All you need is love, and maybe not even that

All you need is love, and maybe not even that

I got the link to this in my Twitter feed:

John Lennon’s hierarchy of needs is so much simpler than Maslow’s. No wonder Lennon was so popular.

pic credit https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg/1200px-MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.png

Practically speaking, of course you can't live on love alone. But from the point of view of simplicity and focus, there actually is something to reducing all to one guiding principle. That is exactly what Hillel did in response to the person who demanded that he teach him all of Torah while the listener stood on one foot. Hillel's answer (which is sometimes misquoted as that of the principle that R' Akiva's  klal gadol baTorah "veahavta lereacha kamocha" [Love your neighbor as yourself]) was "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. The rest is commentary; go learn it."  So we do have a single guiding principle on which we peg the infinite wisdom of the Torah -- that you not do to another what you don't want done to yourself, even if you haven't yet achieved the level of true ahava [love] for another. Interesting that there are songs of ""veahavta lereacha kamocha," but none with the words of Hillel, though, admittedly, they don't have the same rhythm.

Related post: http://kallahmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/03/rabbi-akiva-said-of-himself-that-before.html
http://kallahmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/05/quality-of-infinity-and-pardes.html 

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