The Torah endorses loving people, "v'ahavta l'reiacha kamocha -- love your neighbor like yourself." On the other hand, it condones hating evil, "ohavei Hashem sin'u rah -- Lovers of God hate evil." How do we reconcile these two imperatives?
Rav Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, writes in his Tanya (32): "It is a mitzvah to hate them, and it is a mitzvah to love them. Both are true. You hate the yetzer hara, the evil inclination that's in them, and you love the goodness that is concealed in them, which is a spark of Godliness."
Any hatred directed towards a person is considered baseless on its face because it rejects and ignores the core and base of the person, the image of God with which we can find connection or commonality. That doesn’t mean we don’t confront, debate and challenge the ideas and actions of people that we cannot tolerate; it means we love people, even when we reject and can’t love something they say, think, or do.
In his excellent book, Baseless Hatred, Dr. Rene Levy writes, “Hate is triggered because our primitive neural system reacts to events from the perspective of our own preexisting insecurities, because we make generalizations (which may be positive or negative) and confuse associations (additional but not necessarily relevant information) with causality.” Essentially, when we hate someone, we reveal a lot more about ourselves than we do about the subject or object of our hate.
Norman Frajman is one of very few individuals who went to hell and back not once, but twice. He survived both the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdanek. I had the honor of twice accompanying him to Poland as he took hundreds of teenagers to those places on March of the Living. As we walked through Majdanek, a well-preserved concentration camp, Norman identified to the teenagers his former barracks, showed them where the daily lineup took place, and detailed the horrific things he witnessed. At one point, one of the teenagers asked him, “Do you hate the Poles and the Germans for what they did, do you hate those countries today?”
In a moment I will never forget, Norman stopped walking, turned to the huge group of teenagers walking with him, and without hesitating said, “No, I don’t hate them. I don’t hate anyone. I greatly dislike, I condemn, I criticize, and I will confront what I think is wrong, but I will never use the word hate. I don’t hate, because hate is what started it all.”
What should be a powerful and jarring word, hate, has lost its meaning and impact because of its overuse. “Hater” is sometimes used to describe someone who simply objects to something. In this period of the three weeks in which we are working to repair the damage from baseless hatred, let’s make a concerted effort to use the word hate more judiciously, thoughtfully, and appropriately. You don’t hate your least favorite food or the hot weather, or when your internet is slow or the person you are waiting for is running late. Above all, you can never and should never hate people, even when you reject what they are saying or doing.
Rav Avraham Yitzchak Ha’Cohen Kook (Orot HaKodesh vol. III, p. 324) famously wrote that there is only one antidote to baseless hatred. “If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love — ahavat chinam.”
For Rav Kook, ahavat chinam was not just a theoretical idea. There are countless stories of Rav Kook’s profound love for all Jews, even or especially those far removed from a Torah lifestyle. When questioned why he loved such Jews, he would respond, “Better I should err on the side of baseless love than I should err on the side of baseless hatred.”
If we want this mourning to end, we need to be more like Brian and Rav Kook. Choose to connect instead of divide, choose to live with baseless love over baseless hatred.
