Love your fellow as yourself

The secret of Chabad was written 3336 years ago on a piece of parchment in the desert. We read it this week in the Torah, when told to “love your fellow as yourself.” Rabbi Akiva called it “a major principle of the Torah.”
The Torah is a book of commandments, not suggestions. Yet, this seems contrary to human nature. How can one be instructed to “love” another “as yourself”? Love is an emotion, a feeling, and is not something that can be commanded.
This challenge led to various interpretations among commentators. Some suggest that the mitzvah is not on our emotions but about our actions, urging us to treat others as we would want to be treated, seeking their well-being as fervently as our own. To echo Hillel, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”
However, every word in the Torah is precise and eternal. And the Torah does not merely instruct us to treat others as we would treat ourselves; it explicitly commands us to love them as ourselves.
Hasidic philosophy offers insight: the difficulty in loving one’s fellow arises when we see them as physical beings, separate from us. Yet, if we delve beyond their physicality, and see the soul, recognize the divine spark within them, we realize they are actually not “someone else”; rather, spiritually, we are both an extension of G-d. In essence, loving them equates to loving a part of ourselves, akin to one limb of our body cherishing another.
As one scholar paraphrased, a healthy body is one where every part works in harmony. Likewise, a healthy Jewish people is one big, caring family where each individual loves the other like his or her own self. Where one Jew faces rough times and the others hold his hands. Where one meets good fortune and all of us celebrate. Where each runs to do an act of kindness for the other, and shuts his or her eyes and ears to the other’s shame.
Love for those closest to home nurtures love for the extended family of humanity, and from there, love for all G‑d’s creatures. But if love doesn’t start at home, from where will it come?
Some three hundred years ago, in a small town in Russia, the Baal Shem Tov taught that “A soul enters this world for seventy or eighty years just to do a favor for another.” If we can live this today, just imagine how much better the world would be. Let’s look at our fellow for who they really are, the very essence of their soul, and then we can truly love the other, just as ourselves, as the Torah commands.