This week we celebrated Tu b’Av, known as the Jewish festival of love. Love is one of those words we think we understand. We speak about falling in love, romantic love, love of family or friends. Yet the Torah commands us to practise a deeper, more demanding, and ultimately more transformative love. Love, in Judaism, is rarely described as something that simply happens to us. It is something we are commanded to do. Again and again, Torah speaks of love as a commandment. Love the stranger. Love the Eternal your God. Love is a difficult choice, made again and again. Elie Wiesel expressed that truth memorably when he wrote: “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” Love is not simply a feeling. It is the decision to notice another human being. And that is the lesson I learned from a stranger. Her skin was as deep as the night, and her smile shone like the full moon on a Tu b’Av evening. There was a gentleness in her eyes, but also a quiet alertness, as though she never stopped paying attention to the world around her. I met her on the Tube, and she saved me. It was an ordinary Wednesday morning, on my way to the synagogue. I was sitting by the window when a man came and sat beside me. There was something about him that made every instinct tell me to leave, but he was between me and the aisle. Before I could decide what to do, a woman sitting across the aisle caught my eye, smiled, and quietly beckoned me to come and sit with her. Later, after the man had finally left, she turned to me and said, “I thought he was going to hurt you.” We began to talk. I thanked her for looking out for me and said, “It’s good that we protect one another.” She smiled and replied, “I never expect anyone to help me. I’m a woman, I’m Black, and I wear a hijab.” Her name was Layla. Born in Eritrea, married to an Englishman she met in Qatar, now studying English at college. A woman whose name means night, and whose kindness lit up my day. Without knowing it, Layla had already begun teaching me this week’s Torah portion. וַאֲהַבְתֶּם אֶת־הַגֵּר כִּי־גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם You must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. In Ekev, Torah asks us to see beyond fear, beyond difference, beyond ourselves. It asks us to recognise the image of God in another human being, even when they seem completely different from us. That is not sentimentality. Nor does it mean pretending the world is safe. Layla noticed the danger before I fully understood it myself. Love did not make her naïve; it made her attentive. Compassion does not ask us to ignore reality. It asks us to respond to reality without allowing fear to have the final word. The Mishnah tells us that the young women of Jerusalem danced in borrowed white garments so that no one would be recognised by wealth or status. Love was invited to look beyond appearances and to see the person standing before you. This is why Layla’s words have stayed with me. How often do we see only the labels people carry before we see the person standing before us? The Torah commands us to see one another before we see our differences. There is another tradition about Tu b’Av that I have learned to appreciate over the years. At first, I found it difficult. It hardly sounded like a story about love. The Talmud teaches that it was on the fifteenth of Av that the deaths of the wilderness generation finally came to an end. And then, God spoke to Moses once again. The silence was broken. The relationship was renewed. Later tradition imagines that moment through a powerful story. Every year, on the eve of Tisha b’Av, the people would lie down in graves they had dug for themselves, knowing that many would not rise in the morning. But one year they all awoke. Unsure whether they had miscounted the days, they waited until the full moon. Only then did they understand: the decree had ended. Death no longer had the final word. That is why the festival of love comes just after the season of mourning. Not because grief has disappeared. But because love makes it possible to begin again. Love restores relationship. Love gives us the courage to keep walking through the wilderness. That is what Moses is trying to teach the people in Devarim. Standing on the edge of the Jordan, carrying the failures of the past and the uncertainty of the future, they are reminded that covenant is lived through love: love of God, love of the stranger, love expressed through justice, compassion and responsibility. On that Wednesday morning, God sent me Layla. A woman who chose compassion instead of indifference. A stranger who saw me before she knew me. A stranger who reminded me that love often begins long before we learn another person’s name. After commanding us to love the stranger, Moses continues: “Love, therefore, the Eternal your God—and always keep God’s charge, laws, rules, and commandments.” Those are not two different commandments. We learn to love God by learning to really see one another. By noticing. By protecting. By crossing the aisle. By choosing compassion when fear would be easier. May we have the courage to notice. May we have the courage to protect. May we have the courage to love. Shabbat Shalom.