for Shavuot 5782 / 2022
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
What’s the most important mitzvah in the Torah?
Is there an “Ur-mitzvah,” one mitzvah that stands above the others as more important, offering an overriding principle or framework from which the others derive?
Rabbis have provided different answers to this question.
Rabbi Akiva declared that the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Vayikra 19:18) is a “great principle of the Torah,”
meaning that one should not say, “Since I am scorned, I should scorn my fellow as well; since I have been cursed, I will curse my fellow as well.” Rabbi Tanchuma says, “If you do this, know that God made the person you put to shame in His own image.”
Bereishit Rabba 24
Rabbi Akiva offers a profound interpretation of this familiar verse. To “love one’s neighbor” is not always a simple matter. Human nature is such that often people project upon other people the pain that they have experienced in their own lives, whether that pain comes from the way that others have treated them or from some accident or misfortune of nature. Akiva warns us against harboring such resentments—the subject of the beginning of the verse (“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your people”). Loving others must be the default, an overriding approach to human interaction, regardless of the pain and challenges we’ve faced or had inflicted upon us. As such, this principle can be for many an extraordinarily difficult one to fulfill—and hence, Rabbi Akiva would argue, the discipline of Halakhah is intended to help us achieve it.
In his Sefer HaMitzvot, the book listing all of the Biblical commandments, Rambam begins with the commandment to have faith in God. He bases this mitzvah on the beginning of Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Utterances (commonly called Commandments): “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:2). This verse is not phrased as a commandment, more as a fact, which is how other medieval thinkers understood it. For the Rambam, however, this verse is simultaneously a commandment and a meta-commandment, the foundation for all of the other mitzvot. After all, how can there be a commandment without a Commander? Without acceptance of God’s existence, the entire Torah loses its rationale. Belief in God is both the first precept and the first principle.
Sefer HaChinuch, the anonymous 13th century explanation of the commandments, works his way through all of the mitzvot of the Torah, beginning with procreation in Bereishit chapter 1 (1:28). He does not consider this commandment’s priority as accidental, for he indeed views it as foundational:
God wants the world to be settled, as it says (Isaiah 45:18), “I did not create it for naught, but [rather] formed it for habitation.” This is a great commandment, through which all the commandments are observed, as [the Torah] was given to people and not to the ministering angels. (Berakhot 25b).
According to the author, the world and the Torah were created for humans. Without the proliferation of people on the Earth, God would have no recipient for the gift of Torah. The commandment of procreation thus forms the basis upon which the entire edifice of Torah stands.
One more mitzvah that commentators understood as establishing an important principle or two for our approach to Torah as a whole is the seemingly minor mitzvah of shiluach ha-kan, sending away a mother bird before taking her eggs. They were particularly struck by the attribution of long life to someone who fulfills this mitzvah (Devarim 22:7), found elsewhere only in the commandment to honor one’s parents. Rashi regards this reward as paradigmatic: If it is given for “an easy command which involves no monetary loss,” how much more will people who fulfill commandments requiring greater sacrifice receive it. Others see this mitzvah as embodying sympathy for the bird, preserving the species even while taking food, and extending to concern for people as well, with such abundance of feeling for creatures naturally extending to fellow humans.
I would like to suggest one more verse in the Torah that might be seen as straddling the line between a mitzvah and “great principle”: “And the Lord God placed the human in the garden of Eden, to work it and care for it” (le‘ovdah uleshomrah, Bereishit 2:15). As with Rambam’s first precept, this verse on the surface seems a statement of fact rather than command: God created us to be farmers (rather than hunter-gatherers, like Esau). Indeed, this verse is not reckoned in standard lists of the mitzvot.
However, in the age of environmental collapse and climate chaos, this assertion of human purpose takes on the aspect of an overriding injunction. As the most powerful, God-like creature on Earth, humans are endowed with twinned responsibilities. We need to care for ourselves, through agriculture, construction, education, and the whole gamut of institutions that comprise our culture. At the same time, we must balance our usage of natural resources, including the totality of non-human life, with our protection and preservation of them. Our use of the world has too often become abuse, with little regard for the indiscriminate damage that our building, our farming, our hunting has inflicted. We have reached the point where this observation of human purpose must instead become our great principle, our overarching mitzvah that guides how we see our place within the larger realm of God’s creation, which we have driven to the precipice through wanton destruction.
In the prayers recited during the Torah service, we call upon God to “build the walls of Jerusalem (from Psalm 51:20).” We ask for the restoration of our national homeland, and specifically for the Temple as the place where we felt God’s presence most intimately. In light of this preceding principle, we might think of these walls differently, serving two purposes. They protect the precincts of the city inside, enabling people to survive and create their culture, free from harm. At the same time, they limit us, leaving space for other species to thrive within their own dedicated habitat. They impose restrictions on the human appropriation of nature’s resources and topography.
The eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote of the need for a “half-earth,” of people to allow half of the land to remain wild, for the benefit of all species. When we sing of Jerusalem’s walls, may we think of them in these two senses, as preservers of us and of the web of life that pulses with God’s creative majesty.