Universal Love and Its Contradictions

Universal love is a contested ideal in the novel: Gershom Wald argues that the demand to love everyone can become as dangerous as a political or religious program of universal salvation. His critique does not deny the world’s suffering; it asks whether anyone who claims to redeem humanity can avoid converting an ideal of love into authority, compulsion, and bloodshed. In conversations with Shmuel Ash and in recollections of his son Mija and Shaltiel Abravanel, Wald tests universal love against the limits of human affection and the consequences of nationalist conviction.

Love as a Dangerous Universal

In one of Wald’s extended speeches, he contrasts suspicion and hatred with love directed at all humanity. He judges even gratuitous hatred less deadly than universal love, because the latter carries what he calls an ancient scent of rivers of blood. His target is not compassion in a personal encounter so much as the grand claim that humanity can be saved by those who appoint themselves its champions. Generation after generation, such advocates arrive to rescue people who cannot rid themselves of their rescuers. The disturbing turn in the argument is that love, when declared for everyone at once, may conceal an appetite to direct everyone’s life.

Wald’s remarks make the argument intimate as well as political. He interrupts his own sermon to acknowledge the young, disheveled Shmuel sitting in his house, jokingly wondering whether the visitor has come to recruit him too. The prospect of recruitment turns the abstract danger of universal benevolence into a question of who gets to decide what another person needs. His insistence that the two men will continue talking frames conversation as an alternative to imposed salvation: they may dispute comfort and redemption, but their exchange does not require either to submit to the other’s program.

Wald also associates love with danger through his personal, deliberately antiromantic reading of the biblical verse about love covering all faults. He sets that idea beside the scriptural image of waters unable to extinguish love, which he says recalls the warning sound of a fire engine. The contrast unsettles love’s customary association with shelter and reconciliation. In his account, love may cover over wrongdoing, while its seemingly inexhaustible force may announce disaster rather than safety.

Testing the Ideal Against Jesus

Wald develops the argument while discussing The Book of Nestor the Priest. Shmuel suggests that the work shows substantial knowledge of Christianity, the Gospels, and Christian theology. Wald rejects that assessment, describing its treatment of Jesus and his followers as a collection of degrading popular clichés. For him, contemptuous language directed at Jesus resembles the language of antisemites attacking Jews: mutual enmity reproduces itself rather than producing serious criticism.

His alternative is to disagree with Jesus without resorting to abuse. Wald questions whether anyone can love everyone, without exception, all the time, and uses episodes and sayings attributed to Jesus to test that demand. He asks how universal love fits Jesus’ anger at the money changers in the Temple, the declaration that he came not to bring peace but a sword, and the instruction that his disciples be both shrewd and innocent. He also invokes the account in Luke of enemies who refuse Jesus’ kingdom being brought before him and executed. These examples make the contradiction concrete: the ideal of loving enemies stands beside anger, division, and punishment. Wald’s point is not that one inconsistency settles the question, but that universal love cannot be treated as a simple, continuously obeyed rule even by the figure associated with it.

From this challenge he draws a broader proposition: a person who loves everyone may, in the end, love no one. The saying distinguishes an abstract affection for humanity from attention to actual people, whose needs and disagreements do not disappear under a universal formula. It also clarifies the kind of disagreement Wald considers legitimate. Jesus can be questioned on the limits and implications of his teaching; degrading invective, by contrast, merely repeats the dehumanizing habits of persecution.

Salvation, Power, and Bloodshed

Wald extends his suspicion beyond Christianity. In his view, Jews with power might have persecuted Jesus’ followers just as Christians hostile to the Jewish people persecuted Jews. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all preach goodness, charity, and mercy, he argues, but benevolent language does not prevent believers from using restraints, prisons, torture chambers, and gallows once they possess power. He includes newer movements among the promises of salvation that, in his account, have quickly begun shedding blood. His rejection of redemption is therefore not a claim that the world is already redeemed: he calls it dark, wicked, and full of suffering. It is the repeated violence of would-be redeemers that makes him doubt the project.

This critique shapes his political language as well. In discussing the news and Ben-Gurion’s return to coalition-building, Wald praises the leader’s broad vision and the recognition that Jewish existence apart from other nations might be a curse rather than a blessing. Yet Shmuel disputes Ben-Gurion’s later political course, criticizing the biblical rhetoric of national restoration and prophecy as empty when attached to a nationalist state. Their exchange shows that the problem is not simply whether love or solidarity is desirable. It is how ideals acquire political force, and whether claims made in the name of collective safety or destiny leave room for the people who must live with their consequences.

Wald’s account of Shaltiel Abravanel gives that dispute a personal history. In 1948, Shaltiel tried unsuccessfully to persuade Ben-Gurion that Jews and Arabs might agree on a condominium as the British departed, provided that the idea of a Jewish state was relinquished. His opposition to establishing that state led to his expulsion from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership. Wald confesses that he sided with Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising realism rather than Shaltiel’s proposals. Their disagreement thus places the abstract question of universal concern alongside a specific political alternative—and alongside the institutional cost paid by the man who advocated it.

The Human Cost of National Ideals

Wald’s memories of the 1948 war deepen the argument through the fate of his only son. Mija had lost a kidney after an illness as a child and deceived the recruitment committee in late 1947. Both Atalia and Shaltiel urged him not to fight. Shaltiel regarded the war as madness on both sides and continued meeting his Arab friends even after violence, road blockages, and sniper fire began. He was called a friend of the Arabs, a muezzin, a Muslim devotee, and a traitor; nevertheless, he continued to call himself a Zionist, distinguishing his own ideal from nationalism that had become intoxicated with itself.

Wald remembers taking the opposite position. He spoke of the war as a holy war and raised Mija on stories of earlier Jewish defenders and fighters. The summons to fight did not come from one speaker alone: teachers, classmates, and the wider country all helped make it sound like a shared obligation. Wald recognizes his own part in that collective voice. Mija went to war; Wald remained behind, but describes himself as absent from life too. His recollection turns the language of patriotic duty into a question of responsibility: the ideals that shaped his son’s decision cannot be separated from the voices, including his own, that taught him what a young man was expected to do.

The conflict between Wald and Shaltiel continues after the loss. Shaltiel had argued that the oppressed might dream of becoming the oppressors of those who had oppressed them, repeating the cycle of master and servant rather than ending it. He feared that Ben-Gurion’s messianic political ambition would bring a tragic, continuing bloodshed that harmed Jews, Arabs, and the wider world. Wald later remembers having supported the opposing course, and imagines the question Shaltiel never asked him: whether the sacrifice had been worth it. The question becomes a wound between the two men, after which they stop speaking except about ordinary household matters. Universal love, in this history, is not a solution confidently achieved; it is a standard against which political conviction and private grief remain painfully answerable.

Conversation Instead of Redemption

Wald’s skepticism does not produce a claim that suffering can be ignored or that all moral commitments are equal. He continues to speak, argue, read the news, and explain the political choices behind it. His repeated return to conversation matters because it offers a practice less absolute than redemption: people can test ideals against contradictions, histories, and particular losses without pretending that argument will make Ben-Gurion change his mind or undo Mija’s death.

The concept’s central tension remains unresolved. Love for all humanity can express a refusal to limit moral concern to one group, yet Wald fears that the universal claim can become a license for those who promise salvation to exercise power over others. His memories reveal what that danger looks like at close range: a son formed by a national call to arms, a political dissenter isolated for advocating coexistence, and a friendship broken by the silence that follows loss. Against the promise that humanity can be redeemed by a single doctrine, the novel sets the harder work of examining what love demands of actual people—and what is done to them when that demand becomes compulsory.