How do I love my enemy?

Judaism does not ask you to pretend. That matters, because when someone has hurt you, or stands against everything you value, the instruction to "love your enemy" can feel like a demand to lie to yourself. The Jewish tradition takes a more honest path. It begins not with your feelings, which you cannot simply switch, but with your actions, which you can choose. The Hebrew concept at the heart of this is *ahavah*, love, but in Jewish ethics love has always been understood as something you practise rather than merely feel. The rabbis recognised that the emotions tend to follow the behaviour, not the other way around. If you wait until you feel warmth towards someone who has wronged you, you may wait forever. If you act with basic decency, something in you begins, slowly, to shift.

The Torah itself holds a striking tension here. On one hand, it commands you to love your neighbour. On the other, it is honest about the existence of enemies and does not airbrush them out. There are passages in the Psalms, for instance, that give full and fierce voice to anger at those who have done harm. This is not treated as a spiritual failure. The tradition has always made room for honest lamentation, for naming what is real. At the same time, there is a well-known legal teaching in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy that if you see your enemy's animal struggling under a burden, you must stop and help. You are not asked to feel fond of this person. You are asked to act humanely, even towards them. That principle, rooted in practical obligation rather than enforced sentiment, is where Jewish ethics on this question begins.

The rabbis of the Talmud developed this further with the concept of *sinat chinam*, baseless hatred, which they considered one of the gravest spiritual dangers. They were not naive about the fact that some hatreds have causes, that some people genuinely wrong others. But they were deeply suspicious of the way hatred tends to expand, to find justifications, to become comfortable. The discipline they encouraged was not to manufacture warmth, but to actively resist the hardening of the heart. One practical teaching that emerges from this tradition is the idea of *dan l'kaf zechut*, judging others favourably, giving people the benefit of the doubt even when you would rather not. This is not the same as excusing harm. It is a deliberate effort to keep your perception of another person from calcifying into something that closes off any possibility of change, in them or in you.

Maimonides, the great medieval philosopher and legal thinker, wrote carefully about the internal work involved in ethical life. He understood that character is formed through repeated action, and that you can reshape your own dispositions by choosing, again and again, to behave in ways that run slightly against the grain of your immediate feeling. This is a deeply practical psychology. You do not begin by loving your enemy. You begin by refusing to spread a rumour about them, by acknowledging their difficulty in a situation where you could have stayed silent, by resisting the small daily cruelties that enmity makes easy. Over time, those choices accumulate. They change you, sometimes more than they change the other person.

It is also worth knowing that Judaism has never pretended this is a simple or complete resolution. Teshuvah, the process of repair and return, involves the person who caused harm making genuine restitution, not just the wronged person generously absorbing the injury. If someone has genuinely hurt you and has not sought to make it right, you are not required to dissolve your sense of what happened. The tradition is not asking you to make yourself smaller. What it is asking, gently and persistently, is that you not let the enmity define you. That you keep enough of yourself free from the grip of the grievance to remain the person you want to be. That is a difficult thing. The tradition knows it is difficult. But it frames the effort not as something heroic or extraordinary, but as the daily, unglamorous, deeply human work of living with other people in a world where harm is real and yet where something better remains possible.