I want to talk about something
difficult: hatred. It’s one of the most powerful emotions in the human heart,
it is a universal experience, and as old as humanity, and it has the capacity
to make toxic everything it touches: personal relationships, family
relationships, communal relationships, national and international
relationships, relationships between ethnic groups and within ethnic groups,
relationships between religions and within religions, relationships between men
and women, relationships between political groupings and within political parties
– there is no area of human life spared the debilitating and destructive nature
of hatred.
Even within an individual, hatred
doesn’t need an external target, because we can experience hatred towards
oneself, or parts of oneself: and that can be conscious – I hate the way I
look, I hate the way my voice sounds, I hate myself when I fail to achieve what
I set out to do, I hate myself for having so much hatred in me – or it can be
unconscious.
But conscious or unconscious,
directed at oneself or directed at others, it is a powerful spoiler of
well-being, an inner aggression that we struggle to tame, and sometimes give up trying to tame, because
the expression of hatred has, dare one say this, it has its pleasures too: we
might struggle to admit this, but the
expression of hatred can purge something inside us, temporarily maybe, like
lancing a boil, like the emptying out of a seeming bottomless well of rage; but
a well that gets filled up again pretty quickly and then needs and waits for
another opportunity to spill out. In that sense hatred is a condition of
psychic bulimia and unless we are able to get a grip on this basic human
emotion, and understand it, and do the hard psychological and spiritual and
mental work to contain it, it will destroy the world we know, and love.
Too dramatic a statement? I fear
not. Wherever we look, if we have eyes to see, we can perceive hatred in
play. I am not going to rehearse here
all the countless domains where we see hatred – you can construct your own
anthology and it would no doubt embrace everything from wars and rape and knife
crime to the renewed European hatred of immigrants to the strands of racial
hatred in America towards the black community or towards scientific truth on
evolution or climate change.
But it’s been on my mind recently
particularly because of the way in which one of the youngsters in this
community (Finchley Reform) has attracted (along with her family) the most vile
abuse in social media concerning her participation in the recent ‘Kaddish for
Gaza’ event. And whatever you think about the wisdom of that form of
demonstration of concern about the Palestinian deaths on the Gaza border some
weeks ago, the invective unleashed has been truly despicable. This is hatred
from Jews against other Jews. You can Google all the background to this if you
want to - it is too shameful for me to go into here, the hate-fuelled sewage
that has emerged from our fellow religionists.
It's revealed a tragic irony about
us Jews. Because we Jews often think that hatred is what the world – or groups
in the world, or individuals - feel
towards us (and of course there is a reality to that, and to anti-Semitism),
but when you see what happens within the so-called Jewish ‘community’, the kind
of hatred that is expressed – and it’s not a new phenomenon, Jewish hatred of
other Jews, but I think it is amplified now through the new channels that
social media offer – when you see the levels of bile and misogyny and racist
invective and ugly polemic that lie beneath the surface, in Jewish hearts and
minds, one can genuinely fear for our collective well-being.
What I am saying here is far from
being an original idea, though maybe I’m trying to say something about it with
perhaps a new emphasis on the psychological complexity of this universal
emotion. But it’s certainly not new in Jewish history for there to be an
awareness of the destructive nature of Jewish hatred. We are in the midst of Tisha B’Av, the annual day of memorialising the losses of Jewish
history – focused on the destruction of the First then the Second Temple, but
over the generations becoming a day when we recognise the cycles of loss and
persecution that Jews have gone through, throughout the ages.
But the remarkable thing about the
way the rabbis of the time thought about the loss of the Second Temple,
destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 - which marked the end of a whole era of
worship and ritual life and the very ordering of society into priests,
Cohanim, and administrators of the cult,
Levites, and then the mass of other Israelites - the way they came to
understand the disaster that had befallen them was that it was due to one thing
above all. They said, and I quote from the Talmud : “In spite of the Torah we
studied, the commandments we kept, and the deeds of love enacted, the Temple
fell because of groundless hatred: sinat
chinam – hatred without reason” (Yoma
9b). And they weren’t talking about
groundless hatred by the Romans, they were talking about Jewish hatred of other Jews. This was our downfall, those Talmudic
rabbis said.
They could have blamed the Romans,
but they didn’t – they reflected on their experience and realised that there
was something endemically self-destructive in the very fabric of the Jewish
community: that in spite of adherence to study and practice, in spite of acts
of compassion and kindness within the community, it wasn’t enough - because there was something else which
undermined all that: it was the way that hatred exists within us and seeps out.
Hatred which is groundless.
Another way of saying that might
be: hatred which is felt and not reflected on, but acted out; hatred which is
grounded in our inability to tolerate difference, our inability to bear someone
having a different opinion to us, our incapacity to manage the feelings of envy
of other people, our inability to prosper like them, or be as beautiful as
them, or as visionary as them, or as lucky as them – a thousand reasons why in
the fine-grained relationships in a family, a society, a community, we can’t
bear the otherness of people, what they do, what they think, what they are. And
hatred just arises in us, and we can’t manage it. And then it is acted out. And
this is as old a story as humanity – it’s there in the mythic tale of Cain and
Abel – and it’s as newly-minted as today’s newspapers and the omnipresent
social media, which are full of it.
Those Talmudic rabbis , in their
wisdom, saw into the heart of something profound. What we value, they said,
gets destroyed because we can’t contain our own hatred. In the past, when I have reflected
on this Talmudic self-indictment, I tended to think about it in a different
way. I thought of their response as being like the victim blaming herself,
himself, themselves – an inability in the rabbis of that generation to own up
to their rage at what had been done to
them. Jews do have a long history of
turning rage away from their persecutors
and looking inside themselves to see what they as a community had done wrong.
Over the generations, and
particularly in the Middle Ages as a response to the Crusades and blood libels
and massacres in Europe, there developed a whole theology around this – the
theology of mipnei chata’einu: we
were punished because of our own sinfulness. So the outrage at what was done to
us is turned away from the goyim and
it becomes our fault. And there have been relics of this thinking even today in
some Orthodox circles – there was the extreme view that the reason for the
Holocaust was that Jews had assimilated, or become Reform, so it wasn’t the
Nazis and their acolytes that were to blame but we were to blame.
This inability to take
responsibility for one’s anger and feel it in relation to the right object is a
very common human trait but as an attempted explanation for Jewish victimhood
it is woefully inadequate, misguided. It’s actually perverse. Or at least it is
perverse when carried to an extreme: because it is still psychologically
healthy to be able to reflect on what role one plays in one’s own victimhood. We
have spectacularly lost this instinct for looking at what part we might play in
our persecution – the tendency now is just to blame ‘the other’.
So I’m sketching this out because,
as I say, in the past I might have thought about our Talmudic passage about sinat chinam along those lines: a
failure of the rabbis of that generation to come to terms with their hatred of
the Romans, their hatred of what had been done to them without reason. I might
have thought: well, this is where it all begins, this problem the Jews have
through history in dealing with their rage at the non-Jewish world - they turn
it inwards, they blame themselves. The Temple was destroyed because of our
groundless hatred.
Turning the blame inwards can be a
psychological defence against outwardly-directed rage: this is certainly a
problem in Jewish (and other) families today, and I think it is a collective
problem historically; but I also now think that this Talmudic passage is on to
something even more important: the way in which the hateful feelings in each of
us that we don’t manage to deal with become
destructive of the social fabric.
We are certainly seeing this all
around us at the moment: in the Jewish community around the toxic debates and
differences of view about Israel and its occupation; in Israel itself in - for
example, in its new Nation-State law, although some of the more hateful
proto-fascist aspects of it were fudged or dropped before it was passed this
week; we see it in the Labour party as it wrestles with antisemitism, in the
Conservative party as it wrestles with Islamophobia, in Parliament as it
wrestles with the poisonous legacy of that self-destructive Brexit vote; we see
it in the country as a whole as it struggles to keep afloat under the tide of
hate speech and hate crimes that somehow have been released following the
referendum, as if (consciously or unconsciously) the Leave vote was felt to
have legitimised expressions of disdain and antipathy towards, and sometimes
outright hatred towards, migrants and immigrants and asylum seekers, anyone who
isn’t self-evidently one of ‘us’. And we see it in the rise of far-right groups
across Europe.
And we see it in the hatred
directed against our planet.
At a global level it might be
helpful to think of this planet we all inhabit as if it were a Temple, a sacred
space where the world community comes together: this fragile planet of ours is
the site of everything we value in life, where we are dependent on the earth
and the seas and the sky and the rain, on the natural world in all its
miraculous abundance, on the delicate balance that exists to keep everything
sustained for our well-being, our survival. And this sacred space we inhabit is
at risk: it can be destroyed, we can destroy it if we don’t curb our hatred,
which is evidenced in our casual disdain for it, our disregard of its animals
and trees and plants, the whole ecosystems on which our lives depend. And we
are all complicit in this low-level aggression against the Temple we inhabit.
So much is at stake, I fear, in all
the multiple ways this question of what we do with our hatred is played out.
The Jewish tradition recognises
the basic ingrained nature of hatred, it’s part of the fabric of our
consciousness; our tradition even recognises that hatred is something that God
experiences too, so to speak. You hear it in our prophetic reading this week,
which included Isaiah 1:14: “Your new moons and fixed festivals fill me with loathing…” – sana nafshi, literally “my soul hates
them”. The prophet intuits that from the ultimate point of view, the viewpoint
of divinity, all this religious ritual stuff we do is hateful – not in and of
itself, but if it is a substitute for what matters, which he goes on to talk
about: “goodness, justice, helping those wronged, protecting the vulnerable and
society’s outsiders” (verse 17, paraphrase).
The text suggests that God hates
the way outer observance of so-called ‘religious’ traditions takes the place of
certain core values. So, we might think, if even God has hatred enmeshed into
God’s Being, what hope is there for us? We aren’t going to get rid of it. In
which case the work is to manage it
better: which means to reflect on it, to think about why things are hateful to
us, rather than reacting hatefully to them. And if we are going to feel hate –
and we do feel hate - then at least let it be directed into channels that could
be life-enhancing rather than life-destroying. There's a text from Amos that can help us here.
At one point the prophet says:
“Seek good and not evil, that you may live, and that God may truly be with you;
hate evil and love good, and
establish justice in your gates.” (Amos 5:14-15). So if you are going to hate – and
you will – let it be directed not against people but against manifestations of
evil: if you are going to hate, hate evil – ‘evil’, note, not ‘evildoers’.
Now,
there’s a challenge: learn to hate evil without hating those who are
perpetrators of evil! Once we elide the distinction between acts of evil and those who enact evil, once we merge in our minds evil and
evildoers, we are sunk. This is hard work but it’s the spiritual, psychological
and mental challenge humanity is set. If we fail in this task we will, I fear,
sooner or later destroy ourselves.
[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 21, 2018]
