Leviticus 19:18
Love & Hatred – A Primordial Asymmetry
From the essay
For ages, millennia, it was an integral part of the consciousness of the ancients, and then of the Western World that to be capable of really and deeply loving someone else, one must love oneself, as Leviticus 19:18 tells us, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." This eternal truth stands, in my mind and flows from my earlier life experience in the USSR, in a stark contradiction to a short rhyme in Russian, strongly promoted by the Soviet Union’s media and in their literature, "Не умея ненавидеть, невозможно искренне любить, " which, in a direct translation reads like this, "Without knowing how to hate, it is impossible to love sincerely." A few days ago, this strongly nuanced difference struck me strong when I happened to read a poem recently written by my friend, Sy Dorfman.
Adapted from PDF pages 1.