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A Word Worn Thin

Few commands are quoted more often, or obeyed more rarely, than the ancient instruction to love your neighbor as yourself. We repeat the words until they lose their weight, forgetting that the sentence was never meant to be admired politely from a comfortable distance. To love a neighbor is not to feel a warm glow toward humanity in the abstract. It is to turn, deliberately, toward the particular person whose life has been set beside your own. The word neighbor, after all, once meant simply the person who was near, the one whose need you could not help but see. That turning is harder than it sounds. In an age that prizes broad opinions over narrow obligations, we would rather debate humanity than help a single struggling human. The command resists such evasion, for it refuses to let us love everyone in general so that we may quietly avoid loving anyone in particular. Its scale is small, local, and stubbornly concrete, and that very smallness is what unsettles us.