were.

We always love the other as a phantom: the figure we build of them so that they will give us back what we expect. Forgiving is letting that phantom go. Not to discover at last who the other is, but to accept that we will never finish seeing them: to let them be a specter, a presence without outline.

The Bible says it with a single word. According to Genesis, we were created in the image of God. And a psalm says: “Surely, as a shadow, man walks.” In Hebrew, that image and that shadow are the same word: tselem. What founds us is also what makes us transient. We are not a fixed figure, but a passing: something that lets itself be seen as it goes.

Created in an image, we walk as shadows.

That is why the phrase is written in the future. “You shall love” is not an order fulfilled once and for all, but an apprenticeship that never ends. You shall love: you shall learn. Learn what? To lose. To lose the other as you believed them to be. To lose the idea you made of them. And to lose, before giving them anything, everything you hoped would come from them: gratitude, response, repayment.

Then “as yourself” stops being a measure. I do not possess myself either: I am the stranger who passes from one word to the next, the shadow that walks. Loving myself is learning to lose the image I made of myself. And loving my neighbor as myself is loving them as that stranger I also am: without fixing them, without owning them, without making them pay.

✦ ✦ ✦

Loving your neighbor as yourself is learning to give. But only those who know how to receive give well, and those who know how to receive know that nothing belongs to them: everything that arrives, passes. Accepting this is learning to lose. And whoever learns to lose learns to forgive. Because to love is not to lend. To love is to lose, in the oldest sense of the word: to give completely.

You shall love your neighbor as a phantom: as someone passing through, loved while they pass.