An ancient rabbi once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day was on its way back.

“Could it be,” asked one student, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”

“It is when you look on the face of any woman or man and see that she or he is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot do this then no matter what time it is, it is still night.”

This simple story with its clearsightedness gives expression to true religion as understood by the great spiritual traditions of the world. They agree on a spiritual ideal that is uncomplicated: all you have to do is to identify with your fellow human beings and treat them as other selves.

Religious leaders at their best agree that, beyond all rules and regulations, the most important single element is love. In fact, that is how those rules and regulations get their meaning. All you have to do is love.

Of course a certain irony lies hidden in the phrase “all you have to do.” In practice, loving other people as ourselves turns out to be a formidable challenge demanding a lifetime’s self discipline.

The writer and Boston University professor Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for peace, recently told an interviewer how much stories like the one told here about the ancient rabbi have meant to him. Perhaps he has drawn inspiration from this story in particular. Certainly, the title of his autobiographical novel, “Night,” starkly expresses some of the same meaning.

This book is based on Wiesel’s experiences as a boy in three Nazi death camps where he saw his fellow Jews, including members of his own family, put to humiliating and agonizing deaths. Such savagery toward fellow human beings truly did spread night across whole nations during those years of Holocaust.

Wiesel’s encounter with absolute evil shook his faith in human beings and destroyed all belief in God. For years afterward, he struggled painfully to find his way through the darkness of profound despair about humanity and its prospects.

That many people do manage to love others can give us hope in what often seems like a hopeless world. Taking a broad view of the human family, one philosopher who used to teach at Dartmouth College, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, saw the issue this way:

“The history of the human race is written on a single theme: how does love become stronger than death? The composition is recomposed in each generation by those whose love overcomes murdering and dying. So history becomes one great song.  .  . As often as the lines rhyme, love has once again become stronger than death. This rhyming, this connecting is men’s and women’s function on earth.”

Against all expectation, the last years of the twentieth century have providentially brought the people of some nations from darkness toward the light. Moves toward reconciliation among the residents of Northern Ireland, for example, have cheered those of us who desire for large national communities something like the fraternal love we want individuals to have.

Similarly, the demise of apartheid in South Africa has brought citizens, of various skin colors and ethnicities closer to a society based on respect for basic human rights. Many people look forward to the day when the people of Israel and Palestine act as brothers and sisters toward one another.

In recent weeks, the astonishing move toward undoing hostilities between the two Koreas, North and South, has encouraged the peace lovers of the world. One can now hope that these two peoples will become true friends.

If love is true enlightenment, as the story we began with suggests, then love serves as the goal of the spiritual life. Being able to see that other people are brother and sister to us stands as the best single indication that we are advancing on the right path toward God and spirit. Then, for us, as the old hymn says, morning has broken.  

Richard Griffin