Gallup Independent 2.27.21 ; New Mexico Jewish Link Spring, 2021.
My mother told me about the Golden Rule when I was a very small child. I don’t remember what I did, but I must have done something wrong. I remember looking to see if she was holding a gold-colored ruler behind her skirt. She recited, ‘Do onto others as you would have others do onto you.” I didn’t get it. Then she tried reasoning. She said, kindly enough, “If you are nice to others, they will be nice to you,’ but that required an imaginary leap into the future, something that a four-year-old wouldn’t make. The version in Leviticus 19:18, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” made even less sense to me, as I knew my mother didn’t even like our neighbor, an old man who made my father listen to his dirty jokes over the hollyhocks.
Perhaps if she’d used the other version, “What is hateful to you do not do unto another,” that might have made a bigger impression. As in, ‘Don’t hit your brother if you don’t want him to hit you,’ or, ‘If you hit the dog, it will bite you.’ It would be a more commonsensical approach.
For any family, people or country, for any society to hold together at all, it has to start with that most fundamental idea.
A story that dates back centuries explains that this is a core tenet of Judaism. A non-Jew asked a rabbi to explain Judaism while standing on one leg. The rabbi, annoyed, sent him away. The man then went to Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who told him, “Whatever is abhorrent to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now, go and study.”
The positive version, “Do onto others as you would have others do onto you,” might be better for the grownups among us, as it instructs how to practice making the world a better place.
But Hillel’s version may be what’s needed right now, because it forces us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Do not do to others that which is distasteful to you. Don’t make up lies about someone else—how would you like it if they did that to you? Don’t make fun of a person who looks different from you—what if that turned out to be someone in your group? Don’t exclude others from having the same rights as you. If we are all made in God’s image, all a spark of God, then it follows that you wouldn’t like to be excluded either.
This extends to all living creatures, great and small, all of creation. It’s a teaching that is found in most religions and cultures in the world. It is the concept of reciprocity. But apparently some in this country are having to relearn this. We seemed to have lost the finer points of common sense in a proliferation of made-up stories to bolster some wishful thinking, a false belief that the election was stolen. This is causing an erosion of our democracy.
When people want to believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories, and refuse to believe reality, we have slid down a most treacherous slope. The only way out, the antidote, is to start again with this foundational teaching, however it speaks to you: Treat others as you want to be treated, don’t do something to others that you wouldn’t want done to you.