The Commandment of Universal Love

The commandment to love one another universally is a moral ideal that Gershom Wald subjects to persistent scrutiny. In his view, asking people to love everyone without exception can become dangerous when the promise of saving humanity turns into a justification for power and violence. His arguments do not simply reject compassion; they challenge the assumption that universal benevolence can be imposed, or that its advocates are exempt from the anger and coercion they condemn.

Wald’s Challenge to Universal Love

Wald develops his skepticism in conversations with Shmuel Ash, often amid the routine of their evenings in the library. He listens to the news and explains its political background, but his reflections move beyond current affairs to the moral language used to interpret them. He contrasts suspicion and hatred with love directed at all humankind, arguing that universal love can carry a violent history when its champions claim authority to rescue others. The danger, as he frames it, is not love as a personal feeling but the grand project of saving humanity without its consent.

His challenge becomes sharper when the two discuss Jesus and Christian teaching. Wald insists that Jesus can be disagreed with seriously, rather than dismissed through crude abuse. He asks whether any person can love everyone at every moment, and whether Jesus himself consistently did so. Wald tests the ideal against Gospel episodes involving anger at the money changers, the declaration that he came not to bring peace but a sword, and the command that enemies who reject his kingdom be brought before him and executed. These examples make the universal commandment a problem of practice, not merely doctrine: the ideal must be measured against moments when religious authority permits anger, division, or force.

Wald condenses that challenge into the paradox that the person who loves everybody may, in the end, love nobody. Universal affection, in this formulation, risks remaining abstract: it may claim to embrace humanity while failing to answer the particular demands and limits involved in actual relationships. His objection is not offered as a license for cruelty. Rather, it questions whether an unlimited moral demand can be fulfilled without concealment, contradiction, or a claim to speak for those it purports to save.

Religion, Revolution, and the Violence of Salvation

Wald extends his criticism from religion to political movements. He tells Shmuel that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all proclaim kindness, charity, and mercy, yet such commitments do not prevent persecution when their adherents acquire power. He makes the same argument about newer movements that promise deliverance: they may begin by offering salvation and end by shedding blood. For Wald, the recurrent danger lies in the passage from a humane promise to coercive authority, when a movement treats its vision of the good as grounds to compel others.

His skepticism is not a belief that the world is already redeemed. He describes it instead as dark, unjust, and full of suffering, while doubting that anyone can redeem it without becoming entangled in violence. He invokes Immanuel Kant’s image of humanity as crooked and rough timber to question the ambition to perfect people. In the same conversation, he proposes that a world without religions or revolutions might have fewer wars. The claim joins his critique of universal love to a broader suspicion of programs that seek to remake humanity: the aspiration to improve the world can become dangerous when it is backed by force.

Nationalism and the Demand for Sacrifice

The novel places Wald’s ethical argument alongside disputes over the formation and defense of a Jewish state. He can praise David Ben-Gurion as an exceptionally far-sighted Jewish leader, while also criticizing the empty biblical rhetoric surrounding national restoration. Ben-Gurion’s realism, as Wald explains it, rests on the belief that Arabs would not willingly accept Jewish presence or share land and power, and that no outside power would ensure Jewish security. This view presents force and self-reliance as political necessities; Wald’s broader arguments expose the moral cost of turning necessity into a sacred collective mission.

The contrast is embodied in Wald’s memories of his son Mija and Shaltiel Abravanel. Mija went to war after being shaped by a public culture that celebrated military duty and sacrifice. Wald recalls that his own words about a holy war helped form the call his son followed, and recognizes himself as part of the voice that sent him. Shaltiel, by contrast, opposed the war and urged young people on both sides to lay down their arms; he continued speaking with Arab friends even after violence and roadblocks began. Their disagreement makes the commandment’s political stakes concrete: universal concern and refusal of violence confront the demand that one’s own people fight for security and national survival.

A Personal Measure of the Ideal

Wald’s account of these political disagreements is inseparable from grief and responsibility. He remembers Mija’s death in the Jerusalem hills and admits that he once supported the war more readily than Shaltiel’s alternative. After the tragedy, Wald and Shaltiel stopped speaking except about household matters. Wald imagines the question Shaltiel never asked him—whether it had all been worth it—as a continuing wound. The silence gives the debate over universal love a private consequence: political convictions are not abstractions when their costs are borne by a family.

The commandment therefore remains unresolved rather than discarded. Wald does not claim that the world’s suffering can be ignored, nor does he present nationalism or force as morally uncomplicated. His arguments instead resist the certainty of anyone who promises redemption on behalf of everyone. Across religious teaching, revolutionary idealism, and national struggle, the novel tests whether love can remain attentive to particular people without becoming an excuse to rule them—and whether a universal ideal can survive contact with the violence committed in its name.