I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
(Matthew 5:44)
In my country, the word enemy is not a metaphor.
It is not a difficult coworker or a cousin who says cruel things at weddings. It is a siren at three in the morning and a decision about which child to carry first. Everyone here has a funeral in their memory that should not have happened.
So let me tell you what happened in me once, in plain words, because it matters for everything that follows.
A man sent me messages describing how he would murder my wife and my son if I did not take down my Hebrew videos about Yeshua within twenty-four hours. I went to the police. I did what a citizen does. But in the days after, lying awake, I was not thinking about the law. I was designing his ruin. I wanted his name destroyed, I wanted his family to see it, I wanted him to feel small in the exact place where he had made me feel small. I could hold that thought for hours without effort, the way you hold something warm in winter.
I say that because people quote the next sentence as though it were embroidery on a pillow, and I refuse to quote it that way.
Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.
Sit inside the room where that was first said. A backwater Jewish province under Roman military occupation. In the crowd are men who have watched a soldier requisition their neighbor’s back for a mile of road because the law allowed it. Yeshua has just told them that if the soldier takes the mile, walk him a second one. Then he says the sentence. It is the most offensive thing a Jewish teacher could have said to Jews living under Rome.
Notice what he did not say. He did not say tolerate your enemies, which is what we mean when we say it. He did not say do not hit back. He did not say leave the revenge to God, which is a respectable position with real Scripture behind it. He said do something for them, out loud, on purpose, including the one thing you cannot do while hating a man, which is to stand in front of God and ask him to bless him.
Nobody Ever Said the Whole Sentence
Let me be fair before I make any claim, because the claim I am about to make is often made dishonestly, usually at the expense of my own people.
The seed of this is Jewish, and it is old.
Exodus is the one that undid me the first time I read it slowly:
If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.
(Exodus 23:5)
If you come across the donkey of someone you know hates you, collapsed under its load, you do not simply walk on. You go and help him. You lift the load with him. Think about what that scene requires: standing shoulder to shoulder in the road with a man you cannot stand, sweating, both of you pushing the same animal, possibly for miles. Leviticus, in the same breath as love your neighbor, forbids two separate things: taking revenge and keeping a grudge. Proverbs says feed your hungry enemy (Proverbs 25:21). Job, defending his integrity, offers as evidence that he never once celebrated when an enemy went down.
So Yeshua is not correcting Moses. Anyone who tells you the Old Testament is the book of vengeance and the New Testament is the book of love has understood neither.
Then who said hate your enemy? Not the Torah. But it was in the air. Down at Qumran, by the Dead Sea, a community whose library we now possess wrote themselves a rule book, and the opening lines instruct the members to love all the sons of light and hate all the sons of darkness. Devout men. Serious men. Men who had done the reasonable thing with the commandment and drawn a circle around who counted as a neighbor. That is the practice he was arguing with, and it was real, not a straw man. Sadly, many fundamentalist groups, both Christian and Jewish, still behave that way today.
Yeshua was also not the only human being to reach for something higher. Socrates, in Plato’s telling, insisted four centuries earlier that returning an injustice is never right, no matter what was done to you. The Buddha’s Dhammapada says hatred is never ended by hatred. When the same fingerprint turns up in Athens and India and Jerusalem, that is not embarrassing for my case. It is what a moral law written on the heart should look like.
So let me narrow my claim until it is strong.
The others reached restraint, and restraint is magnificent. Do not return the injury. Do not let hatred deform you. Rescue someone who hates you from danger. What none of them reached is the second half of his sentence, the half that turns around and points at the man’s good. Bless. Pray. Feed. Go toward him.
It is one thing to teach the stranded neighbor you do not much like how to change a flat tire on a scorching day, because he does not know how to do it himself. It is another thing entirely to hand him your own cold Coke and then change the tire for him yourself. Self-giving is how you turn an enemy into a friend. It is exactly what Yeshua did for us.
And there is a second difference, which I think is the real one. For Socrates the reason was consistency, for the Buddha release from suffering, for the Stoic mastery. Yeshua gave a reason none of them could have given. Do it, he said, because that is what your Father does, who sends rain on people who curse him and sunlight on people who deny he exists. Then be his children. This is not a technique for a better inner life. It is a family resemblance. It is the very essense of Tikkun Olam.
Which brings us to the thing that separates him from every moral teacher I have ever read, and it is not something he said.
***
He is on the wood outside Jerusalem. The men at his feet are professionals doing paperwork with hammers, and the sentence that comes out of him is a request for their acquittal. Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing. (Luke 23:34).
I will be honest about the text, because this book has tried to be honest about every text. That line is missing from a few of our earliest manuscripts, and any good study Bible says so in a footnote. Some scribes appear to have found it unbearable. But it sits in the great majority of the tradition, and there is a second witness harder to explain away: within a few years, when the first follower of Yeshua was stoned to death, he died praying the same prayer for the men throwing the rocks. You do not imitate a sentence nobody ever said.
And read the reason he gave. They did not know what they were doing. He did not mean they were unaware that crucifixion hurts. He meant they had no idea what their hands were accomplishing, that the blood running down onto a soldier’s forearm was the very thing that would wash it clean.
That is what I mean by divine altruism. Not God loving the lovely. God demonstrating his love while we were still on the other side of the war.
The War in Our Stairwell
Now let me take this out of the heavens and put it in a building I know.
Two families, same floor. It began with a bicycle left in the hallway. A note appeared, polite and slightly wrong in its tone, the way notes are. A second note appeared, less polite. The bicycle stayed. Somebody let the air out of a tire. Somebody complained to the building committee about a renovation permit from four years earlier. Somebody stopped signing the elevator maintenance form. Six years later they ride that elevator, a box the size of a phone booth, in complete silence, and they are both good people. Every move in that war was proportionate. That is why it never ended.
Because there are only four things a human being can do with an injury.
You can escalate, which feels best and works worst. You can match it exactly, and it is worth saying that eye for an eye was never a license but a ceiling, a law invented to stop blood feuds by capping the payment. Still, an exact match leaves two accounts open, both stinging, and each side holding a pen.
Or you can withdraw. Say nothing, absorb it, hate quietly. Leviticus has a strange verb for that. It says lo titor, do not keep, and the verb is natar, the same word the Song of Songs uses for a girl set to watch over a vineyard. Guard duty. Looking for fault. That is what a grudge is in Hebrew. Not something you have, something you tend. You water it, you check the fence, you get up at night for it.
And then there is the fourth thing, which almost nobody does. Absorb the injury, refuse to pass it on, and then move toward the person with active good. That’s what being Christ-like is about.
Notice something purely mechanical about those four, before any theology at all. Three of them guarantee the story continues. Only the fourth has an ending in it.
Martin Luther King saw this with total clarity, and wrote it down in a Montgomery jail cell at Christmas of 1957, in a sermon on this exact commandment. Hate multiplies hate, he said, and violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness, in a spiral that only goes down. His conclusion is the whole argument of this chapter in eleven words: we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity.
That is why I say enemy-love is not idealism. It is the only algorithm anyone has proposed that can terminate. Forgiveness heals, cures, mends. It is the single move that can turn an enemy into a brother, and since peace just is the state of having no enemies left, it is the only road that even in principle arrives.
You cannot have peace unless you choose to forgive.
This is not a technique with a guaranteed output, but it is God’s way. Yeshua loved his enemies and they killed him anyway. MLK loved his and was shot on a balcony. Sometimes you go toward a man with open hands and he takes them off. So the claim is narrow and also enormous: enemy-love is not the move that always ends the cycle. It is the only move that can.
The Objection With Bodies Behind It
Here is the strongest form of the argument against everything I have just written.
Orwell said it with a hammer in 1942, with Europe occupied and the trains running: pacifism, he wrote, is objectively pro-Fascist, because hampering one side’s war effort helps the other whether you meant it or not. He later backed away from the phrasing, rightly. The argument underneath it does not back away so easily. Tyrants can absorb moral appeals indefinitely; what they respond to is force. Say “love your enemy” to a man at the gate of Auschwitz and see what it accomplishes.
And there is a version of this objection that belongs to my own family, and I will not step over it. Forgiveness has been preached at Jews for centuries by people who never asked our permission and never paid the bill. Simon Wiesenthal, who hunted Nazis, spent his life on one scene from the camps: a dying SS man asking a Jewish prisoner for absolution. He put it as a question to the world’s best minds, and many Jewish respondents answered that the man had no right to ask and the prisoner no right to give. They are correct. My grandmother survived the Holocaust. Whatever forgiveness is owed for what was done to her is not mine to hand out. It was never in my account.
So here is where I have landed, in three distinctions.
The first: the command forbids hatred, not protection. Love and force are not opposites, and any parent knows it. A mother who lifts her child away from a bully has violated nothing. Yeshua told his followers how to hold their hearts; he never told a judge to release a murderer, and the same Scriptures assign the state a sword for restraining evil. Justice does not evaporate here. It has its own chapter later, and it is not a soft one.
The second: Bonhoeffer. He wrote the fiercest exposition of enemy-love in modern Christian literature, then joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged for it three weeks before the war ended. If enemy-love meant passivity, he was a hypocrite. But he never claimed a loophole. He called it a guilty act, took the guilt onto himself, and asked God to forgive him for it. That is not a man who stopped loving his enemies. That is a man who loved his country enough to try to stop it, and refused to make his hardest decision look clean.
The third, and pastorally the one that matters most: forgiveness is not reconciliation, and neither one is trust. Forgiveness I can do alone, tonight, without your cooperation, and all it means is that I lay down my claim on your destruction. Reconciliation takes two and requires truth from the other side. Trust has to be rebuilt with evidence, slowly, and sometimes should not be rebuilt at all. Any preacher who fuses those three has handed an abuser a weapon and called it Scripture. I have seen it happen many times.
The command tells me to stop guarding the vineyard. It does not tell me to give the man my keys.
Corrie ten Boom, who lost her sister in Ravensbrück and then spent thirty years talking about this, said the thing I keep returning to: you never come so close to the ocean of God’s love as when you forgive an enemy. She also said, and this is the part people skip, that when God commands us to love our enemies, he supplies the love along with the command. She had reason to know. We will get to her.
Shalom Has a Price Tag
One more Hebrew word, and then I am finished.
Everyone knows shalom. Most people think it means the absence of trouble, a kind of holy quiet. It does not. The root is S-L-M, and it is about wholeness, about a thing being complete with nothing outstanding. Which is why the same three letters give us shalem, whole, and shillem, paid in full, and why Deuteronomy pairs vengeance and recompense as one divine prerogative. It is also why, in 1952, when Israel argued itself half to pieces over whether to take German money, the word on every front page was shilumim. Reparations. From the root of peace.
Hebrew knew from the beginning what the diplomats keep forgetting. Peace is not a mood. Peace is a settled account. The only question is who pays.
The retaliation system answers: you pay. Then I pay for making you pay. Then your children pay. The ledger never closes, because both sides are holding the pen and neither will put it down.
The Messiah is called, in Isaiah’s astonishing list of titles, sar shalom. Every English Bible says Prince of Peace, and every Israeli hears prince of quiet. It is nearer to prince of the settled account.
And on a Roman cross, a Jew from Nazareth paid an account he did not open. That is not a metaphor laid on top of the ethic. It is the ethic, performed. He did not hand us a clever rule and then die of something unrelated. He absorbed the worst injury in human history, refused to pass it on, and used his breath to ask for the acquittal of the men doing it.
Here is where the ladder goes, and I want to climb it slowly enough that you can get off at any rung.
Judaism has one of the noblest dreams any people has ever had. Tikkun olam, the repair of the world. The phrase begins in the Mishnah as a legal consideration, gains its cosmic weight from the mystics of Safed, and today covers everything from soup kitchens to politics. Some of us were raised on that dream. But a dream needs a tool, and we have spent two thousand years arguing about which tool.
If the job description of the Messiah is bringing shalom, then whoever put into the world the only move that can end the cycle is doing the Messiah’s work, whatever we decide to call him. That is the first rung, and a fair-minded skeptic can stand on it.
Then the second. This wisdom does not read like the best insight of a first-century Galilean. It outruns every moral teacher I have studied, including the ones I love, and it happens to describe exactly the character of the God this whole book has been arguing for, demonstrated in the one place where a person’s real character finally shows, under torture, on behalf of the people doing the torturing.
At that point I can no longer keep the categories apart. If he is the one who delivered the solution to the human problem, and the solution turns out to be a portrait of God, then I am not holding a teaching. I am looking at the teacher, and I conclude what the first Jewish believers concluded with the Shema still in their mouths. This is God, come to do it in person.
You can push back on every rung of that. I have. What you cannot do, I think, is find another way out of the stairwell.
Which raises the only question worth asking next. It is very easy to write an inspiring chapter about enemy-love from a desk. Has any actual human being ever done it, with the person who ruined their life standing in front of them?
As it happens, yes. And I know the woman’s name.
This was a free chapter from my book, Why I Am a Jew for Jesus: My 40 Best Reasons to Believe in God and His Messiah
