In my dream this morning, a business-suited high-school teacher was lecturing to the class (mine?). He stated that in the past – and in many cultures today – people fought or even murdered others because there was too much hatred. He then went on to explain that this hatred grew directly out of the directive to love your neighbor and even to love your enemy. It’s hard enough to love your neighbors, much less your enemies, so naturally most people fail. But if they believe they are supposed to love these people but they don’t, then they are faced with a dilemma. Either they have to accept the idea that they are in some way inferior or deficient, or they must turn against the ones they were trying to love and blame these others for the failure. But cognitive dissonance works against finding the fault in oneself. Therefore, people naturally blame others. And if the others are to blame for making a person fail, then it’s natural for that person to hate them and feel he must destroy them, so that he can eventually succeed.

So, the teacher proceeded, it is clear that as long as we have the injunction to love others, we are doomed to have hatred and murder in the world. Clearly, the system of relying on emotion to obtain right behavior is fundamentally flawed and primitive. But here in America we have a better system. We require only that people learn to live with the presence of others. Live and let live. And he wrote on the board, “Love = getting along”. It’s the only reasonable thing to do. We have replaced emotion with reason. If we don’t have to try to love, at least we can avoid outright hatred.

At my side, the student teacher shook her head and whispered that somehow, she was not sure that was right. She couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with it, because it seemed, somehow, so reasonable. But she felt there must be more to love than just toleration.

Somehow, it seemed a fitting dream for Yom Kippur. Asleep or awake, it is a time to examine the roots of our beliefs and to consider whether we are living the lives we ought to be living.

To me, this dream speaks of the cheapening and trivialization of values in our culture. Let’s just schmear over the differences and all learn just to get along. Let’s not make ourselves look or act so different that we are too hard to get along with. Let’s all dress more or less the same (within normal cultural, age, fashion variances), speak the same, do the same kinds of acceptable things. We try our best to tolerate the people on the edges of acceptability, but we know we don’t have to like them (much less love them!) or even have much of anything to do with them. In all fairness, it’s not a bad compromise. Most likely, there will be no krystalnacht in America. We have probably come further in learning to live together than most places in the world. I am not putting it down. I’m glad to be living here.

But let’s not fool ourselves: This is NOT love. This is not what Jesus and Hillel and Gandhi and other men of God were talking about when they urged us to love our neighbors (and even enemies) as ourselves.

God made ocean beaches and the rugged mountains of the Andes. Luminous icebergs and sweltering jungles bejeweled with birds. Rivers of grass and oceans of sand. We can love and appreciate all these things, in their (sometimes deadly) beauty, for just what they are, without wanting to change them. God also made people and cultures and religions in profuse variety. We find it much harder to see the (sometimes deadly) beauty in these, and to love them. But surely, THIS is the task we are called to. Not to change them. Not to bring them to the inoffensive norm. But to revel in our differences. To love one another.