Brotherly Hate – Vayeishev
Due to the many responses and questions regarding last week’s shiur, I have decided to devote this week’s shiur entirely to the subject of sin’at chinam, for two reasons. Firstly it has a direct bearing on this week’s parsha and secondly, it is a central theme in my work with Machon Lechem Hapanim, trying to spread more light in Am Yisrael and stamp out the darkness. This shiur is a potential history changer. Please distribute it to as many people as you possibly can.
Unlike my usual modus operandi of first developing the philosophical aspect of the topic and ending with the halacha lema’aseh, this week I would like to reverse the order and davka begin with the bottom line, the halacha – because it gives us an astonishing insight to the degree the Torah despises hatred. Also unlike my usual style of trying to “sidestep” problematic areas (like politics for example) and speaking in general terms, this week I will spell it out very clearly, so that there can be no room for doubt. Since this is such a fundamentally important subject, it may take a little longer than the regular weekly shiurim and for that I beg your indulgence.
If I were to ask you, have you ever practiced sin’at chinam – the cardinal sin that destroyed the second Beit Hamikdash and that continues to prevent the rebuilding of the third - you would most likely answer “Me? Sin’at chinam? No way!” So let’s examine the halachot of sin’at chinam. This is Shulchan Aruch, not opinion.
לא תשנא את אחיך בלבבך הוכח תוכיח את עמיתך ולא תשא עליו חטא (ויקרא יט, יז).
If a fellow Jew has wronged you in any way, for example - insulted you, embarrassed you, betrayed you, harmed you physically, financially, emotionally or in any other way, it is an איסור דאורייתא to hate him/her.
What constitutes hate, according to the halacha? One or more of three behavioral patterns –
A few examples for clarification are in order.
1. This is not speaking to the person for 3 days or more, not because you are away on vacation and don’t happen to see them, but because when you do see them, you purposely do a u-turn or a detour to avoid having to greet or speak to them.
2. You have slaved for the last 15 years establishing a pedicure/manicure business and last week, a new family moved into an apartment building directly opposite yours and had the “chutzpah” to open a competing pedicure/manicure parlor. It is a small neighborhood and, you think, not large enough to support two businesses of that type. The new manicurist has gone round the neighborhood posting flyers on noticeboards and lampposts. When you came home from shopping yesterday, you saw her flyer on your building’s noticeboard. After looking around to see that nobody is watching, you removed her flyer from the board.
3. A co-worker in your law firm is always belittling you and making snide remarks to the other people in the office about you behind your back. This morning he accidentally spilt a cup of coffee over his clean suit, 10 minutes before having to appear in court. You think to yourself “Yes! That is karma baby! What goes around comes around”.
If you behave in one or more of the three ways above, you are עובר איסור מדאורייתא and are guilty of the sin of sin’at chinam.
That person chas vechalila just got you fired, infected you with Corona, poisoned your dog, informed on you to the IRS, passed a law in parliament to freeze building in your settlement, raped your daughter, sexually abused your child, shot your bother in the head and killed him !!!!!! And you are not allowed to hate them?
Judaism is not like other religions, there is no turning the other cheek. You are allowed to pursue any legitimate recourse stipulated by the Torah for protection/justice/restitution. If someone is trying to hit you, you are allowed to protect yourself. הקם להורגך השכם להורגו. You are allowed to take them to court and seek compensation. But you are not allowed to hate.
If someone has wronged you, the Torah gives the remedy הוכח תוכיח את עמיתך, go to the person and rebuke them “What did I ever do to you that you did this to me?” In the best case scenario, the person will relent and repent and then you are obliged to forgive them (you may still claim restitution for damages caused to you).
There are also halachic criteria for תוכחה –
If you rebuke the person (according to the above criteria) and the person is unrelenting and unrepenting, then and only then are you allowed by the Torah to “hate” them. What does that mean? You are allowed to cut yourself off from them and not speak to them for 3 days or more (1. above). But you are still not allowed to seek them harm or rejoice in their misfortune (2, 3 above). The Torah allows you to disassociate yourself from them, to “hate” their evil deeds, not hate them as a person, to protect you from getting swallowed up in their evil. If however that person ever does tshuva, you have to forgive them and you are again forbidden to perform 1,2,3 above.
The Torah takes this one step further. If you have someone that is considered your שונא, someone the Torah allows you to hate and –
כי תראה חמור שנאך רבץ תחת משאו וחדלת מעזב לו עזב תעזב עמו (שמות כג, ה).
Here is the scenario. You are walking down the street and you see your best friend walking with his donkey that is straining under the heavy load. On the opposite side of the street, you see your שונא who is loading his donkey, no strain yet on the donkey. The Torah tells us that we must first help our שונא to load his donkey before we help our best friend, even at the expense of צער בעלי חיים.
The bottom line from all of this is that the Torah forbids us to hate a fellow Jew – period. In the worst case scenario, we are allowed to hate – the evil deeds, but not the person and even then, we are commanded to give precedence to our שונא over our best friend – to totally stamp out hatred amongst Am Yisrael.
Am Yisrael is not a nation of hate. Even with our arch enemy, Amalek, the Torah commands us to wipe out their memory, but not to hate them.
What it is about hate that the Torah so despises? What is hate?
The psychologists will tell you that it is all about the “ingroup” and the “outgroup”. It is a defense mechanism that people automatically love the members of their “ingroup” and are wary and suspicious about people from the “outgroup”. They will tell you that it is also about insecurity and fear, about incomplete self-image, that people who are confident about themselves and their self-image rarely hate. All this is true, but the Torah strips it down to the root cause.
Hate is all about anger. When the yetzer harah wants to make a person sin, one of the best weapons in his arsenal is anger. Anger is manifested in two ways – rage and hate. Rage is violent and visible/audible. Hate is violent and surreptitious - it poses under the veneer of civility but is as deadly as rage. The two can be compared to shooting someone with a gun (rage), or shooting someone with a gun with a silencer (hate).
The first case of family rage in the Torah is Kayin and Hevel. The first case of family hate in the Torah is Eisav and Yaakov. There is a halacha עשו שונא יעקב. Yaakov does not hate.
It is interesting that both the above two cases, rage and hate were instigated by sibling rivalry (the elder being upstaged by the younger) and insecure self-image. Kayin knew in his heart that his offering was inferior to Hevel his brother. Eisav, who grew up in the house of Yitzchak and Rivka, knew deep down in his soul that his behavior was evil and inferior to that of Yaakov his brother.
In this week’s parsha we have a different mix. The sibling rivalry is still there, but instead of insecure self-image, we have over-secure self-image. The brothers didn’t feel inferior to their younger sibling, Yosef, they felt superior to him. Their hatred toward him was the same kind of hatred that occurred during Bayit Sheini. It stemmed from a feeling of unwarranted self-righteousness.
The brothers perceived that Yosef was מורד במלכות when he dreamed that the brothers would bow down to him, because it was known by prophecy that מלכות belonged to Yehuda. They perceived that he was liable for דין רודף when he snitched to Yaakov that they were eating אבר מן החי, which according to the 7 Noachide Laws is punishable by death. They tried him in a בית דין and sentenced him to death.
Halachically speaking, they were justified. What they were not justified in, was hating him. It says twice וישנאו אותו (בראשית לז, ד) and ויוסיפו עוד שְׂנֹא אותו (בראשית, לז, ח). It was this hate that narrowed their perspective, prevented them from seeing the big picture and from contemplating that another reality might exist that was different to their perception. They were guilty because עשו שונא יעקב, but Yaakov and his family do not hate! That was their fundamental error.
This was the root source of sin’at chinam in Am Yisrael and it came to a catastrophic conclusion with the destruction of the second Beit Hamikdash and has continued to the present day. This is very important to understand, because if you fully understand the root cause, you can begin to address and remedy the problem.
Yaakov was all about his twelve sons. His entire life was structured around establishing and preserving the Twelve Tribes, because this was the fundamental building block of Am Yisrael. The Zohar Hakadosh tells us that originally it was intended that Adam and Chava would have 12 sons that would constitute Am Yisrael זה ספר תולדות האדם – זה in gematria is 12. When that didn’t happen because of the חטא עץ הדעת, the next in line was Noach זה ינחמנו ממעשנו. But Noach failed to save his generation so it went to the next in line Avraham and Sarah. Again it didn’t happen because Sarah laughed למה זה צחקה שרה, so it was passed to Yitzchak and Rivka. But Rivka complained למה זה אנכי, so it passed on to Yaakov, who finally accomplished the task.
The full importance of the number twelve and why it is such a cornerstone of Am Yisrael and the entire world is beyond the scope of this shiur, but suffice it to say that the twelve are an indivisible unit. All twelve components are vital for the functioning of the unit and despite the fact that there is not equality between the components, if one is missing, the unit ceases to function.
This is the underlying principle behind the issur of לא תשנא את אחיך בלבבך, because every Jew, from every tribe, is an essential cog in the mechanism, without which the entire mechanism fails. By wanting to exclude or “erase” another Jew, you are grinding the mechanism to a halt, or at least, severely handicapping the functioning of the mechanism.
Hate and rage are emotions, perhaps the strongest emotions of all, but they are part of our animalistic nature. We are human, we cannot escape our emotions. When somebody wrongs us we feel hurt, anger, rage, hate. The Torah does not deny us our emotions, it allows us these emotions, but for no longer than three days. After that we are required to use the Torah to control these emotions. This is what separates Am Yisrael from the other nations – that we try to elevate ourselves above our animalistic nature and conquer our yetzer hara, using the Torah. Other nations can hate, עשו שונא יעקב, but Yaakov does not hate. Am Yisrael is forbidden to hate, because we are required to rise above that, that is our purpose as a nation. Hate works to exclude essential parts of the mechanism and HKB”H requires the entire mechanism. That is what כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה means. It doesn’t just say כל ישראל ערבים, it adds זה לזה because you need all twelve. Every cog, every component is vital. When one of the cogs fails, it is the responsibility of all the other cogs to repair and restore the failed cog to full functioning. Some of the cogs are bigger, some smaller, some in the front, some in the back, some in the middle, but without them all, the mechanism does not run. That is Am Yisrael.
I am now going to do something I will probably regret, but in order to take this to its practical conclusion and clarify things beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have no choice but to address issues that I would normally run a mile from, politics, being one of them.
When Am Yisrael were dispersed throughout the Diaspora following the destruction of the 2nd Temple, we lost our “home tree” (anyone seen the movie Avatar?). Although we retained our wellspring, the Torah, we lost our sense of being a nation. During 1878 years of darkness and persecution in galut, we developed enclaves – an enclave in Poland, an enclave in Lithuania, and enclave in Morocco, etc. with little or no communication between the enclaves.
When the trend of secularization of Jews and the Reform movement began in Europe a few hundred years ago, those enclaves who wanted to preserve our only remaining saving grace, the Torah, took a decision of isolationism, based on the philosophy of the Chatam Sofer and others - that it was essential to preserve part of Am Yisrael that would be totally adherent to the Torah, like a diamond amongst the stones. This gave rise to the Charedi philosophy and way of life. For the most part it blocks out, or at least tries to, anything that is not 100% Torah oriented or aligned. It is separatist, it doesn’t see its function as acting as the glue that combines the diverse factions in Am Yisrael, but rather to self-preserve within itself.
We cannot judge such a decision, from our luxurious privilege of hindsight today. It was taken from pure motives for the purpose of preserving the best part of Am Yisrael. However, we now do have the luxury of hindsight and we know that while it appeared to the Torah observant Jews in Europe that they were the last of the שארית הפליטה, in Torah terms, amidst a deluge of assimilation - this was not the case. There was an entire world of Sephardic Jewry scattered in enclaves all over the Middle East and North Africa, with little to no secularization and assimilation at all, who still clung to the Torah. It is eerily like the brothers judging Yosef as a רודף or a מורד במלכות, from their limited perspective, when in fact the reality was different. The Charedi school of thought encouraged people to come and live in Eretz Yisrael over the centuries and primarily due to them, our presence in the land has remained uninterrupted, since churban Bayit Sheini. However, their purpose of moving to Eretz Yisrael was to perpetuate the enclaves, in Jerusalem, Tzfat, Tveria etc. in small, mostly indigent communities, studying Torah.
In the late 1800’s a new kind of Jew started to move to Eretz Yisrael, the secular Zionist Jew, also driven by motives of self-preservation, trying to reestablish a safe haven for Jews from persecution and pogrom. These secular Jews knew little or nothing about the Torah, they were “practical Jews”, farmers, artisans and when they came here, it was for the purpose of building and expanding, not remaining cloistered in the existing communities. It was primarily due to the success of this secular “movement” that we now have the State of Israel. It is providential that these secular Jews, with little Jewish heritage or belief, were drawn to building a homeland davka in Eretz Yisrael and not someone else in the world, like Uganda, which could have been simpler and more practical. Despite their almost total secularity and lack of faith, something drew them here like a magnet.
The Charedi movement for the most part (there were some exceptions) shunned the secular Zionist movement. They viewed them as the most serious threat to the existence of Am Yisrael, due to their lack of Torah observance. They objected to (many still do to this day), the establishment of the State of Israel. For the most part the Charedi communities in the modern State of Israel continue their separatist philosophy and this was accentuated recently with the Corona crisis.
Aside from these two major groups of European Jews, there was a small minority of Religious Zionist rabbanim, no less in stature to the Charedi rabbanim, like HaRav Moholiver, HaRav Kook etc. who seeded the Dati Leumi movement.
On the other side of the ocean, primarily in north America, were a large population of Reform Jews, part of the secular Jewish movement from Europe, that unlike the Zionist secular movement, had no nationalist aspirations. They wanted to become citizens of the countries they were living in and retain their watered down Jewish “heritage”.
The final group of people was the Sephardic Jews, scattered over the Middle East and the Maghreb, Torah observant Jews for the most part, with almost zero assimilation and secularization.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel 73 years ago, with the exception of the Sephardic Jews, these groups have remained practically unaltered in their life philosophy. The only exception to this is the Sephardic Jews, who, for the most part have remained Torah observant and traditional, but a significant part has also become secularized.
One can only imagine what would have happened if all these factions would have grasped the enormity of the sudden turn of events in history and recognized the finger of G-d behind the miracle that is the return of Am Yisrael to Eretz Yisrael. If they would have banded together with a common purpose and a shared sense of responsibility and destiny – how we would look today.
If the Charedi movement would have embraced the physical return to Tzion and spearheaded the cultural and spiritual kiruv and return to the Torah. If the secular Zionist movement would have realized that a home without a heart is just a shell and what do you do once you reach post Zionism – you built the homes, the roads, the cities, the industry, the military … what comes next? If the Reform movement in America would have understood that galut is only temporary and eventually it evicts us, and will from America, just like from Poland, Spain and all the other countries where we once “prospered” in exile but were eventually thrown out or annihilated, and emigrated en mass to their ancestral homeland.
For the last 100 years or more we have practically remained the way we were ideologically 200 years ago. We have just relocated geographically. We are (mostly) no longer geographical enclaves, but we are still living in the ideological enclaves of galut, today, in 2021 - 73 years after returning to our ancestral homeland (those who have returned – almost half of the total world Jewish population).
The governments of the State of Israel since its establishment are just a reflection of this. They simply take it in turns to impose their own sectorial life philosophy on everyone else. It started with the secular European Zionists, Mapai and the Labor party trying to turn the State of Israel into a secular state, like “all the other nations of the world”. During this period, the Sephardic Jews were discriminated against. This was followed by the Nationalist Sephardic Likud period, where the tables were turned and those that were downtrodden during the Labor period decided to “repay” those who repressed and discriminated against them. All the while in the background, you have the Charedi parties and the National Religious parties vying for their slice of the pie.
At least until the time of Menachem Begin there was some modicum of “vision” amongst the leaders and sense of common good - that they were acting in the best interests of the nation as a whole. Today even that does not exist - it is just personal interests and sectorial power. Never have the ivory towers of power of government been as detached from the people as they are now. The democracy in Israel now is a broken thing. It has been contaminated from so many undemocratic sides, the media, the supreme court, the corruption, the inclusion of terrorist factions, and the list continues. It started to breathe its dying breaths in the last few years when no clear government could be formed and now it is the illusion of a government. It was for this reason I did not vote in the last election, because my vote was worth less than the note it was written on. My vote, your vote and everyone’s vote were meaningless – because we have lost that sense of shared responsibility - that we are all necessary cogs in the mechanism. Instead it has become a witchhunt.
If things continue like this, we are facing another war. HKB”H keeps bringing conflict to this region, because only in a time of war is there some semblance of unity in our nation. Haven’t we gotten the message yet? Do we need another war to remind us yet again who our true enemy is? Ourselves!
I have been asked, “With all the “evil” being done by the current government – anti Torah legislation, giving land and infrastructure to our enemies, etc. – You say we should have achdut, that I should love these people - how can I love people like that?”
If someone wrongs you, the Torah details the course of action as I described above. If they have caused you physical or monetary harm, you may take all legal recourse necessary to compensate you for that. You may take all democratic recourse necessary to remove them from government. You must rebuke them and try to convince them to fix their ways. If they are unrelenting, you are allowed to cut yourself off from them to protect yourself. But you are not allowed to hate them. It is an איסור דאורייתא. You may hate their evil deeds, but you cannot hate them as people. You have to love them. You have to continue to pray that they will do tshuva. HKB”H commands us to love the רשעים and pray that they will do tshuva. Hate is not a word in our lexicon.
I want to conclude with a story. Chaim and Srulik were two brothers. Chaim went into business and became a successful entrepreneur, running a multimillion dollar company. Srulik had a hard time with parnasa and went from job to job. The two brothers lived in different cities and rarely saw each other. One day, after losing yet another job, Srulik decides to pay his brother Chaim a visit and ask him if he can work in his company. He arrives at the reception desk and says “My name is Srulik, I would to see my brother Chaim”. “Which Chaim?” they ask. “Chaim! You know, the CEO!” The receptionist calls the top floor and says to Srulik “I am sorry, but the secretary of the CEO says he doesn’t have a brother”. “What? She must be confused”. Srulik takes the elevator to the top floor, brushes past the secretary and barges into Chaim’s office. “Chaim, it’s me Srulik, I came to ask if you could help me with a job”. Chaim takes one look at him and says to his secretary “Call security and throw him out! I do not have a brother”. A few months later the father of Chaim and Srulik is on his death bed, and both sons are present. The father totally ignores Chaim and only speaks to Srulik. “Abba, it’s me, Chaim, why won’t you even look at me?” Chaim cries. The father turns to him and says “As long as Srulik doesn’t have a brother, I don’t have another son”.
בנים אתם לה' אלקיכם. If we want our Father to protect us, we first have to be brothers to one another.
Instead of understanding the fundamental importance of the unit of twelve, the brothers saw fit to discard one of the cogs in the mechanism. They hated him. They had good reason to hate him. According to their perception of the halacha, he was liable for the death sentence. But their perception was limited. They did not understand that his prophecies did not conflict with their own. They were arrogant enough to think that it was up to them, and not have the humility to realize that it is HKB”H who is running the world, not them. All HKB”H wants is for the twelve to function as one. Because of that fatal error and the subsequent hate they had for Yosef, we had to endure 210 years of slavery in Egypt. We had to endure the destruction of the second Temple due to the same sin’at chinam. We have had to endure 1951 of galut and persecution because of that hatred, which still throbs within our nation. Every year that we do not see the Mashiach and the rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash, it is because of our hatred towards one another. We ask to be sons to HKB”H, but how can He accept us as sons if we are not brothers to one another. We need to be less arrogant and realize that the world is not being run according to our plan – it is according to G-d’s plan, all He requires from us is to be united with one another, to share a mutual responsibility for each other’s destiny and to not discard and hate one another.
The reason we bless our sons every Friday ישימך אלוקים כאפרים וכמנשה and not like Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, not like Yehuda and Levi and Yisachar, is not because any of these iconic people are unfit chas vechalila, but because Efraim and Menashe had no sibling rivalry. Even though Yaakov switched hands and favored the younger over the elder, there was no animosity between the brothers, the first time in four generations.
We are living in exciting times. It is true that sin’at chinam is alive and well and still throbbing in AmYisrael, but forces are at work, which are stronger than that. We are closely approaching the time of Geulah, whether we are willing participants in it or not. The only thing we have true power over is how much we suffer until it happens, because happen it will, like it or not.
How glorious it would be, if instead of inviting another war upon us chas vechalila, we undertook to lower our own personal arrogance a notch. Instead of trying to fix other people’s middot we concentrated more on fixing our own. We need to smile more at others, be more tolerant of others, more forgiving of ourselves and others, pray that the reshaim amongst us will do tshuva. We do not know who the reshaim are - they may be us for all we know. We do not know HKB”H’s calculation of the merit of the different mitzvot! We need a new wind to blow over our people, a wind of hope, purpose and mutual responsibility. When that happens, prosperity will come first to us and then to the whole world and there will be peace. Instead of convening world conferences for climate change, the nations of the world would be better served convening to figure out how to sow unity in Am Yisrael, because that will solve the world’s problems quicker than restricting emission of gases.
למען אחי ורעי אדברה נא שלום בך
