we need to be impartial in our commitment to partiality: If it is okay for me to feed my child before I feed yours, it is equally okay for you to feed yours before mine. If I am entitled to my partial loves and commitments, then so too are you.

“Okay, fine, every human being is infinitely valuable, but let’s be honest: I’m a little more infinitely valuable than anyone else. After all, I’m me.”

For Luria, in other words, tzimtzum yields divine absence; for the sages, in contrast, it yields intensified presence.

Judaism is a religion of love and law, of action and emotion; indeed, Jewish liturgy reminds us daily that Jewish law is itself a manifestation of divine love, not a contrast or an alternative to it.

At bottom, love as a posture values and pursues the flourishing of others.

We have all heard it a thousand times. Christianity is about love, we are told, but Judaism is about … something else, like law, or justice, or whatever.

God’s command, coupled with our commitment, frees us to love our neighbor whatever we happen to be feeling at this moment or that; “such a commanded love can be ours in a deeper sense than is possible for an emotion that is rooted in what is momentary.”21 Commanded

We are thus obligated to affirm our own worth.33 “Just as a person believes in God,” the Hasidic master Rabbi Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) teaches, “one must also34 believe in oneself.”35 How we see ourselves profoundly shapes who and what we become.

How we treat the poor is how we treat God. Honoring one is honoring the other; deriding one is deriding the other.