If I were asked to pick the central biblical message, then the imperative to love is on the short list. To love God and to love human beings created in the divine image are great biblical themes, as well as very specific teachings: Love your neighbor as yourself and You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.
Under the hyper-racialization pushed by the wokeists, life has gotten more violent.
Love is a popular thing. Who doesn’t love a great pizza, or a backrub, or winning the lottery? Love it!
My philosophy professor, though, had a saying that he would repeat: God doesn’t have to command you to breathe. If God is teaching it to you, it is because the love being talked about is not instinctual.
Sometimes that love requires that we do things that are difficult: staying up nights to attend to a sick child or spouse; devoting money that could have gone to a new sports car to one’s children’s education or to a meaningful contribution to a charity.
Sometimes it involves turning away, like John Adams, from an invitation to join the elite, and instead, risk “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for a cause that was truly loving — to allow humans to govern themselves.
Sometimes it involves massive bloodshed. Soldiers fighting to extinguish slavery died by the tens of thousands. So many of them sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, invoking their most profound model of sacrificial love as their model: “Let us die to make men free.”
Sometimes it involves choosing to stand up for complete strangers in a subway car who are being terrorized by a repeat offender and to use force to end the threat.
Those whom New Yorkers had entrusted to protect them — they opted for love with no effort. Why earn your reputation if you can pretend virtue at no cost. They had the job of getting such people as the subway menace off the streets. But they did nothing except to try to win cheap esteem from the ignorant, the pretentious, and the malevolent, and leave this chronically violent predator running loose.
Real love is sacrificial love. It is not cheap. It may require us to demonstrate its value by risking everything that we have for its sake.
Certainly, that is what the guardian of the subway did. Perhaps he did not know that he would be put on trial for standing up to protect a subway-car full of terrorized passengers, men, women, and children of all sorts of ethnicities. Perhaps he could not have imagined that the authorities who accepted the trust of the people to maintain order and keep them safe would try to imprison him for doing the job that they had failed at.
This subway savior, ex-Marine Daniel Penny, was not looking for fame or money. He was doing his duty to the people and to the higher order of which we are all a part. Any virtue he attained was through standing up when no one else could or would.
Recently, he was asked by Jeanine Pirro of Fox News if he would have done what he did had he known he would be tried for manslaughter and be in danger of being behind bars for many years.
Penny replied:
I didn’t want any attention or praise, and I still don’t. The guilt I would’ve felt if someone did get hurt, if he did do what he was threatening to do — I would never be able to live with myself. And I’ll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed.
This is the love that the Bible is talking about. It is what brings real change. It is more than indulgence. It is acting lovingly when there may be no love sent the other way, only trouble.
Another example. All through military history, the bloodiest battles have always been in cities. Always, civilians die far more than soldiers. Armies spare their soldiers — civilians are of little interest, especially if they would gain military advantage by ignoring them.
This has been true even for civilians on the same side as the army; how much the more so for civilians of the other side. More than twice as many civilians die than combatants even when a country like the U.S. is fighting (forget it when it is an unaccountable dictator like Hitler or Putin). The ratio in the Battle of Mosul is estimated by a West Point urban warfare expert to have been about 2.5 to 1; in the Battle of Manila in World War II, about 6 to 1; in the second Battle of Seoul, probably even higher.
But in the fighting this last year in Gaza, Israel kept the ratio to 1:1, unparalleled in modern warfare. How did it do that? Instead of simply leveling the city by air, which it could easily have done, since it has complete air supremacy, it sacrificed the lives of its soldiers by a painstaking ground campaign, as well as by a massive civilian evacuation, similarly without precedent in warfare. Sacrificial love, even for the sake of many people who hated them. Ask the children who lost their fathers and the widows how real the sacrifice is.
Both in the Middle East and in the subways of New York, and perhaps in many other places as well, Western civilization is breaking out of the illusion that dark-tetrad people respond to moral suasion. They are seeing that building a loving society requires a willingness to sacrifice. People are willing to accept the risk of exerting the force necessary to stop psychopaths who have no conscience.
It is not a path to ever-increasing violence. That is that path that we have been on. Under the hyper-racialization pushed by the wokeists, life has gotten more violent. Under a foreign policy based on woke principles, the world has blown up, with more than a million casualties in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. The architects of these policies have sold them as loving and responsible, but lived experience shows otherwise.
In the Jewish law tradition, with its great principle of “choose life,” the law of how to deal with someone threatening someone else with death or sexual assault is expressed in the phrase “If someone comes to kill you, you should get up early in order to kill him.” Simply understood, it seems to mean one should not wait and so allow the attacker to kill or rape if one can stop him even if it requires violence.
But read more closely, paying careful attention to the words, the teaching yields a deeper meaning. It doesn’t say “get up early and kill him,” but rather “get up early to kill him.” That difference tells us that when one is fully prepared to use whatever force is necessary to stop the assault, that in itself can be enough to deter the attack without the violence being necessary.
Thus, this way is not only the most loving because of its care for the innocent — it is also more likely to result in the peace being kept without any actual violence being necessary. Thus, it is more loving even to the would-be assailant, for it saves him from something worth than death — sin of the gravest sort. In the language of the Talmud, you save them, both the victims and the would-be assailant.
It is not only that deterrent force saves innocent people — it also turns out to be the most loving way to act, for it affirms the freedom of even the would-be assailant to reconsider and himself choose peace. It is simply a matter of speaking language that people can understand. Even the psychopath can respond peacefully when spoken to in a language they can understand.
To do less is to fail at love.
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