PART 4: Rabbi Hillel the Elder, the LOVE revolution in ancient Judaism, and the ethical core of Western Civilization

An MOR series: SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM: The structure of our history

Detail of the Knesset Menorah in Jerusalem representing a famous Talmudic story in which Rabbi Hillel the Elder teaches the essence of the entire Torah to a pagan while that pagan stands on one foot.

If you didn’t read Part 3 yet, you may do so here:

PART 3: The Church (and Western) paradox

[ Go to Part 1 ]

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Jurisprudence can refer to the philosophy of law. But it can also refer, in the practical sense, to the system of decisions by which laws are actually applied in real life, especially via reasoned debate to produce court rulings that set binding precedent.

In Judaism, the work of both philosophical and practical jurisprudence begins—at least as a written tradition—with the Mishna. It records the process by which the ethical philosophers and legal scholars we call ‘rabbis’—employing logical derivations within the framework of the sacred ethical axioms of Judaism—develop and adapt the Jewish Constitution, the Torah, to the specific ethical/legal challenges of everyday life.

Generations of rabbis have poured enormous rational, scientific, philosophical, and religious effort (there is no contradiction) to try and discover how the basic principles of ethics, received from God, can spread tendrils of legal specificity into all aspects of human life. The goal is to defeat evil—or, what is the same, to protect life, reduce suffering, expand liberty, extend compassion, embrace brotherhood, seek justice, and establish peace for all humankind.

We may of course disagree with any specific rabbinic proposal. In fact, famously, the rabbis often disagree among themselves. Controversy is common in any rational-scientific field. But regardless of controversy on any specific point, we can be grateful that Hebraic Civilization—the most exquisite surviving historical product of the ancient Mesopotamian ethical movement I call Babylonian semitism—has wrapped its entire identity around seeking better legal solutions for an ethical life. Because this, of course, is the most important investigation of all.

Now, amazingly, according to an influential view,

• The logic and essence of this millenarian Jewish investigation may be grokked by reduction to just ONE generative grammatical principle.

This view is captured in a famous story that is passed down century after century within Hebraic Civilization. Situated in the first century before Jesus, it tells of a cocky pagan—a non-Jewish polytheist enamored of his own cleverness—who challenges the two great chachams (sages) of that generation: Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel. The pagan’s challenge was this: condense the entire Torah for me into just one quick statement.

“There was another occasion involving a Gentile [non-Jew] who came before Shammai and said to him, ‘Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.’ [An annoyed] Shammai pushed him aside with the builder’s cubit [stick] that was in his hand.

[The Gentile] then came before Hillel, who converted him. Hillel said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary—go and learn it.’ ” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a)

This is, of course, no ordinary story. It tells a key lesson about an important controversy—which occupied the two great chachams of antiquity, Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel the Elder—over what should be the basic nature and orientation of Judaism.

Rabbi Shammai tended toward rigorist—strict, inflexible, and literal—interpretations, whereas Hillel prioritized the ethical spirit and humane application of the law. Thus, whereas Shammai’s rulings emphasized precision, discipline, and legal stringency, Hillel’s rulings often aimed at mercy, tolerance, and practical compassion. In the generations that followed Shammai and Hillel, the community of rabbis resolved the controversy in favor of Hillel.

In consequence, Hillel became the hero of the Mishna. His legal opinions form the basis of the first portion of that masterpiece of ethical and legal reasoning known as the Talmud, foundation stone for all future Torah interpretation and practical jurisprudence, guiding the Jewish sages throughout the ages.

• Hillel is—hands down—the most influential rabbi of all time.

The Talmudic story of the pagan who challenges Shammai and Hillel may well be apocryphal. It probably is: one can glimpse the text winking at us humorously via that impish pagan and the replies he got from the sages. But that hardly matters. What this story expresses in condensed form is the deep love and reverence felt by the Talmudic rabbis towards the person and teachings of their revolutionary founder. They were enamored of Hillel’s wisdom, his compassionate humanity, and the sheer poetic brilliance by which he reduced Jewish legal grammar—in paraphrase—to its generative ethical core: “you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Levíticus [Vayikrá] 19.18).

In the terms of art of my analytical language (the academic presentation of which you may go read if you wish), we can say it like this: “I have loved my neighbor as my own self” is the one-sentence meaning goal of Jewish Civilization, and therefore the meaning that normatively orders all ‘social games’ within it, and which must be implicated by the joint performances of the participants in order properly to ‘close’ any such social game.

• Love your neighbor as yourself—we call this ‘the Golden Rule.’

It is because Hillel the Elder set rabbinic Judaism so firmly and so consciously on the path of this all-important principle that—in a community of geniuses—Hillel is perhaps the greatest Jew who ever lived.

And yet, Hillel is more—so much more. Because Christian ethics was also inherited from Beit Hillel. And so…

• Hillel’s Golden Rule is the cornerstone of ethics in Western Civilization.

But didn’t we get the Golden Rule from Jesus?

Rabbi Yeshua ha-Notsri—in Greekified English ‘Jesus of Nazareth’—was certainly a big fan of Leviticus (19.18), the Golden Rule. For example, it is written about Jesus in the Gospel According to Matthew (22:36-40) that someone asked him:

“Rabbi, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

And [Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

In Jewish religious talk, any reference to “the Law” is first and foremost to the Law of Moses or, what is the same, to the Torah. Jesus adds, “and the Prophets,” which amounts to claiming that the Jewish normative tradition—as exemplified by the exhortations of the Prophets—is consistent with the two commandments he chooses as jointly generative for all Jewish ethical and legal grammar. The commandment he mentions second matches Hillel’s: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19.18).

Now, it may seem at first that Jesus is making an original point by placing the command to love the Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4–5)—absent in Hillel’s formulation—above brotherly love. But Jesus is not doing that: he considers them equally important.

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PODCAST: Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, ethics, and the West

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True, the ‘love your neighbor’ commandment (Leviticus 19.18) is mentioned second in Jesus’ formula. But order here does not imply hierarchy—Jesus is not demoting Leviticus 19.18. In fact, Jesus is careful to say that “[the] second commandment is like [the first one],” a point that he underscores with: “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” The two commandments have equal status at the top, and they are presented as jointly generative for all of Judaism.

And a case can be made that Jesus considers love your neighbor as the most important one of the two, because on a different occasion he follows Hillel precisely, omitting the commandment to love the Lord when summarizing the essence of Judaism:

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

Here Leviticus 19.18—as in Hillel—is presented as necessary and sufficient, all by itself, to generate “the Law and the Prophets.”

The Golden Rule belongs to Rabbi Hillel

So Hillel and Jesus agree. But does Rabbi Jesus get the original credit for this? Or does Rabbi Hillel? Well, credit requires priority, and Hillel said it first.

As a young Catholic, I remember, I was sure that Jesus had been the first to urge upon us this radical message of love as the true, central, and generative meaning of all Judaism. And I was sure of it because the older Catholics around me, from whom I learned my religion, were sure of it themselves. And they had learned it from the grandparental Catholics. And so on. It’s a tradition. But we’ve all been wrong.

Mind you, to the extent that the historical Jesus can be glimpsed in Gospel Jesus—and an interesting scholarly controversy has long raged on this question—one can make a good case that Rabbi Jesus was preaching a radical message of love as the fundamental meaning of Judaism. Undoubtedly. But does that make Jesus the original ‘love radical’? No, because Hillel came first.

By the way, no scholar disputes that Hillel came first, for this is a simple matter of our evidence concerning when each of these two rabbis, Hillel and Jesus, lived. Our records say that, having attained a ripe old age, Hillel died in the year 10 of the Current Era, when Jesus was still a little boy (six years old, according to the latest scholarship on his probable date of birth). This means that, growing up, Jesus was exposed to a rabbinical atmosphere thick with the as-yet-unsettled controversy between Shammaites and Hillelites. Many rabbis of Jesus’ generation joined Beit Hillel (‘House of Hillel’ in the most literal translation, though of course in English we say ‘School of Hillel’). This was Hillel’s movement. Rabbis who joined this movement preached Hillel’s radical and urgent message of love.

The rival school was Beit Shammai. In Hillel’s lifetime, Rabbi Shammai, younger by some years, rose to become Av Beit Din (Father of the Court). This title made Shammai the second highest authority at the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish legal and legislative council in the Land of Israel—indeed, in the Jewish community at large. More than a Supreme Court, though it was certainly that, the Sanhedrin was also a tribunal, a parliament, and a religious (though not technically priestly) council. Shammai’s exalted bureaucratic position almost forces the conclusion that his views perfectly embodied the mainstream in the rabbinical Establishment, especially considering his further rise, in the years after Hillel passed away, to the highest office: the post of Nasi (pronounced Nah-SEE) or head of the Sanhedrin.

What does this context mean? That Shammai’s rival, Hillel, was leading a rebellion against the Establishment—an intellectual, social, legal, and political revolt that challenged a rather stiff, unfeeling, and institutionally entrenched rigoristic order. Hillel brought a fresh and bold injection of mercy and human dignity. Yes, Beit Hillel would later be canonized as tradition in the Mishna, becoming legal Jewish precedent for all time to come, but when the Hillelites began pushing for this they were a bold minority movement challenging the dominant legal ethos of the day. Beit Hillel were upstarts. Even then, however, they were hardly weak, because Hillel was a sage of towering influence, quickly adding many new excited followers to his ranks.

Jesus gives every appearance of having counted himself among Hillel’s followers.

We see Jesus in the Gospels teaching leniency toward sinners and choosing mercy over punishment, an orientation that springs from a compassionate interpretation of the law and its purpose, as in Hillel. We also see Jesus reducing Judaism to the generative grammatical commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, precisely according to Hillel’s formula.

It follows that when we see Gospel Jesus confronting the entire community of Pharisees, as if the Pharisees had all been Shammaites, condemned by the Gospels for their unfeeling rigorism and hypocrisy, caring only about the letter of the law and never about its spirit, we are glimpsing a distorted reflection, as in a bent mirror, of the rabbinical contest between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai that was taking place all around Jesus as he grew up. No doubt Jesus was fired up by Beit Hillel.

But this context of an intellectual, social, and legal confrontation encompassing all of Pharisaic or rabbinic Judaism, with two large rival camps, and rabbis everywhere taking sides, is entirely absent in the Gospels, where Beit Hillel is reduced to… Jesus! The Gospels present matters as if Jesus had been the original and lonely love radical who, all by himself, confronted the ‘Pharisees,’ equated in the Gospels, as an all-encompassing category, to ‘the Establishment.’

Because of this Gospel representation, the term ‘Pharisee’ has acquired in the Christian imagination only negative connotations, and chief among them hypocrisy. But this is unhistorical. ‘Pharisee’ simply means this: rabbi. The two terms were synonyms in antiquity. Jesus, too, was a Pharisee. And, at least according to his own boastful claim, so was Paul (Philippians 3:4–5): “If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee.” A rabbi.

The rabbis—or Pharisees—were not an ideological monolith against which Jesus, lone ranger, directed his revolutionary barbs; rather, the intellectual and ethical revolution had started years earlier with Hillel, in the generation before Jesus, and plenty of rabbis—Pharisees all—had joined this revolution and were preaching Hillel’s ethical revolution. Jesus was recruited to this movement.

The Jewish Messiah?

Why then did the Gospels represent Jesus as the lone radical peddler of love? Because the Gospels were written at a later time, when the formerly pagan Greeks who had become followers of Jesus—a very large movement—were busy defining themselves simultaneously in opposition to Judaism, and, rather paradoxically, as its rightful continuation.

This was a gigantic controversy.

Now, because the Greek (and then also Roman) claim that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah demanded that Jesus, in the manner of a prophet, had been the divine channel for a new religious dispensation, and because in Judaism this must include, on the behavioral plane, a moral component, the Greek story became that Jesus had come to replace the culture of the harsh and punitive Old Testament with a much softer exhortation to faith, forgiveness, and love, a message supposedly uniquely original with Jesus.

The new Christian dispensation, of course, was one package: mystical sin-forgiving salvation plus behavioral invitation to love. So the simple Christian story became that the Jews had rejected Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah and his message of love. It’s the story we find in the Gospels, where most Jews appear as frankly evil, stubbornly rejecting love and ultimately crucifying Jesus for daring to preach it. The easily established truth, however, is that the Jewish community embraced Hillel’s message of love; it was only the messianic claim for Jesus—and emphatically not his endorsement of Hillel’s message—that the ancient Jews almost universally rejected.

Why did most Jews reject the messianic claim for Jesus?

The Jewish tradition expected the Messiah not as a mystical savior. The Jews were not waiting for a divine forgiver of sins to confer eternal life on his followers by offering himself up as the sacrificial victim (the ‘Lamb of God’) for a Grand Expiatory Rite officiated by the Supreme Deity. They were not waiting for the ‘Son of God’ but for a man—a political savior. Their expected Jewish Messiah would be an ethical warrior who would defeat the Romans and liberate Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean so they could all live in freedom under the Law of Moses. As in the canonical understanding of Jewish origins narrated in Exodus—which tells of a great slave revolt in Egypt that gave rise to Jewish Law—this would be a new great liberation from slavery. But this time it would be universal, for all peoples.

I can find no controversy among scholars on this point.

Among the ancient Jews “there were, it is true, many different doctrines of the Messiah,” writes Paul Johnson in A History of Christianity, “but the variations were matters of detail and all rested on the unitary belief that foreign oppressors would be driven out and God alone would rule Israel.”¹

“The Messiah,” concurs John Collins in The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, “was primarily expected to be a warrior king who would drive out the Gentiles [the Roman oppressors], and little in the traditions about Jesus fits this [Jewish] mold.”²

In The Jewish Messiahs, Harris Lenowitz, an expert on Jewish messianic movements throughout the ages, puts it rather more strongly: the Gospel Jesus, he writes,

“was … unlike other [would-be Jewish] messiahs in his apparent disinterest in developing a program for gaining power against malign political authorities (those in Rome) or for governing his kingdom when it came. In fact, his desire to be put to death in Jerusalem, in itself unique among [would-be] Jewish messiahs, brings together precisely these two peculiarities of his.”³

In sum, although Christians no doubt find great meaning in the—Pauline—concept of the Messiah as a mystical, sin-forgiving and eternal-life-conferring savior, this concept has really nothing to do with the political revolution that, for Jews, was the entire point of the Messiah.

In fact, diametrically opposed to this universal Jewish expectation, Gospel Jesus preaches political quietism, as encapsulated in his immortally famous phrase, which generations of Christian apologists have labored to interpret positively: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). This directive appears also in Mark (12:17) and in Luke (20:25)—three out of four canonical Gospels!

This Roman power—brutal oppressor of Jews and others—that Gospel Jesus expresses so much respect for, was expected by the Jews not only to be defeated, but humiliated by the Jewish Messiah. Yet the Romans had tortured Jesus to death. This made it impossible for most Jews to accept Jesus as the expected Messiah—it made zero sense to them.

Now, for the Christians—the Greek followers of Jesus—the Jewish rejection of Jesus was a deep and nakedly logical problem striking at the heart of Christian prestige. This problem may be presented in the form of a rhetorical question:

• How could the Greeks know better than the Jews who qualified as the Jewish Messiah?

To solve this problem, the Greek followers of Jesus needed to raise the prestige of prophetic Judaism while ruining the prestige of the Jews themselves. They found themselves forced to make the following argument: the Jews had been led astray by the Pharisees or rabbis, who had confused the proper interpretation of Jewish Scripture, and for this reason the Jews had not recognized Jesus as their own Messiah. Since Jewish Scripture presents earlier generations of Jews stubbornly rejecting their prophets, the Greek Christians simply assimilated Jesus into this literary trope.

But adopting this trope meant, as already mentioned, that the Jews would be represented as rejecting also the new prophet’s moral message, allegedly original with him: love your neighbor as you love yourself. The Jews thus appear in the New Testament as corrupted by a Pharisaic establishment that is uniformly Shammaite and which makes the Jews uninterested in—nay, opposed to—the message of love that Jesus—all alone, as if Beit Hillel had never existed—preaches until it kills him. The Gospel conclusion, carried forward implicitly in Acts of the Apostles (in reality the story of Paul), is that the Jews did not deserve this message of love. Neither did they deserve salvation, as understood mystically by the Greco-Roman Christians. God would make a New Covenant with a ‘New Israel’: the Greco-Romans.

The great historical irony in all this is that, according to the most careful dating of the Gospels, they were written in the late first century of the current era—in other words, precisely during the time when the rabbis were reaching agreement to turn Hillel’s love-inspired legal conclusions into legal precedent. They did this by way of a disputatious process that laid the groundwork for the compilation of the Mishna in the early third century, when Hillel—the love radical—was enshrined as nothing less than the foundation stone for the entire edifice of Torah interpretation.

Put another way, even as the Christians preached to the Greco-Romans that the Jews had rejected love, the Pharisees, the rabbis, were institutionalizing—by overwhelming consensus—Hillel’s message of love for all future generations of Jews.

But score one for Jesus…

The polemic against ‘the Jews’ by the Greco-Roman Christian Church is a consequence of the acute prestige problem and authority crisis that confronted these Greco-Roman Christians in the late first century. This polemic is in part what creates such an enormous difficulty when we try to recover the historical Jesus from the tendentious ‘testimony’ of the Gospels. Once this context is understood, however, it becomes obvious that the historical Jesus was a Hillelite, preaching love like many fellow rabbis of the same school did during his time.

I wish to dispel, however, any impression that I mean to diminish Jesus. He was obviously a towering historical figure, for the dispute over him became gigantic. We may have trouble establishing precisely what the historical Jesus taught, but his impact on world history is undeniable. And, despite the Gospel distortions, some of Jesus’ likely Hillelite contributions shine true.

One in particular is Jesus’ ‘positive’ formulation of Leviticus 19.18: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). Hillel’s formulation is by contrast ‘negative’: what is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbor.

I think Jesus here completes the important methodological contribution of Rabbi Hillel. What their two paraphrases of Leviticus 19.18 give us, in combination, is a comprehensive method by which to apply the ethical principle enshrined in the Torah commandment.

Hillel and Jesus are both answering the question: Love my neighbor as myself—but how? How can I ensure that I have done this? Hillel answers that you should ask yourself: In my neighbor’s shoes, what would I hate? And he says: don’t do that. Jesus answers that you should ask yourself: In my neighbor’s shoes, what would I prefer? And he says: do that. Together, then, Hillel and Jesus equip us with the two major methodological derivations of Leviticus 19.18 that can guide us as we stumble forward in our efforts to be good.

Hillel and Jesus teach us to rely on introspection. This is smart. Assuming there is—for most important issues—great overlap from one human to another, empathic introspection gives you a rationale for agentic, ethical choices. You are loving your neighbor as yourself if you respect your neighbor (don’t do to him what you hate) and care for your neighbor (do to him what you prefer) as you would like your neighbor to respect you and care for you.

This is love.

The political context

It is important to add here the historical and political context, for only then can one appreciate just how momentous the great controversy between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel.

Rabbi Hillel was a Babylonian Jew who migrated to Jerusalem perhaps in the year 75 BCE, which is right before Rome conquered Jerusalem in the year 63 BCE. Rabbi Shammai was born immediately after that conquest. Shammai and Hillel therefore made their contributions at a time when Jewish autonomy had collapsed in the Land of Israel, and Roman rule—often brutal, sometimes cunning—was asserting itself over the people of the Torah, and over their Temple. This context is crucial. At stake in the disputation between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel was a lot more than mere legal interpretation; this was a philosophical struggle over how the Jewish people should live, adapt, and preserve their ethical and spiritual mission under foreign subjugation.

How to interpret the law was not the only controversy. Another was the question of whether to resist and fight the foreign invader in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, or to endure the oppression and meanwhile convert the Mediterranean pagans to Judaism, overwhelming the Romans demographically.

This was debated urgently, for the totalitarian Roman Empire was oppressing giant multitudes of people all around the Mediterranean basin, not only the Jews. Everywhere Rome went, it made war, and then slaves. But the Jews—everywhere—though militarily defeated, remained spiritually and intellectually unbowed. They would not worship the emperor. And they would not abandon their laws. This bravery amazed and inspired the enslaved Mediterranean pagans, who flocked by the thousands to the synagogues, where they fell in love with the law of the escaped slaves: the Law of Moses: the Law of Freedom. There were so many Jews, and so many admiring pagans that the emperors, to a point, were cowed! They dared not abolish the Jewish religion for fear of a revolution.

So many pagans converted to Judaism during this time—thousands upon thousands—that the Roman aristocracy despaired of a solution. For sooner or later—and it seemed it might be sooner—the empire would become Jewish. Such was the fear expressed by the famous Roman Senator Seneca in the early first century, a few years after Hillel died:

“Meanwhile, so powerful has been the practice of this most accursed race [Jews] that it has spread throughout all the earth; the conquered have given laws to the conquerors.”⁴

This was no joke. Seneca was saying that even many Romans—the ruling class of the Roman Empire—were converting, for such was the universal appeal of Judaism. Two centuries later, the Roman Dio Cassius, a historian of Rome, commented on this:

“I do not know the origins of this name [Ioudaios = Jews] for them, but it also refers to the other persons, even foreigners, who eagerly pursue their customs. And this people is even among the Romans. Though often curtailed, it increased to the greatest extent so as to win by force the freedom of its religious belief.”⁵

What were the rabbis doing to get everyone excited about Judaism in the ancient Mediterranean? They were preaching peace and love. And the most radical rabbi of all was none other than Rabbi Hillel.

In context, then, Rabbi Hillel was saying this: Listen, Jews and pagans: I have the weapon to defeat Rome. It is LOVE.

Into this great moment strode Jesus.

(We’ll soon have more to say about that.)

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PODCAST: Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, ethics, and the West

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1. Johnson, P. (1976). A History of Christianity. Atheneum (USA): Simon & Schuster. (p.19)

2. Collins, J. J. (1998). The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. (p.263)

3. Lenowitz, H. (1998). The Jewish Messiahs. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (p.35)

4. Quoted in Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei (6.11)

5. Quoted in: Slingerland, H. D. (1997). Claudian policymaking and the early imperial repression of Judaism at Rome (South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, no. 160). Scholars Press. (pp. 62–63)