Aime ton prochain comme toi-même

Aime ton prochain comme toi-même is invoked as a Christian commandment and turned into a direct question about the limits of service: should a person learn to love herself before devoting herself to others? In the novel, Mr. Baumel’s appeal unsettles Stefania’s belief that serving another person is a way of serving God, making the commandment a challenge to self-erasure rather than a simple endorsement of duty.

The commandment as a challenge

Stefania recalls Father Josef teaching that life is given for service to the Lord, and that serving another person is therefore a form of serving God. This understanding gives her work and submission a sacred meaning: the identity of the person who serves, and the manner of service, seem secondary to the elevation of loving God. Against that teaching, Mr. Baumel asks whether Christians do not also have the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and whether a person must not first learn to love herself. His question brings the self back into an ethic that Stefania has understood chiefly through service.

The contrast is not between religion and irreligion. Mr. Baumel’s question comes from within a conversation about religious life, and it uses a Christian precept to test the consequences of Stefania’s own religious reasoning. If loving another as oneself presupposes care for the self, then service cannot automatically sanctify neglect of the person who serves. The commandment gives that possible neglect a clear measure without resolving the issue for Stefania.

The encounter with Mr. Baumel

The exchange takes place as Stefania leaves with Felix after Mr. Baumel has discussed the theft of Jewish sacred objects. He laments the loss of Torah ornaments and ritual objects, including rimonim, a toraschild, and yads; he also recounts that a Torah crown was stolen from a synagogue in Zhytomyr. For him, the Torah is a living book, and its garments cannot simply be taken and stolen. Mrs. Baumel interrupts his distress to defend Felix, offering the child a large yellow apple.

When Mr. Baumel turns from the thefts to the commandment of love, the question is personal in its effect even though it is phrased generally. Stefania answers, “Au revoir, monsieur,” turns away, and leads Felix with her, dismissing further discussion as pointless. Her exit does not settle the moral question; it shows that she is unwilling, at that moment, to let it revise the beliefs by which she understands her obligations.

Service, self-regard, and refusal

The commandment’s force lies in its balance: the neighbor is to be loved as oneself, not in place of oneself. Set beside Father Josef’s teaching that serving another person is serving God, it exposes a tension between devotion as self-forgetting and love as a relation that includes the self. The novel stages that tension through speech and response rather than resolving it with an abstract pronouncement: Mr. Baumel asks, and Stefania withdraws.

Her departure is especially telling because her earlier response to Father Josef’s words was intense and bodily—her chest tightened and her temples felt gripped in pincers as he spoke of service, submission, and sacred love. The later question does not erase that conviction, but places beside it another religious demand: the person who serves is also someone who must be loved. The commandment thus functions as a countervoice to an ethic that risks making the servant’s own worth invisible.