Home__OCTOBER_2026Loving Your Fellow Jew: If It Was Always Easy, It Wouldn’t Be...

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Loving Your Fellow Jew: If It Was Always Easy, It Wouldn’t Be A Mitzvah!

October 2, 2026

For most of us, Jews who are too young to have had firsthand knowledge of the Shoah, the surge in antisemitism over the past few years is shocking, and unprecedented.
If you’re my age, you grew up with Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Polish, etc. accents everywhere, almost all of whom were either Survivors, or barely made it out of Europe. That reality always came with warnings about what the world is really like.
Not “was” – “is.”
We dismissed it as fears which were themselves relics from another world, old fashioned, distant, and out of touch with the world that we lived in. We were certain that the antisemitism of the past, even though it spanned 2,000 years, culminating in the Shoah, was permanently stuck in the past. It was as much a distant, black and white, memory as the horse and buggy, Victorian dress, or the Model T.
To discover that it was actually an “is,” and not a “was” is the societal shock of our lives.
In short: the old people were right.
As I’ve written about before, the world I grew up in, Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s, just like the rest of the American experience after World War II, up until the first decade of the 21st century (although the decay had begun, with 9/11 as the most glaring example) – was the Jewish immigrant dreamscape that our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents could only imagine. There was opportunity, safety, and endless opportunities to live freely as a Jew – with zero fear of consequences.
It was America.
That America is either on its last legs, or in severe decline, and the reaction of the world, including in America, to the absolute horror of 10/7 only proves that nothing really changed.
So, what is the solution? More Jewishness, more community, more, unity, and more mitzvahs. Of course.
And on October 8, 2023, unity and pride in being Jewish was pouring out of our Jewish souls.
But, we also had to deal with the horrific reality that Hamas sensed an opening for their putrid attack because they sensed unprecedented disunity among Israelis during the vicious debates arguments over reforming Israel’s supreme court.
That disunity incontrovertibly cost us, and the lesson is always that disunity makes us weak and vulnerable to attack. And even having our own, B”H, extremely strong state – is not a substitute for real Jewish unity.
Jewish history is replete with examples of disunity leading to tragedy.
Unfortunately, a common human trait is the (seemingly) inevitable return to bad habits as “normal,” even after living through a nightmare like 9/11 or 10/7.
Obviously, Jews are people, and we disagree sometimes. That is understandable…it’s also normal. But some disagreements are so fundamental, that they cause massive strain on the community, and can even put Jewish lives in further danger.

Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham, directors, at 83rd Venice International Film Festival in Venice, Italy for the film NAZA.
(WIKIMEDIA)

The starkest recent example occurred recently when there was a massive backlash against the Israeli filmmakers who made the repugnant pile of garbage which is the movie “NAZA.”
If you’re not familiar with it, you can read about it here¹, here², and here³.
It is EXTREMELY painful that two Jews would create a film that is pure anti-Jewish propaganda. It would be rough no matter when it happened, but to have it happen after 10/7, when Jews have been under attack on a daily basis for almost three years is nearly inconceivable.
I get the anger. These people are engaging in activities and rhetoric that mirror and reinforce the views, and lies, of our enemies. The same enemies that call for a Jewish genocide every single day. They are creating a potentially even more dangerous world for us. They are also giving credence to the parade of lies and stupidity that is antisemitism.
It makes me angry. Very, very, very angry.
It makes me so angry that I have been struggling with how exactly to observe the mitzvah of “ahavas Yisrael,” love of your fellow Jew, when there is a (seemingly) constant stream of nonsense from people who ally themselves with the people who want to kill us.
It is, in fact, so heinous that it is much easier to feel the anger, than rationally understand their behavior.
Despite that – we are still supposed to love our fellow Jews.
Doing so is one of the 613 mitzvot. The Torah commands us⁴ to love each and every Jew. Just as we’re commanded to keep Shabbat, kosher, not to murder, etc. – we are commanded, as Jews, to love each of our fellow Jews.
It can be hard. But, Mitzvahs can be hard.
It can be hard not to eat that delicious cheeseburger. Not driving on Shabbat, davening (if you’re a guy) three times a day, etc. can be hard.
That’s the point. If the 613 mitzvot were easy, there would be no need for them to be enshrined as mitzvot. While some are harder than others, obviously, the fact that they are encoded in Jewish law is ALWAYS because they are critical, and often things that may, or may not, be practiced if they didn’t carry the weight of law.
Not that, G-d forbid, “difficult” makes them less worthwhile. Like with literally everything, you get out what you put in, and the effort is necessary for things to really be meaningful.
Adults know that, right?
Ahavas Yisrael is probably the best example of why that is true.
Jews need unity as much as we need air to breathe. In fact, we have no choice. Chassidic thought explains it⁵ perfectly:
“Achdus Yisrael is the term used to describe the reason why one Jew can truly love another ‘as yourself,’ because in essence, they are one.
The Talmud Yerushalmi explains the mitzvah of ahavas Yisrael with a parable: If a man were to cut a piece of meat with a knife and by mistake the knife cut his hand, would one imagine that one hand would hit the other to reprimand it? So too, in ahavas Yisrael, each Jew must view the other as part of the same body. Living with a day-to-day awareness that all Jews are limbs of the same body is the true fulfillment of the mitzvah⁶ of ahavas Yisrael.’
In other words, Jewish unity is already our state of being. So, to injure one part of us, is to injure each of us.
Which doesn’t explain how you avoid being angry with those who do things that clearly hurt the rest of us.
I constantly remind myself that the average overly assimilated, secular, leftist, whatever, Jew who is out there involved in the typical “anti-Zionist” (which always means anti-Jewish) activities has next to zero connection with anything authentically Jewish.
Did they have a real Jewish education? Do they know anything about our history, values and religion? Probably not. I grew up in that world. I knew next to nothing until I searched for it, starting in my late teens. It took a lot of curiosity, effort, good timing, and great teachers to connect me to my Jewishness. I was lucky because I had an endless thirst for learning about what being Jewish means.
But my typically assimilated background gave me the ability to understand that you can be fully Jewish, and really not know what that means.
The average American secular Jew has probably never sat down to dinner at a Shabbat dinner hosted by observant Jews. I had never met an Orthodox Jew until I was almost 20.
Most secular Jews are taught by their liberal leaders that leftism is Judaism. They are taught that whatever thing du jour that the Democratic Party thinks, is what Jews ought to think. I’m not trying to be partisan here, but most secular Jews are Democrats. Their leaders are uniformly Democrats.
They are told week after week in their “Temples” that the only thing that they really need to know about Judaism is “tikkun olam.” And “tikkun olam” just “happens to” mirror whatever is en vogue on the left at the moment.
Tikkun olam is a real concept in Jewish thought. But the way it has been applied in America for more than a century is a complete lie.⁷ A lie that is convenient because it is so amorphous – it can be applied to literally any cause.
Similarly, I STILL hear people translate the word “mitzvah” into a “good deed.” I’ve got news for those people: everyone should do “good deeds,” Jews are required to do mitzvahs.
How can you blame someone who is essentially Jewishly illiterate for not behaving Jewishly? It’s the same reason you don’t punch a child in the face because he spilled his milk.
We, as a community, failed to educate generations of Jews in what being Jewish actually means. So, what right do we have to even be upset with behavior with which we disagree – no matter how heinous that behavior appears to be?
And while some behave in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us, calling them “kapos⁸” is just as bad as ANY comparisons of Jews to Nazis (G-d forbid). As is calling people the “erev rav⁹” (the “mixed multitudes” – the people who worshipped the golden calf).
Jewish tradition in fact teaches¹⁰ that the “erev rav” were not Jews at all, but non-Jews who left Egypt with us because they witnessed G-d’s miracles during our redemption from Egypt and wanted to be part it. Which makes sense because the Torah calls them the “mixed multitude,” not “Jews.” So again, no Jew is like the erev rav.
Recently, in reaction to “NAZA,” I saw a Facebook post in which someone said that they would prefer that the filmmakers makers would leave the Jewish people and…”convert to Islam.”
That’s logical. You’d rather add two names to the two billion who want to murder us, rather than teach them, no matter how much patience it takes, or how long it takes, how wrong they were, or whatever, awesome being Jewish really is?
I’d prefer two Jews, no matter how disconnected from Jewish reality, over joining our enemies.
But, that’s just me.
Never give in. Never give up.
Am Yisrael Chai.