On Hatred

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]