The commandment to love one another

The commandment to love one another stands at the intersection of religious hope and political disillusionment in the novel. Shmuel Ash loves Jesus’s message despite being an atheist, and imagines Judas Iscariot as a devoted disciple who arranged the crucifixion in the belief that Jesus would survive it and call the world to love. Against that hope, Gershom Wald argues that religions and revolutions alike preach benevolence but turn to persecution when they command power.

Jesus’s message and Shmuel’s belief

Shmuel distinguishes loving Jesus’s teaching from believing in his divinity. He says he has never believed that Jesus was God or the Son of God, yet has loved him since reading the New Testament at fifteen. The commandment to love one another belongs, for Shmuel, to a larger ethical message of universal love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion. He objects that the historical arguments they have been discussing do not confront that message at all.

His atheism makes this attachment more pointed, not less. Shmuel cites the death of a three-and-a-half-year-old child, Yosi Siton, who was struck by a car while chasing a green ball on Azza Street, as sufficient evidence to him that God does not exist. The suffering of an innocent child does not cancel his love for Jesus’s words; instead, it helps explain why he separates the moral force of the teaching from belief in a divine source.

Judas and the imagined proclamation

Shmuel’s study of Jewish writing about Jesus leads him to notice a silence: Jewish polemicists who challenged Christian accounts of Jesus often avoided Judas Iscariot. He wonders why a man supposedly paid a trivial sum to betray his teacher would then take his own life in grief, and observes that Judas was the only apostle who did not wish to go on living after Jesus’s death. In Shmuel’s view, the inherited image of Judas as a contemptible traitor leaves unexplained both his remorse and his central role in the story.

Shmuel therefore reverses the familiar account. In his reconstruction, Judas believes that Jesus, having performed miracles, will be able to descend from the cross and reveal his divinity. Judas arranges the crucifixion not to destroy Jesus but to bring about that revelation. He imagines the crucified Jesus rising, coming down before the astonished crowd, and declaring, “Amaos los unos a los otros.” The commandment is thus the expected culmination of Judas’s faith: a universal appeal that would make the ordeal meaningful and disclose who Jesus is.

The hoped-for outcome never arrives. Jesus dies, and Shmuel’s version makes the commandment a promise suspended over a failed expectation rather than a doctrine shown to have transformed the world. The contrast is essential to the reinterpretation: Judas’s actions can be understood as fidelity to a hope of universal love, while the historical story continues to cast him as the betrayer.

Power, violence, and political redemption

Gershom Wald challenges the assumption that benevolent teaching can safeguard people from the violence of institutions. He tells Shmuel that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam preach goodness, charity, and piety so long as they do not possess shackles, prisons, authority, torture chambers, and gallows. In his view, religious traditions that promise salvation have repeatedly begun shedding blood; he extends the same suspicion to modern movements that continue to fascinate people with promises of rescue.

Wald’s rejection is not based on a belief that the world is already redeemed. He calls it wicked, dark, and full of suffering, but argues that those who arrive to redeem it soon become immersed in bloodshed. He would prefer a world without religions or revolutions, believing it would have fewer wars. His position gives the commandment a grave counterpoint: the ethical ideal remains intelligible, but its proclamation does not by itself prevent those who claim to serve redemption from exercising coercive power.

Nationalism and competing readings

The dispute over love is also political. Wald praises David Ben-Gurion as a leader of exceptional breadth, arguing that Jewish isolation among nations is a curse rather than a blessing. Shmuel, by contrast, criticizes Ben-Gurion for leading a nationalist state and surrounding it with biblical language about restoration and the fulfilment of prophecy. Their disagreement turns on whether collective security and national sovereignty can be reconciled with a universal ethic.

Wald’s memories of Shaltiel Abravanel sharpen the conflict. Abravanel opposed the establishment of a Jewish state and believed Jews and Arabs might reach an agreement through a shared political arrangement. After a meeting with Ben-Gurion and David Remez, he warned Wald that Ben-Gurion had become a false messiah whose political project would bring catastrophic bloodshed. Wald later defends Ben-Gurion’s realism, reasoning that the Arabs would not willingly share territory or power and that no outside force would defend the Jews. The commandment to love one another thus appears amid two incompatible responses to danger: Abravanel’s hope for coexistence and Wald’s conviction that survival requires force.

Wald also remembers his own part in the culture that sent his son Mija to war. He had argued that the conflict was a holy war and helped raise Mija on stories of earlier Jewish fighters. In retrospect, he recognizes that he was among those whose voices called his son to go. The movement from sacred language to military action makes the commandment’s universal promise particularly fragile: words that sanctify struggle can gather collective force, while the appeal to love does not erase the human consequences of war.

A commandment without guaranteed redemption

Across Shmuel’s reading and Wald’s arguments, the commandment is neither simply dismissed nor offered as a solution. Shmuel preserves its moral authority by separating Jesus’s teaching from claims about his divinity and by recasting Judas as a believer in the proclamation he expected Jesus to make. Wald, however, insists that ideals of compassion cannot be trusted merely because they are professed by religions or revolutions; once backed by power, those movements can reproduce the persecution they promise to end.

The commandment’s significance lies in this unresolved tension. It names a universal ethical demand, while the novel’s accounts of Christian-Jewish polemic, nationalist argument, and wartime sacrifice show how readily communities and political causes depart from universal concern. Shmuel’s imagined Judas becomes the figure who tries to force that demand into history, but the failure of his expectation leaves love as a moral measure rather than a guaranteed redemption.