Billie Holiday, Abraham, and Selfless Love

Here is a paradox I have been wrestling with for some time now: how do you take the Universe into account and still love a single person? How do you at once realize an individual’s absolute insignificance and his absolute significance? And not just know intellectually but comprehend at such a fundamental level that all of your actions are informed by your understanding?

Here’s how it started – consider the idea of completely selfless love. I think that the ordinary love that we all feel for others has a certain self-interest in it naturally. I love my sister more than I love another person’s, and I would be sadder if my sister died. We all see a little of ourselves in our family, our friends, and our lovers. Their actions reflect on us, and they (at least in part) define us, and we want to keep them in our lives. This is extremely basic and intuitive, but if true enlightenment was loving every person on the entire planet with all your heart, wouldn’t a perfect person be equally saddened by every person’s suffering? He would unconditionally love strangers, even those who hated him, criminals, racists, old, and young, in his town or 10,000 miles away. Would he be overwhelmed by sadness from everyone’s death and suffering? Or would he be completely insensitive, and numb?

If one accepts selfless love as an ideal, it can lead to some pretty strange dilemmas. For example, there is the famous biblical story of Abraham in which God orders him to sacrifice his son Isaac, whom Abraham had waited for years to conceive, and who was supposed to be the progenitor of a great nation. So total was Abraham’s love for God that, without questioning the purpose of the order, he silently brings his son to the forest and attempts to kill him, but is stopped by angels sent by God. Metaphorically, Abraham could be seen as a role model for people to emulate, both in the way he stoically accepts the Isaac’s inevitable death and in his singular love for God (it is, after all, a love story between Abraham and God).

But wait, how can Abraham be a good man? Isn’t his story twisted and repulsive? If he is enlightened in his love for God and in his comprehension of the insignificance of worldly and ephemeral things, does that mean he doesn’t love his son? Isn’t it horrible that he is no more hesitant to sacrifice his son than a lamb? Secularly, his love for God can be translated into a comprehension of the order of things, that inescapably his son will die, so it doesn’t matter if it is by his hand or Nature’s. God’s test is a judge of his attachment to impermanent things, be them his reputation, his marriage, his dream of a prosperous future nation, and most of all, his son. But how can a person who is so wanton of a killer, who feels they have nothing to lose, be admired?

But I actually think he is torn apart inside, not at all reckless, and that this story, to me, is about his struggle, his internal battle between his empathy for Isaac and his devotion to the divine order that says Isaac must die.

I want to understand (again, deep inside me) that another man’s life is just as important as my father’s or mine for that matter, and that in the biggest picture we are all collections of atoms that just tend to rearrange in certain self-replicating formations, but I don’t want that understanding to desensitize me to anyone’s death. I want to love my future spouse with all of my heart, but I want to understand that she and I will both be gone in the blink of an eye, and therefore cherish the present as much as I can. The struggle between those two opposites is natural, and, I think, necessary to be moral. Our actions should be founded in an unconditional love for all things, but we should also strive to see beyond the ephemeral, and I think being a good person is just doing the best you can to navigate those extremes.

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~ by Akhil on April 13, 2009.