...Jesus told us to
“love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Torah commands, “That
which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”...This is not entirely accurate. The Torah, in Leviticus 19:18, commands the teaching the President attributed to Jesus. The commandment the President attributes to the Torah is actually a teaching of the Sage Hillel to a potential Roman convert.
This mistake is mostly, but not entirely, harmless. The rub is this -- there is a strain within Christianity that likes to imagine that they discovered love and true human fellow-feeling. Such Christians find it important to emphasize how much more loving Christianity is in particular contrast to the Judaism of the Pharisees, which is to say, our Judaism. The distinction between the active "golden" formulation of Jesus and the passive "silver" formulation of Hillel is of crucial importance to such people, as is maintaining the fiction that the teaching of Hillel, and not the biblical verse, represents the authoritative view of Judaism.
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