The Talmud teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans:
‘because there was gratuitous hatred during that period’. Talmud, Yoma 9b
As the Fast of the 9th of Av approaches, the day in the Jewish year in which we are asked to reflect on destruction and destructiveness in our world, I find myself puzzling over what that ‘hatred’ is, and how we can stop hating.
‘Gratuitous hatred’, sinat chinam in Hebrew, may be defined as the opposite of righteous indignation. If the latter is anger directed at removing a wrong or injustice in the world, the former is pointless rage and recrimination, justified by no cause.
Sinat chinam has both a personal and a political dimension.
On the personal level, I don’t think gratuitous hatred means hatred which has come from nowhere and has no source. Anger almost always has its pretexts; the mind is liable to hover over them until they become an ingrained bitterness of the soul: ‘I was neglected’ ‘I was treated unfairly’ ‘Life never gave me what I deserved’. Ground can always be found, or invented, for such thoughts.
‘Gratuitous hatred’ draws attention to their futility. Where do they take us, if not back to our own mental prisons of grudges and resentments? As Nelson Mandela famously said:
As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom I knew that if I didn’t leave bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
None of us wants to go through life with part of our heart in an internal solitary cell of our own making. Once one has taken two or three turns in the labyrinth of resentment, it is extremely hard to find one’s way out. We need kindness, from ourselves as much as from others, inner understanding and self-discipline to help us.
On the political level, gratuitous hatred means wantonly or ignorantly engaging in disputes which could and should have been avoided.
This is probably what the Talmud means by the phrase. The wars against Rome were driven by extremists. The zealots who eventually burnt the food supplies in the besieged city of Jerusalem and forced its citizens to fight to the hopeless end, refused to listen to moderating voices.
The heirs of sinat chinam today are all who practise a politics of extremism and rejection and all of us who demonise others. The healers are those who practise the difficult, dangerous, often seemingly futile art of building bridges with the fragile armoury of words and relationships; with tentative sensitivity to how the world may feel like to others…all who reach out to care for others with humility, courage and faith.
I believe causeless hatred also describes pain and anger we end up provoking without even thinking about it. In a news report from the civil war in Yemen, Orla Guerin interviewed a family whose son had lost both legs in a bomb, then spoke to a local journalist, who asked: ‘Why does the west arm Saudi Arabia? You are people who believe in humanistic values, so why do you leave us to suffer?’ Sixty per cent of the population of Yemen don’t know where their next food is coming from.
No doubt the politics are complex. But it is a fact that, indirectly and without wishing to do so, we are all implicated in vast suffering in many parts of the world.
It is not pleasant to face a date established in the Jewish calendar to ponder the terrible exiles and persecutions we as a people have been forced to undergo, and to think about why there is so much hatred across the globe. But the day is important. If we refuse to visit the angriest, most hurt places in our hearts, our history and in the world, we will not be able to bring healing.
It is only out of understanding that redemption is born. Hence the teaching that it is on the Fast of the 9th of Av that the Messiah is born. This may be understood metaphorically as the desire and determination in each of us to rebuild and restore creation through justice, compassion and love.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it. Martin Luther King