Amid the headlines, hagiography, and high-stakes drama surrounding Pope Francis’s final days, the papal conclave’s secret maneuverings, and the historic election of the American-born Pope Leo XIV, there was one quiet scene that – unless your vocation is organized religion – you probably missed.
The exchange happened on April 20 at 11:30 a.m. in the papal residence, an encounter between Pope Francis and Vice President JD Vance. It was Easter Sunday, the holiest day in the Catholic faith, and a day that would turn out to be Pope Francis’s final full day on this earth. By all accounts, the visit was brief. I have no idea what, if any, words were exchanged. The news reported a presentation of gifts to the vice president, including a Vatican necktie, rosaries, and chocolate Easter eggs for his children.
Far more interesting than the meeting was the run-up to it, and here we need to turn the clock back two months, or, by a certain telling, two thousand years. It all began on January 29 during a Fox News interview, when the Catholic vice president made a foray into moral philosophy by weighing in on the Christian understanding of love. In his words, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then, after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
Aside from the spectacle of witnessing an elected official draw on Christian doctrine to justify administration policy, the internet went abuzz over whether the vice president was accurately representing Catholic belief. Some rushed to defend Vance, citing Christian scripture such as 1 Timothy 5:8: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith . . .” Others, citing Acts 1:8, pointed to a more universal call to bear Christian witness “in Jerusalem, and in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
In response to the controversy, Vance doubled down, posting on X: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ . . . The idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense,” and going on to note that moral duties to one’s own children come before one’s duties to a stranger. Vance was referring to a concept that dates back to the fourth-century thinker Augustine, who first expressed the principle of ordo amoris, roughly translated from the Latin as “the right order of love.” Sin, Augustine argued, arises when we love out of order, for example, loving an object of creation more than God, the Creator of creation. Eight hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas further developed the idea, distinguishing between different kinds of love – natural love, rational love, and otherwise – once again ranking love of God as the highest expression. There are and have always been, according to Vance, not just different kinds of love, but a hierarchy of those loves. Nothing that he said, he contended, was either new or interesting.
Our story, however, did not end there. The operative question, or rather, two operative questions, remained. First, had Vance correctly represented the doctrine of ordo amoris? And second, could the concept serve to justify the administration’s policies on immigration, on deportees, on anything that asks us to prioritize the well-being of one member of humanity over another?
And here it would seem, on both counts, Pope Francis – who I suspect did not need to google the Latin term in question – answered with a resounding “no.” On February 10, Pope Francis issued a letter to the bishops of the United States of America, noting that he had been following “the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations.” The pope affirmed the equal and infinite dignity of all, writing, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan,” (cf. Luke 10:25–37) that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.”
Pope Francis was referring to Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a man left for dead is ignored by a priest and a Levite but cared for by an outsider, the Samaritan. The pope never mentioned the vice president by name, but given the audience of the letter, its subject matter, and its proximity to the precipitating event, I think we can all assume that despite his failing health, Pope Francis knew exactly what he was saying and to whom he was saying it.
You may also be interested to know that Robert Prevost, who, as of Thursday, is known as Pope Leo XIV, was also of the opinion that the vice president had misapplied Catholic doctrine to support restrictive immigration measures. Prevost posted on his X account, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” Vance, it would seem, got the message as well – thus the last-minute lightning visit, the Easter egg chocolates, and the Vatican tie.
Interesting as all this is, at least to me, I imagine some of you may be wondering why your rabbi is doing a deep dive into Catholic moral theology, and what any of this has to do with the Torah reading or the concerns and condition of the Jewish people. They are fair questions, both of which can be answered by directing your attention to what is probably the most famous verse in the Torah, a verse found in this week’s reading: Lo tikom v’lo titor et-bnei amekha. V’ahavta l’rei·akha kamokha: ani Adonai. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:18)
As with real estate, in the Bible, location is everything. This verse, situated in the midpoint of the third of the five books of the Torah, is understood as the heart of biblical theology. A reminder – in the midst of all the rituals of ancient Israel and all the commandments regarding worshipping God – that holiness is achieved not only through the vertical reach toward the heavens, but through the horizontal plane where we relate to one another. To love others as we would love ourselves is the heart of biblical ethics, in the words of Rabbi Akiva, “the great principle of the Torah.”
And yet, as simply stated as the verse is, in the rabbinic tradition it has been interpreted in a variety of ways, a debate that mirrors the self-same debate in the Catholic community. Because while there is consensus that “neighbor” here does not refer to a literal neighbor, there is plenty of debate about whom it is speaking. Someone of the same nationality? Same faith? Same family? Who exactly and then how exactly shall we love that person with the same intensity as we love ourselves?
The rabbis wrestled with the question because while Genesis chapter one makes clear that all of humanity is created equally in the image of God, they also understood that love is a commodity that is neither endless nor can be distributed equally. We must prioritize the needs of our families and our communities before we care for others. There is actually a rabbinic principle: aniyei irkha kodmim, “the poor of your own city come first.” In the allocation of charity, one prioritizes one’s own before others. Alternatively, the Talmud famously relates the thought experiment of two people walking through the desert. One holds a flask of water – enough for only one to survive. If they share, both will die; if one drinks, that person will live. One rabbi, Ben Petura, teaches: better they both drink and die than one witness the death of the other. The other rabbi, Rabbi Akiva, disagrees: the one holding the flask should drink. Why? Because your life takes precedence. (Babylonian Talmud Bava Metzia 62a)
Rabbi Akiva’s position becomes the normative one. The same Rabbi Akiva who identified “love your neighbor as yourself” as the great principle of the Torah also recognized that self-preservation and self-interest are not only legitimate but essential to sustaining an ethical life. It is why, when the rabbinic sage Hillel was asked by a would-be convert to distill all of Jewish teaching into a single sentence, he did not quote the Golden Rule from Leviticus or say, as did his contemporary in Matthew and Luke, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Rather, Hillel said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” One cannot love another as yourself, argued Hillel, argued Akiva, argued Nachmanides, argued Moses Mendelssohn, argued Ahad Ha’am, argued Jews throughout the ages. The best we can do is to love another because he or she is like us – kamokha, created alike in God’s image. There are limits to altruism. There is a place for self-concern. Every human being is created with equal and infinite dignity, yet we prioritize the needs of our families and our communities over care for others.
The debate is an ancient one, stretching back, as noted, not just two months, but two thousand years. As it relates to our present moment, the vice president’s position admittedly aligns more closely with Jewish tradition than with the late Pope’s view—an admission that strikes both me and the vice president (should he be listening) as both unexpected and not without a measure of irony.
But more interesting, and ultimately more important, than identifying which view belongs to which tradition is the overarching question, how do these views inform our present-day concerns? As Jews? As Americans? As participants in the project of our shared humanity?
How do we negotiate love for all while recognizing that love is not an infinite commodity to be distributed in equal measure? How shall we express concern for universal humanity while being unflinching and unapologetic in prioritizing the needs of our own?
The prompt for the recent debate between the vice president and the late pope was immigration and deportation, a debate that pits two deeply held values against each other: the imperative of humanitarian concern and civil liberties on one side, and the responsibility to secure our borders and protect our citizens on the other. It is a real debate, not an imagined one. Yes, there are toxic views on both sides, but the debate itself is important, and it is not the only balancing act of self-interest and universal concern we face.
As Jews, we ask, how shall we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Israeli brothers and sisters in their right to self-defense, in their war against Hamas, in their physical and spiritual struggle to bring the hostages home, and still express empathy and offer relief to innocent Palestinians? How shall we balance our strident defense of Jewish self-determination with the recognition that Palestinians aspire toward the same? How do we take rightful pride in our Zionist story, and recognize that there is another story that stands at odds with our own?
How shall we, as a diaspora Jewish community, commit our full support and resources to fighting the pernicious scourge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism – as we saw yet again this week at Columbia University – and at the same time remain vigilant in defending the value of free speech, wary of the dangers, both explicit and implicit, of this administration’s overreach on campus?
The list goes on. Whether it is climate policy and economic growth, public health and individual freedom, inclusivity and the excesses of DEI, the particulars may differ, but at the center of each lies the same balancing act, the same ethical question: How shall we hold in tension the love, concern, and responsibility we feel for ourselves, our families, our people, and our nation, with the love, concern, and obligation we owe to all people and all of humanity? The debate is not, ultimately, about the vice president and the pope. It is not about Judaism and Christianity. It is about each of us, and all of us, and how we respond to the moral challenges of our day.
I have no idea what was said between Pope Francis and Vice President Vance on Easter Sunday. Given the Pope’s failing health and the brevity of their meeting, I imagine little, if anything, was spoken aloud. But if I could script their exchange – or at least imagine what was held silently in their hearts – it would be this: an acknowledgment that, despite their differences in age, ideology, and authority, they recognized one another’s shared humanity, and perhaps, also recognized the humbling truth that no one person, no one nation, and no one faith holds a monopoly on truth.
Perhaps one – or both – of them considered the wisdom of Jesus’s contemporary, the aforementioned Rabbi Hillel, who taught: Im ein ani li, mi li? U-k’she·ani l’atzmi, mah ani? “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” (Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1:14) The two clauses represent not two opposing opinions, but interdependent halves of a single moral truth. Not in one side or the other, but in the breath we take between the two – in that space, in the pause between self-interest and universal compassion – that is where ethics live, where humanity flourishes, where godliness is most profoundly revealed, and where lies the sacred work ahead.