Universal Love and Limited Love

Universal love and finite love form a central tension in the novel’s debates about ethics, religion, and politics. Shmuel Ash is drawn to the teachings of Jesus, especially their call to love, forgive, and show compassion, while Gershom Wald argues that genuine love belongs to a limited circle and that appeals to love everyone often collapse into rhetoric. Their disagreement reaches beyond private feeling: it tests whether universal ideals can address actual conflict without denying its stakes or becoming another justification for coercion.

Shmuel’s attachment to universal love

Shmuel distinguishes his admiration for Jesus from religious belief. He identifies himself as an atheist and rejects the claim that Jesus was God or the Son of God, yet says that he loves Jesus and the words attributed to him. The teaching of universal love, alongside forgiveness, charity, and compassion, is part of what moves him. His affection is not an assertion of Christian doctrine; it is a moral response to a message he encountered as a fifteen-year-old reader of the New Testament.

That distinction shapes Shmuel’s historical inquiry. In his discussion with Wald about Jewish accounts of Jesus, he objects that some arguments against Christianity do not seriously confront Jesus’s message of universal love. The objection is not that the historical arguments are necessarily false, but that refuting claims about Jesus or Christian doctrine does not by itself answer the ethical challenge presented by his teaching. Shmuel’s research therefore carries a personal question: how can Jewish readings of Jesus acknowledge that challenge without accepting Christian claims about his divinity?

Shmuel’s account of Judas Iscariot belongs to the same effort to reconsider received judgments. He believes Judas was Jesus’s most faithful and devoted disciple, and that Judas did not betray him but sought to show the world his greatness. The novel places this interpretation beside Shmuel’s love for Jesus’s message, making his engagement with universal ideals an active re-reading of religious tradition rather than a simple endorsement of it.

Wald’s account of love’s limits

Wald answers Shmuel’s sympathy for universal love with a distinction between expansive rhetoric and particular attachment. He argues that a person may truly love a handful of people—perhaps five, ten, or fifteen—but that claims to love an entire region, a gender, or the whole world are slogans rather than intimacy. His argument does not present love as pure or selfless. Love can involve egoism, desire, possessiveness, and the wish either to dominate or to be dominated by the beloved; it may come disturbingly close to hatred.

For Wald, love’s contradictions are evidence of its particularity, not reasons to dismiss it. Love and hatred can both make a person intensely attentive to another’s whereabouts, actions, and state of mind, while jealousy mingles attachment with hostility. By contrast, universal love risks replacing knowledge of real people with an abstract category. Wald thus challenges Shmuel not only on the size of love’s proper circle but on whether a generalized benevolence can do the work of an intimate, demanding relation.

His account is severe, but not wholly dismissive of ideals. Wald calls Shaltiel Abravanel a dreamer who believed human beings could love one another universally, and insists that such dreams will not save them. Yet he also says that without dreamers, even the clear-sighted would be more petrified and desperate. The novel preserves this qualification: Wald doubts universal love as a practical description of human feeling while recognizing that the dream of it can keep people from surrendering entirely to despair.

The political test of universal feeling

The disagreement becomes concrete in Wald’s account of Jewish-Arab conflict. He rejects Abravanel’s hope that hostility could disappear once Jews and Arabs overcame misunderstanding and came to love one another. In Wald’s view, the two peoples understand the central fact of their conflict all too well: each holds to the same land as its only homeland, and neither expects the other to relinquish it. Shared conversation or goodwill cannot, by itself, erase incompatible claims.

Abravanel’s proposal, as his daughter Atalia explains it, arose from historical experience: the Arab revolt of 1936, Hitler, resistance, killings, reprisals, and his conversations with Arab friends led him to imagine a mixed community, or two communities living alongside or within one another without a state framework that threatened either people’s future. The proposal was not simply a plea for private affection. It was an attempt to devise a political form that would allow both communities to remain. Wald considers the hope mistaken, but his account also shows why it mattered: it offered an alternative to a national order in which one community’s security could be pursued at the other’s expense.

Atalia’s response registers the aftermath of the failure of that alternative. She describes Jews and Arabs alike as living amid displacement, defeat, fear, hatred, and claims of vindication, with ruined villages and cemeteries marking the land. Her account turns the debate over universal love from an abstract dispute into a question about what political choices have done to both peoples. The novel does not make goodwill a substitute for addressing land and power; it makes the inability of goodwill alone to settle those questions part of the tragedy.

Dreams, power, and the danger of redemption

Wald’s skepticism extends from universal love to religious and revolutionary promises of salvation. He argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and newer movements may preach kindness and compassion, yet their adherents can become persecutors when they hold the instruments of power. He therefore rejects confidence in the world’s redemption: movements that promise to save humanity, he says, have repeatedly become entangled in bloodshed. The point connects private love to political action. Benevolent language does not guarantee humane conduct once a movement acquires authority.

His account of Mija’s death shows how these ideals enter family life. Mija had a kidney removed as a child, and Atalia and Shaltiel both urged him not to fight. Shaltiel opposed the war and sought to persuade Arab friends that another course was possible. Wald, by contrast, had helped form the voice that taught the young to answer a call to battle, invoking earlier defenders and the language of a sacred war. Mija went to fight and died in the Jerusalem mountains. Wald’s grief makes the cost of collective ideals intimate: he recognizes his own role in the social chorus that helped send his only son to war.

Wald’s later judgment of David Ben-Gurion sharpens the contrast between the two political visions. He regards Ben-Gurion as a clear-sighted leader who understood that the Arabs would not willingly share territory or power, and that Jews would have to secure their own future. Yet Wald also remembers the silence that followed Mija’s death between himself and Shaltiel, whose unasked question about whether the sacrifice had been worth it continued to wound him. Political realism may recognize danger, but it cannot answer the private question left by a death; universal dreams may fail to resolve conflict, but their absence leaves the hard logic of power with no counterweight.

The novel therefore refuses an easy choice between universal love and limited attachment. Shmuel’s response to Jesus keeps an ethical ideal alive without requiring religious belief, while Wald exposes the distance between that ideal and the actual behavior of institutions and peoples. Wald’s warning that dreamers will not save the world coexists with his recognition that they make despair less complete. Universal love remains politically inadequate when it ignores competing claims, yet the novel suggests that finite love and clear-eyed realism are not, by themselves, a sufficient answer to the violence they describe.