“Love Your Neighbor as Yourself” – Iris Haim

I often wonder why the letter ו (vav) is added before the word “אהבת” (love) in this phrase. It could have simply said “תאהב לרעך כמוך” (love your neighbor as yourself), and we would still understand the concept.

Perhaps some letters are missing, and the verse was meant to say: “ו (if) אהבת לרעך כמוך”—meaning, if you love your neighbor as yourself, then…

Let’s start with the word love—what is love, and what does self-love mean in the context of this verse?

The verse assumes that a person loves themselves and, in turn, will extend that same love to others.
But what if a person doesn’t love themselves? If they lack self-love, how can they love others?

From this, we understand that first and foremost, a person must find self-love—the love within themselves for themselves.

As a therapist, I often see that one of the most prevalent issues people face is a lack of self-love, which manifests as self-criticism, judgment, anger, and guilt over their actions.
People tend to blame others for both small and large things because they are, at their core, blaming themselves.

Over the years, I have studied many disciplines, one of which is NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).
In Hebrew, this is translated as שפת תכנות עצבית (neural programming language), a method that enables people to change their automatic responses to scenarios.

One principle of this approach is to never judge yourself for a decision you made in the past, because at that moment, it was the best decision you could have made.

For me, self-love happens when a person accepts themselves without judgment, without criticism, embracing their behavior even if it doesn’t align with societal norms. They stand by their principles through choice and connection to their inner self.

Naturally, when a person loves themselves, their behavior toward others will also reflect true love—without judgment and without blame.

When someone is angry with themselves, blaming themselves for who they are, they will also blame others.

On October 7th, my son Yotam was taken from his home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza and held by murderers in captivity for 65 days.
During that time, through self-love, love for others, love for my country, and for the people working to bring Yotam home, I looked at everyone with loving eyes, fully believing that all of Israel—and even the country’s leadership—was acting out of sincere and genuine desire to bring my son and the other captives back. I knew everyone was doing everything they could.

Since October 7th, I have witnessed how much goodness exists in our country—goodness we don’t always notice. I saw the humanity, kindness, connections, and love that flow between us.

From October 7th until today, people who don’t know us and didn’t know Yotam personally have been praying for him, talking about him, singing about him, and feeling as though he were their own son.
“Yotam is the son of all of us.”

On December 15th, Yotam escaped Hamas captivity, saved himself from the murderers, and after five days of heroic survival, along with two of his fellow captives, was mistakenly identified as a terrorist and shot.
My response to the IDF soldiers was to ask them to come to us because we wanted to embrace them. We didn’t blame them, weren’t angry, and didn’t judge them. We knew they hadn’t done it intentionally.

The soldiers received my message and came to the shiva. We hugged them, cried with them, and despite the immense pain of losing Yotam, we didn’t hold anger. We loved and embraced.

We have love in our hearts for every soldier and every person in Israel because only through love will we defeat our enemies here.

On a national level, we are a people who love ourselves, and therefore we can love those within our nation—each person as if they were our own child.

On October 7th, we proved to ourselves how much love we have for one another.

Let’s make sure we preserve it.