Scene 44
Ve'ahavta Lere'acha Kamocha: Love your Neighbour as Yourself
On this most heinous of days, you will likely find me ridiculous for writing about loving your neighbour. And yet, here we are.
Like so many Jews, I have been listening to the news out of Australia. In the midst of the carnage reporting, the word that kept coming up was “community.” The community helped out before the emergency crews showed up. Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who disarmed one of the shooters and apparently was injured himself in the process, was a community member who owned a nearby store. Did he love the neighbours he was saving? Who knows. But he helped out in his community. As did so many others.
The night before, I listened to Rachel Maddow and Timothy Snyder talk about how to save democracy in Chicago. The destination was intentional for it was the people of Chicagoland who successfully stood up to ICE in their communities. One the people they discussed and who was in attendance was Baltazar Enriquez. This hero started wearing a whistle in his Little Village community blowing it to warn his fellow neighbours of impending ICE raids. This idea caught on: a community response of resistance and protection of neighbours.
Does Baltazar Enriquez know all of his neighbours, all of his community. Probably not. But he knew that he had a responsibility to help and protect them.
And so do all of us.
Most of us have members of our community who need help be it in the neighbourhoods where we live, where we work, where we pray, where we go to school. Do we know them? Probably not. But like Baltazar Enriquez and the people who helped out on Bondi Beach, that isn’t really relevant. We don’t have to know them. What we must internalize in that we want our neighbours and community to help us when we are need. If we are in a life-threatening situation, we want the Ahmed al Ahmeds and Baltazar Enriquezs and the homeless man sleeping on a grate in our community to help. And if the Ahmed al Ahmeds and Baltazar Enriquezs and the homeless man sleeping on the grate in our community are in a life-threatening situation, we need to help them. Because you never know when you are going to need their help, but you do know when they need yours.
We are living in a moment when governments around the world whether by choice or circumstance are non-reactive or unable to react in time to crisis. This is why communities need to step up and help their neighbours.
To Love Your Neighbour as Yourself can no longer just be a biblical injunction. It must form the backbone of our resistance to this current moment of violence and hate.
An important read 🩵
Not to take away from the underlying point in the slightest (quite the opposite!). But I'm a Sydneysider, and Ahmed al Ahmed is not from Bondi, but from a suburb called Sutherland. That area is known as being a bit of a heartland for white supremacy, and while of course it is a small but loud minority that feel that way, there have been flyers circulating recently calling for the bashings of Arab people. I imagine he would have run into more than his fair share of hate in his time. I've been thinking a lot at how decisively he chose love anyway.
Powerful reflections here. The Baltazar Enriquez whistle story is one of those simple but brillaint tactics that shows how grassroots organizing adapts faster than institutions can respond. What I find compelling is the framing of neighbor-love not as sentiment but as strategic necessity, when systems fail or refuse to act, communities have to become their own first responders. The connection between Bondi Beach and Chicago ICE resistance shows this pattern playing out across wildly different contexts, same underlying princple though.