By Howard Feldman
It might sound absurd, but one of the reasons we find ourselves in the mess we’re in today is because love has run amok.
Unrestrained. Unquestioned. Untethered from anything that might hold it accountable.
Love, in its current form, has become something close to sacred, not in the religious sense, but in the cultural one. To question it is to risk being labelled cold, harsh, or worse.
Absurd? Maybe. But hear me out.
Judaism places enormous value on love. We are commanded to love our neighbour, the stranger, and God.
But it is not alone. Running alongside love, always, is justice.
The Torah does not say: “Love, and that will be enough.”
It says: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – justice, justice you shall pursue.
Twice.
Every parent understands this instinctively. Loving a child does not mean letting them put their fingers into an electrical socket. It does not mean allowing them to hurt another child because you “understand what they’re going through.”
Love without boundaries is dangerous.
Judaism understood this long before we forgot it.
Even in our earliest stories, the tension is there.
Jacob loves Rachel. That love is real. But it does not prevent injustice. He is deceived. Leah is unloved. And God intervenes, not to reward love, but to correct imbalance. To restore dignity. To ensure that what is broken is not ignored in the name of what is felt.
Because Judaism understands that Love, in and of itself, does not guarantee good outcomes.
Albert Einstein once wrote that what made him proud to be Jewish was a “fanatical love of justice.”
That distinction matters.
What we are seeing around us today is a failure to pair love with judgment, with boundaries, and with the courage.
We have created a culture in which being “good” means being endlessly accommodating. Endlessly understanding. Endlessly respectful, even of ideas and behaviours that undermine the very values we claim to hold.
Take the debate around women’s sport.
In the name of inclusion and compassion, values that matter, we are now asked to ignore obvious questions of fairness. Biological differences are brushed aside. Concerns are dismissed. And those who raise them are judged, as if asking a question about justice is itself an act of harm.
The same pattern repeats itself elsewhere.
We hesitate, and sometimes refuse to hold individuals or groups accountable for destructive behaviour because we fear the label that will follow. The fear is not that we are wrong but rather that we will be seen as unkind.
And then we see the consequences.
Look at the response to regimes like Iran.
A brutal government that suppresses its own people, jails dissenters, and kills women for defying dress codes, and yet somehow finds defenders among those who see themselves as champions of human rights.
Why?
Because once justice is removed from the equation, what remains is no longer morality, but a vague and untethered sentiment.
Judaism never asked us to abandon judgment in the name of compassion.
Quite the opposite.
The command to love the stranger sits alongside the command to pursue justice. Because one without the other is incomplete.
Love without justice becomes permissiveness. While Justice without love becomes cruelty.
And real morality lives in the tension between the two.
Because loving someone does not mean allowing everything. It means caring enough to draw a line.
I might love you enough to let you swing your arms freely. Justice demands that your fists don’t hit me in the face.