Our 613 Love Languages

In Season 4 of Seinfeld, Jerry and George pitch a television show to NBC. Their idea—a “show about nothing,” based entirely on their own lives—is met with skepticism. The network executives ask for a more conventional plot. Reluctantly, they add one: A man crashes into George’s car, can’t pay for the damages, and is sentenced by a judge to become Jerry’s butler. Even Jerry is uneasy about how gimmicky it sounds. “Because he’s my butler,” he says flatly in the script, as if that explained anything. The line is meant to be funny, but it captures something stranger and more enduring: the way punishment can drift into the absurd. I thought about this episode often while studying Tractate Makkot, which is filled with the most unlikely of consequences. False witnesses (eidim zomemim) are punished not for lying, but for what they intended to do. A person who kills accidentally must flee to a city of refuge—not as revenge, but as relocation.

Like Jerry, I found these Talmudic consequences fairly unusual, even by Talmudic standards. But upon further examination, I realized they highlight the very purpose of Jewish life.

The law of eidim zomemim is one of the most unusual in the Talmud. False witnesses are punished only if a second set of witnesses testifies not that their story is false, but that they were physically elsewhere at the time—“you were with us.” Internal contradictions or implausibility are not enough. Even more counterintuitively, if their plot succeeds and the accused is punished, the conspirators are exempt from penalty. And unlike nearly every other case in Jewish law, eidim zomemim can be punished without prior warning—hatra’ah—making it the rare example of legal consequence that seems to bypass procedural justice entirely. The Talmud describes this case as a chiddush, an innovation without parallel in Jewish law. What are these bizarre consequences meant to convey?

Tractate Makkot includes another case of curious consequences: the ir miklat, known as the city of refuge. A person who kills unintentionally—without malice or negligence—is not sentenced to death or fined, but must flee to a designated city and live there in exile. He is not a criminal in the conventional sense, yet he is uprooted from his home and community, sometimes for decades. What’s more, if he fails to reach the city in time, the relatives of the victim—the go’el ha-dam, or blood avenger—are permitted to seek vengeance. His release from exile is not based on personal growth or legal appeal but is tied to the death of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, an event that has no direct connection to the act itself. The entire system seems less like a punishment and more like theater. What are these bizarre punishments meant to convey?

“The world is twofold for man,” wrote Martin Buber in his classic work I and Thou, “in accordance with his twofold attitude.” This distinction forms the foundation of Buber’s entire philosophy, highlighting two ways of engaging with the world: as objects or as relationships. Buber calls the first approach—the instrumental, utilitarian one—an I-It relationship. In contrast, I-Thou relationships are mutually transformative; both parties emerge changed. A teacher can look at students as another grade to submit, another seat to fill, another parent to meet at back-to-school night. That’s I-It: transactional, unmoved, indifferent. We truly meet the other only in an I-Thou encounter, a sincere attempt to connect fully in all of our humanity: a teacher shaped by their students, a self shaped by relationship.

In modern society, we often default to the first mode, treating life like a game in which we’re accumulating tickets to be redeemed, like points at Chuck E. Cheese. Life, however, as Buber argues, is not about tallying up gains or rewards; it’s about stepping into the mode of encounter, where our interactions with others create meaning and shape us in profound ways.

In this relational mode, consequences aren’t just reactions to what we do; they don’t exist as afterthoughts or byproducts. Rather, consequences are woven into the fabric of life, shaping its contours. The relationships we engage in—those moments of genuine connection—are not simply responses to our actions but are the very forces that create our story. Our identities emerge through these engagements. Life is not a simple back-and-forth transaction; it is written in the ink of our actions and their relational consequences, which constantly reshape our narrative.

And this approach toward consequences—seeing them not just as the product of our lives, but as the very canvas of life—lies at the heart of Tractate Makkot. Both eidim zomemim and ir miklat suggest a vision of justice that steps outside the usual crime-and-consequence binary. In each case, the punishment does not directly correspond to what was done, but to something more abstract—what was intended, what might have happened, or what needs to be communicated. Rather than serving as strict retribution or deterrent, the legal response becomes a kind of narrative device. Justice, in these cases, is not merely transactional—it is storytelling. The false witnesses are given the ending they tried to impose on someone else; their punishment plays out an alternate version of history in which their deception had succeeded. The accidental killer, by contrast, is not judged as a criminal but is nonetheless relocated to a city of refuge. His exile tells a different story: one of responsibility, consequence, and the value of life, even when guilt is absent. What unites both cases is a deeper claim about the nature of consequences themselves. Even when no formal guilt can be established—or when the harm never occurs—the Torah insists that actions, or even intentions, ripple outward. These laws dramatize a moral truth: that consequences are inescapable, even when law itself does not typically or formally assign blame. Justice, here, is not about exacting punishment; it’s about making meaning.

Tractate Makkot is a reminder that life itself is a product of our choices and their consequences. Ultimate justice is not simply a sentence handed down by the court; it emerges from the relational encounters in our lives. And this view helps explain the ending of Tractate Makkot.

If you listen closely at the end of many Torah classes, you may hear someone mumble the following words, taken from the final Mishnah in Makkot:

רַבִּי חֲנַנְיָא בֶּן עֲקַשְׁיָא אוֹמֵר: רָצָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לְזַכּוֹת אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל, לְפִיכָךְ הִרְבָּה לָהֶם תּוֹרָה וּמִצְוֹת, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר ״ה׳ חָפֵץ לְמַעַן צִדְקוֹ יַגְדִּיל תּוֹרָה וְיַאְדִּיר״.

Rabbi Ḥananya ben Akashya says: The Holy One, Blessed be He, sought to confer merit upon the Jewish people; therefore, He increased for them Torah and mitzvot, as each mitzva increases merit, as it is stated: “It pleased the Lord for the sake of His righteousness to make the Torah great and glorious” (Isaiah 42:21).

This custom to recite this line at the end of a Torah class is more than a thousand years old. But why this passage? It’s moving, yes, but there are so many others to choose from. How did a random Mishnah at the end of Makkot become the traditional closing line of Torah learning?

Too often, we develop an I-It relationship to religious life. We view mitzvot either as a burden or a badge. In that mode, a mitzva becomes either inconvenient, ignored, or a self-congratulatory performance—rarely a source of transformation. Chögyam Trungpa calls this “spiritual materialism,” as he writes in his incisive book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism:

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit. The teachings are treated as an external thing, external to “me,” a philosophy which we try to imitate. We do not actually want to identify with or become the teachings.

We allow ourselves to be transformed only when we approach our lives through the I-Thou lens—so every mitzvah becomes an encounter with divinity. That’s why we conclude Torah classes with the reminder of the final Mishnah in Makkot. Torah is not a rulebook or a scoreboard; it is the language of relationship.

You may already know there are 613 mitzvot in the Torah. But the source for that exact number appears only once in the entire Talmud: at the end of Tractate Makkot. Why? Because Makkot—concerned with the consequences that define a life—wants us to understand the why behind the sheer number of mitzvot.

We usually translate mitzva as “commandment.” It’s a terrible translation. We already have a word for that in Hebrew: tzivui. The word mitzvah comes from tzavta—connection, relationship. It is what binds the Commander to the commanded. As Rabbi Ḥananya ben Akashya teaches, mitzvot are a merit because they offer the opportunity for relationship. We have 613 avenues to connect to the Divine—613 opportunities to transform our lives through sacred encounter.

The prophet Habakkuk, cited in our Tractate’s discussion, says that in truth there are not 613 mitzvot, but only one: emunah, faith. Not to dispense with the other 612, but to distill their essence. And that faith is not just in God, but in the very trajectory of our lives. Mitzvot cultivate faith in a God who has faith in us—a God who gives us the opportunity to sanctify even the most mundane aspects of our lives.

When we treat mitzvot like a game of Whac-A-Mole, we reduce our religious lives to points that can be exchanged for prizes. But we don’t fulfill mitzvot for points—the ultimate reward for a mitzva is the mitzva itself, the relationship it produces with the Divine.

“Faith is not some half country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed,” writes Christian Wiman in his poetry collection, My Bright Abyss. I think of this passage when I think about Habakkuk boiling down all 613 mitzvot into one: faith. This is not the faith of the I-It relationship, a transactional accomplishment that can now be worn as if fulfilling a mitzvah was an Olympic medal. “No,” Wiman continues:

Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.

That’s the lesson I learned from Tractate Makkot. Not that consequence is merely what the court decides, but that our lives—our stories—are consequence. The life we build from our decisions, the sanctity we experience in our encounters, all of it is the unfolding result of relationship. Wherever you may stand religiously, there is one step forward that can always be taken, the consequences of which will shape the remaining trajectory of your life.

And this brings us to the final story of Tractate Makkot—a bittersweet scene in the shadow of destruction. Rabbi Akiva is walking through the ruins of Jerusalem with other sages. A fox emerges from the Holy of Holies, and the rabbis begin to cry. Rabbi Akiva begins to laugh. They ask, How can you laugh in such devastation?

“That is why I laugh,” he says. Just as the prophecy of destruction has come true, so too will the prophecy of redemption.

“Akiva, you have comforted us. Akiva, you have comforted us,” they reply.

Many have analyzed this story, including a brilliant 50-page treatment by the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I would add only this: Rebbe Akiva understood that exile and redemption are intertwined—part of one unbroken relationship. Like Habakkuk and the one mitzva, Akiva knew that faith is the thread that binds it all. His very life—having spent decades far from religious observance—was a testament to how absence can birth presence. That is the double comfort of Rebbe Akiva: his ideas, and the story of his life.

Akiva, your life gives us comfort—that even in exile, we can still taste redemption. The fields of Jerusalem are not destroyed, but plowed—awaiting seeds. Because justice, in the Jewish tradition, is not merely retributive—it is grammatical. It doesn’t just assign blame; it confers meaning and merit. Consequence, then, is not the end of the story, but the language in which it is told. And we have 613 love languages through which to shape a life of holiness and consequence. Whether in exile or redemption, that should bring us comfort.

הדרן עלך מסכת מכות והדרך עלן