This article is an edited excerpt from a more comprehensive article which appeared in Azure (Spring 5759 / 1999, No.79) and is available online here. Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.

I was in junior high school when John Lennon died, and I was an absolute wreck. I grew up on my Mom’s old Beatles albums, and by the time I reached adolescence, my personal classification system went: Billy Joel–John Lennon–God. So after that fruitcake emptied his revolver into this consummate musician’s chest on the corner of Seventy-Second and Central Park West on the eighth of December, 1980, I wore black to school for a month. I traveled all the way to New York and waved a candle till my arm fell off and sang “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” so many times that it really was all I was saying. Meanwhile, back home, I was suspended by the principal due to an unrelated bum rap (it was Aaron Mittleman, not me, who locked our French teacher in the closet and evacuated the class), and so was conveniently able to initiate “Stay in Bed and Grow Your Hair” week – soon joined, to the principal’s (and my mother’s) chagrin, by some fifteen classmates – at my house in John’s honor. I even went out and spent good allowance money on two Yoko albums, where she intermittently shrieks and imitates whale sounds for some eighty-five minutes straight. Now that’s a true fan. I tell you all this in order to establish my credentials as a veteran, fanatic and peerlessly loyal Lennon lover, because now I’m going to kill him all over again. 

John was at his best as a team player, but there’s no question that his preeminent pièce de résistance, the composition that will be for all time immediately associated with his name, is “Imagine.” And justifiably so: I don’t care what the idiot editors of Rolling Stone think, it’s a great song. Gives me gargantuan goose-bumps from the introductory adagio. The man was a genius, and this was his masterpiece. Even the words themselves are enough to make you weak in the knees: 

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky 
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one 

(Tell me you didn’t at least hum the melody while you were reading just now.) 

Those words, those words! They’re so beautiful, so encompassing, so right. We agree with them viscerally, adopt them instinctively. They strike some of our deepest, most primal chords, they produce (at least for a moment) a kind of nebulous but heartfelt longing, a yearning for something better, for something perfect, for something beautiful. Everything we’ve been taught – indeed, a decent amount of what we human beings are made of – is passionately stirred by the simple yet incredibly compelling message of John’s poetry (actually, the words were originally inspired by Yoko’s verse, if you can believe that). 

I know what you’re thinking: Oh, how predictable! Now he’s going to explain how “Imagine” is just a pipe dream, an unfeasible, quixotic, idyllic fantasy that’s nice to sing about but has no place in our individual or collective practical planning for the future. Well, if that’s what you think I’m up to … you’re dead wrong.   

I am not challenging the wisdom of John’s enterprise because I think it has no chance of succeeding (fact is, many aspects of it are coming truer every day). If I believed in his vision, if I truly desired that it be realized speedily and in our days, I would join up regardless, and struggle against all odds toward our common goal with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my might. 

But I don’t want John’s vision to be fulfilled speedily and in our days. I don’t want it to be fulfilled – ever. John’s beautiful ballad is a death march, a requiem mass for the human race. His seemingly lovely lyrics constitute in truth the single most hideous and most unfortunate combination of syllables ever to be put to music. The realization of his dream, or even just a large part of it, would perforce entail the wholesale and irreversible destruction of the dreams, hopes, happinesses and very reason for living of yourself and every single person you know. If we, who for so long have unthinkingly admired and warbled Lennon’s words, were to live to see his wish come true, the result would be more staggeringly horrific and more devastatingly ruinous than you could ever possibly – imagine.  

Although some readers have no doubt long ago reached their own conclusions on this score, permit me to share with you my own personal take on this exceedingly crucial matter.  

II

Why do you get up in the morning? 

Please stop and think very seriously for a moment about this matchlessly significant and yet for some reason rarely broached question. What is the juice that gets you going every day? What motivates you to pursue … anything? Why, ultimately, do you do … pretty much everything you do? What are you really looking for? What have you always really been looking for – just between you, me and the page? 

What is the end goal, direct or indirect, of the vast majority of your activities in life? What is the one thing you need more than anything else, the one thing you just couldn’t live without, the one thing you probably wouldn’t want to live without? What do you live for? What do you work for? What would you die for?

You’ll agree it’s not any of the basic necessities – food, shelter, clothing, multi-function scanner-printer-copier-fax – you already have these. Know how I know? Because you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t. You’d be out somewhere purloining bread like Jean Valjean.   

You think maybe it’s your health? Look, I know that when two old Jewish men pass each other in the locker room on the way to or from the schvitz, it’s a biblical precept that at least one of them has to rasp, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have nothing.” Granted. But we don’t live for our health. Our health is only one of the things which allow us to pursue our true desires in life. So once again: What is it, that deepest, most powerful, most true desire of ours? 

“Success,” you say, or “fulfillment.” Okay, what on earth are those? Of what elements are they comprised, and which are their most important and indispensable component parts? 

“All right – happiness!” There you go again! You’ve managed once more to beg the question: What is it, more than anything else, that makes you happy? 

All right, here’s the final clue, a Beatles clue: All you need is …   

Love.  

And if you think this is a cliché, then it is the single most powerful cliché ever known to humankind, the one that pervades our thoughts, directs our actions, makes us move, runs our lives. We live for love. Love of parents, love of children, love of husband, love of wife, love of sisters, love of brothers, love of girlfriend, love of boyfriend, love of family, love of friends. That’s what we want and need most of all, and such a vast percentage of the things we do throughout our entire lives is ultimately connected with and geared toward achieving, maintaining and increasing that one incomparably precious treasure: Love. 

Sure, there are other objectives and experiences we may strive to attain – the fascination of scholarship, the rush of artistic creation or scientific discovery, the thrill of the fight or the game, the various hedonistic pleasures –  but tell me you wouldn’t give up any of these before you’d give up love, tell me you wouldn’t give up the entire kit-and-caboodle of them for the sake of love. “Without love” (to enlist the Doobie Brothers), “where would you be now?” 

Okay, so we’re agreed: No one with enough brains to read this piece will deny that love is at least one of the primary motivating factors informing human endeavor. So let’s talk just a little bit about love, shall we?   

III

They asked Jesus and Rabbi Akiva – on different occasions (they lived almost a hundred years apart) – what their favorite verse was in the entire Bible. And wouldn’t you know it, both of them picked the exact same one: Ve-ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha (“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Leviticus 19:18). 

Now there is a fairly famous anecdote in the Talmud (Baba Metzia 62b) which describes the following situation: You and this other chap are out for a stroll in the desert. While you are both busy admiring the various lizard species and rock formations in your vicinity, he suddenly exclaims: “#@$%&! I forgot my friggin’ canteen!” 

You quickly assess your options. There is only enough water in your canteen for one human being to make it back to civilization alive. So you could split the water – and you’d both perish. You could give your flask altruistically to your fellow traveler, and die a hideous death under the merciless, take-no-prisoners, desert sun. Or you could keep the canteen for yourself, and abandon him to the same fate. What do you do?   

Two opinions, two legal rulings, are recorded in the Talmud regarding this matter. One of them comes straight from the mouth of the aforementioned Rabbi Akiva. The other one emanates from an individual with a very strange name, who is never mentioned anywhere else in rabbinic literature: Ben-Petura. Now, I don’t want to go into all the speculative etymology (Ben-Petura – Ben-Pintura – Ben-Pindura: The always fickle letter “nun” creeps in and we have the common, somewhat derogatory Talmudic appellation for Jesus), but it is at least possible that the second jurisprudent whose expertise is consulted in this passage is none other than the Christian Savior himself. We’ll never know for sure whether this is so, and it doesn’t really matter for our purposes today. I am only interested in utilizing this dichotomy of views as a paradigm, and the two men who espouse them as archetypes. So let’s assume, for the moment, that Ben-Petura is in fact Jesus; if he isn’t, he’s sure read a lot of the Nazarene’s sermons, as we shall see.

Let’s go back to the desert. The scorching rays of the noonday sun are cauterizing your corpuscles, your throat is so dry you could bake a matza in it, and you have quite a decision to make. Fast. Ben-Petura–Jesus advises you as follows: Share the water, and die together, because you are no better than your friend. Rabbi Akiva rules differently: You take the flask. 

Now this is fascinating because, if you will recall, both Jesus and Akiva chose “Love your neighbor as yourself” as their all-time favorite Tora verse. Well, what in the name of Jehosaphat is going on here? I understand Jesus’ position: It is entirely consistent with genuinely loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, which certainly appears to be exactly what the biblical commandment requires. Jesus’ verdict makes perfect sense in this light.   

But Rabbi Akiva? What was he thinking? Did he forget that he had once put the same verse way up high on a pedestal as “the premier principle of the Tora”? His judgment – keep the canteen, share none of its contents, leave your buddy to expire miserably in the desert like a dog – seems to contradict everything that that hallowed Pentateuchal principle of mutual, equal love demands. 

What we have here is a clear-cut case of diametrically opposed interpretations of scriptural intention (a common enough phenomenon in our sources). Jesus understands the Levitical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself ” just exactly the way it sounds. We would know this even without the whole speculative business about his possible Ben-Petura alias. Because you see, the entire New Testament is simply riddled with examples which leave not a shadow of a doubt that the ideal in Jesus’ – and eventually Christianity’s – eyes is at least to strive to love all human beings equally.  

One day Jesus was in the middle of preaching to the multitudes – as was his wont – when all of a sudden (every Jewish child’s nightmare) his mom showed up: 

Then one said unto him: “Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.” But he answered and said unto him that told him: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?” And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said: “Behold my mother and my brethren.” (Matthew 12:46-49) 

This and more: Jesus wished there to be no misunderstanding regarding this matter:   

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. (Matthew 10:34-35) 

We have not quoted verses out of context here. Christianity is a system concerned with belief, with faith, and as such it recognizes no separate national entities, no tribal affiliations, not even, in the final analysis, the significance of blood kinship. It is, at least theoretically, the world’s largest equal-opportunity employer, viewing as it does all human beings as similarly deserving (more accurately: Similarly undeserving) potential recipients of salvation. Christianity is a thoroughly universalist – and at the same time a thoroughly individualist – religious creed, and Jesus of Nazareth was without a doubt the foremost prophet of universal love (although nowhere near the only one). 

Okay, that’s settled. Now, let’s get married. Uh-huh, right this minute – you and me. I’m your beau of the ball, we’ve been having the most awesome time getting to know each other for months, and I just can’t possibly wait another second. It’s time to propose. Down I go on one knee. I look dreamily up into your eyes. I reach deftly into the pocket of my Giorgio Armani blazer and pull out a rock the size of a canteloupe. I take your two hands in mine, and, gently caressing them, I coo: “My darling, I love you. I love you so much. I love you as much as I love … as much as I love … as much as I love that other woman, the one walking down the street over there. See her? Oh, and that one, too, riding her bike past the newspaper stand. I love you exactly as much as I love all my previous girlfriends, as well, and I love you as much as all the girls who weren’t ever my girlfriends. I love you as much as I love everybody else on this planet, and for that matter, I love you as much as I love the animals, too, and the weeds, and the plankton and – Oh God ! What’s that searing, indescribable pain in my groin? Hey, where are you going, my daaaaarliiiiing?” 

No one gets turned on by “universal” love. It doesn’t get you up in the morning, it doesn’t give you goose-bumps or make you feel all warm and tingly inside, it doesn’t send you traipsing through copses picking wildflowers and singing songs about birds, it doesn’t provoke heroism, or sacrifice, or creativity, or loyalty, or anything. In short, “universal love” isn’t love at all.   

Because love means preference. The kind of love that means anything, the kind of love we all really want and need and live for, the kind of love that is worth anything to anyone – that is worth everything to everyone –  is love that by its very nature, by its very definition, distinguishes and prefers. Show me a guy who tells you that he loves your kids as much as he loves his own, and I’ll show you someone who should never and under no circumstances be your babysitter. Stay away from such people. Head for the hills. He who aspires to love everybody the same has no idea what love means, indeed, is really advocating – and may be entirely unaware of this – the removal of all love worthy of the name from the planet Earth. Rabbi Akiva – and most of Judaism along with him – views the matter a bit differently. The kind of love (romantic or otherwise) that he unabashedly recognizes and unreservedly encourages, is one-hundred-percent biased, hopelessly unequal, deeply discriminatory, and incorrigibly preferential distinguishing love: The kind of love that plays favorites, that chooses sides, that confers specialness. As a Jewish luminary, Rabbi Akiva only understood that type of love that blossoms from the ubiquitous Hebrew root “k-d-sh,” which is probably most accurately rendered into English as “to declare special, to set apart as unique.”  

When a man marries a woman in Judaism, the institution is called kidushin, because they set one another apart from the rest of humanity, because they (ideally) love each other more than they love anybody else. When Jews bless the wine on a Friday night, this is called kidush, because we are setting apart, we are distinguishing the Sabbath day from what surrounds it, and saying: I love this day more than any other day of the week. When Jews do that weird, Wizard-of-Oz, “there’s no place like home” thing three times with their heels, and declaim the words kadosh, kadosh, kadosh in the Amida, this means: “There is none like unto you among the gods, O Lord.” We single you out, we love you best. 

This is not a Jewish secret. It’s a human secret. It’s the way we all work, all of us, deep down inside. We all love preferentially, and that’s the only kind of love we value, the only kind of love we want back from the people we love. All those perpetually smiling, lovey-dovey, touchy-feely, Swami-from-Miami types who appear at first glance to be all about love, and nothing else but love, toward every single thing that lives and breathes, are in reality all about stealing this absolutely essential human emotion away from you. It is no coincidence that the first and most indispensable step one takes in order to successfully “deprogram” a Hare Krishna (or member of any other cult) is to rekindle his particular love for a particular someone who was once very special to him. 

And this means something else that everybody already knows, but is for various reasons only occasionally acknowledged: Because love is such a major deal in all of our existences, and because the love we’re talking about is invariably distinguishing and preferential in nature, human beings will ever and anon, at all places and all times, prefer hanging out in the company of some people over hanging out in the company of others. They will always form special groups, little groups and big groups, groups to which they feel a special connection, a special sense of belonging. They will always relate emotionally to these groups in the manner of concentric circles, loving the nearer rings more than they love the farther ones. They will always seek to perpetuate these familial, sociocultural and possibly political entities for as long as they can. And they will always distinguish between their own special circles, and those that are special not to them – but to others. 

Is this because human beings are small-minded, visionless creatures who can’t appreciate the lustrous loveliness and messianic morality of universal oneness? No. It is because they are (thank God) supremely and congenitally motivated by preferential love, and special groups of this sort are the inexorable consequence and highest, most beautiful expression of such love. It is because loving in this way is the bread-and-butter of authentic human happiness. It is because if they didn’t love in this way, human beings would have absolutely nothing left to live for. Nothing. This, to my mind, is the underlying meaning of the well-known Talmudic determination: “O hevruta, o mituta” (loosely: Give me society, or give me death). Either you have around you a particular group of people that you especially love (a “hevreh,” as modern Hebrew slang has it) – or you might as well be dead.

(Jesus knew this; he knew it full well. That’s why he continually emphasized that “My kingdom is not of this earth.” He didn’t want to—or at least was aware that he was unable to—bring about the establishment of “universal love” here in the mundane sphere: It just wouldn’t work. Perhaps he even believed it shouldn’t work. So he decided to institute it in the “kingdom of heaven.” That is ultimately the reason why he departed. That is also the reason why there is no parallel in Christianity to Judaism’s 613 commandments and their hundreds of thousands of derivatives, which are all about how to live and act and get along right down here in this world. Jesus, on the other hand, specifically relegated unto Caesar all things terrestrial. Early Christianity, at least, was not interested in creating a system designed for living and loving in this world: It was interested in ushering in the next one.)   

Do you know who nearly managed to pull off John Lennon’s vision of no religions, no nations, no countries, one world – right here on earth? Do you know who almost succeeded – even if only within relative geographic and demographic microcosms – in bringing about that beautiful dream of universal love, no barriers, no walls, and no special or distinct human cliques or clans? How about these fine-feathered fellows: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Any of these names ring a bell? Because the only way to stop people from loving preferentially and start them loving universally; the only way to see to it that they do not divide up – as people who love at all naturally do – into distinct sociocultural and sociopolitical communities and associations, is by forcibly ensuring that they all dress, eat, sleep, talk, sing, dance, work, play and think the same – and killing them if they diverge. There’s your “One World,” John, with all the divisions and barriers erased, there’s the  magnificent, imploding, united utopia, where “all hearts are as one heart, all minds are as one mind, so that through the spirit of oneness you may heal the sickness of a divided community.” Feast your eyes.