1. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
- deep feelings of devotion and reverence
- concrete actions that benefit those we love : nurture, comfort,
care, shielding from suffering and giving them happiness - but God exists on a plane to which we cannot extend our love in
these concrete ways ; there is nothing that we can give God - we can love God concretely only by loving God’s creation
concretely - it is appropriate to love non-sentient creatures as a class ; we protect grasslands, not single blades of grass ; we protect lakes and rivers, but not drops of water
- with sentient creatures it is different : they need nurture and protection as individuals and not only as a class
- the Christian tradition has typically been less open than the Jewish tradition to the idea of loving God by loving creation, owing to the greater influence of Greek philosophy (especially Aristotle) that came into our tradition first through the writings of St. Paul (which we shall soon see)
2. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
- to place her/his interests on a par with yours and to do everything within your power to alleviate her/his suffering and promote her/his happiness as energetically and persistently as you would your own
- the most radical idea ever introduced to human beings ; has never been improved upon and will never be improved upon
- who is our neighbor ? Family, tribe, race, nationality, religion, humanity, all sentient beings (ever-expanding circle of inclusion and compassion)
- Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 : God gave human beings and animals the same “living soul” (nephesh)
- it is not sharing a common humanity that makes us neighbors, any more than it is sharing a common race, religion, or ethnicity ; it is possessing the same “living soul” and sharing a similar ability to experience suffering and joy
- thus, God made animals our neighbors
- why does the Christian tradition (from Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century) up to our own day fail to recognize this ?