The Torah Forces You to Help Your Enemy Load His Donkey

The Torah commands you to help your enemy. The rabbis knew this was hard. They helped anyway.

Sifrei Devarim, the tannaitic commentary on Deuteronomy compiled in Roman Palestine during the second century CE, confronts a verse that appears to offer an escape route. Deuteronomy 22:4 commands: when you see your fellow's donkey or ox collapsed under its burden, you must help raise it up. The verse uses a double construction, common in biblical Hebrew to indicate intensity: "raise, you shall raise it." A prior verse in Exodus 23:5 uses similar language and seems to add: "and you shall not pass by him." The Sifrei asks: what if you have a very good reason to pass by? What if the person whose animal has fallen is a known wrongdoer, someone who has demonstrated through repeated behavior that they are unworthy of your assistance?

The answer is uncompromising. You must help anyway.

Why Would Anyone Need to Be Commanded to Help?

The phrase "and you shall not pass by" is not a description of natural compassion, the kind of impulse that would draw any decent person toward a struggling neighbor. It is a commandment, which means it anticipates resistance. The verse would not need to say "do not pass by" if passing by were not tempting. The commandment exists precisely because there are situations in which walking away feels not only convenient but justified.

The commandment to help a fallen animal, preserved in the midrash-aggadah collection across 3,205 texts, extends the ruling in an unexpected direction. The obligation is not only to the animal. It is to the person burdened by the animal's collapse, even if that person is someone you would ordinarily have reason to avoid. The animal is suffering. The person is suffering. The suffering creates an obligation that temporarily supersedes the ordinary social calculus of who deserves your help.

The One Exception, and What It Reveals

The Sifrei does allow one exception, and it is worth noticing carefully. If the animal's owner has sat down beside his collapsed beast and refused to help unload it, expecting you to do all the work while he watches, you are not required to assist. The verse says "with him": the help must be collaborative. You are joining an effort, not substituting for one. A person who refuses to participate in their own rescue forfeits the claim on your assistance.

This exception is narrow. The owner would have to make a conspicuous show of abdication, sitting down deliberately while you approach, making clear by posture that he intends to let you carry the full burden. Short of that, you help. The fact that he is your enemy does not change the obligation. The fact that he has behaved dishonestly or cruelly in the past does not release you. You help with him, and if he refuses to help with you, then and only then may you pass by.

Jacob at the Jabbok and the Enemy He Was About to Meet

The rabbinic tradition consistently reads laws about interpersonal obligation through the lens of the patriarchal narratives. The 1,913 texts of the Ginzberg collection preserve a tradition that Jacob's wrestling with the angel at the Jabbok was, among other things, a wrestling with obligation. Jacob, returning from Laban's household with wives, children, servants, and flocks, was on his way to meet Esau, the brother he had cheated and who had threatened to kill him.

The night before the encounter, alone on the riverbank, he wrestled with a figure that left him limping. Esau was Jacob's enemy. An enemy with a legitimate grievance. The law Jacob's descendants would receive at Sinai would say: help your enemy's animal. Stand alongside him. The night at the Jabbok was Jacob's preparation for the morning: he would cross the river, approach Esau's four hundred armed men, and bow seven times. He would not pass by. He would help, even though Esau had every reason to still be angry, even though the situation was dangerous, even though the outcome was not guaranteed.

Compassion as Discipline, Not Feeling

The Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzia (32b), compiled in Babylonia around the sixth century CE, extends the Sifrei's ruling and identifies a tension with another principle: the obligation to help your enemy before you help your friend, specifically in order to overcome natural reluctance. If your friend's animal and your enemy's animal have both collapsed simultaneously, help the enemy first. Not because the enemy's animal matters more, but because the reluctance to help the enemy is a moral failure that the commandment is specifically designed to address.

The donkey on the ground does not know whether you helped with resentment or with love. The commandment does not require you to feel warmly toward your enemy. It requires you to act as if you did. The Sifrei trusts that acting as if, repeated enough times, eventually changes the actor. You help the enemy's animal not because you have overcome your hostility but because the act of helping is itself the path toward overcoming it. The law does not wait for the feelings to change. It creates the behavior that will, eventually, change the feelings.

What the Law Says About the Enemy Themselves

The underlying assumption of the entire ruling is that your enemy remains a full person, a bearer of obligations and dignity, even at the moment of your conflict. The animal collapsed because it was overloaded. The person walking beside it is responsible for that collapse, responsible for the animal's welfare, and unable to resolve the situation alone. Your hostility toward that person is real. The disagreement that created the hostility may be entirely legitimate. None of that changes the immediate reality: an animal is suffering, a person is helpless, and you have the capacity to assist.

The Sifrei does not ask you to forget the conflict. It asks you to set it aside for long enough to address the suffering in front of you. Then you may resume whatever position your relationship with that person requires. But first, the animal. First, the immediate need. First, the act of not passing by.