Parshas Devarim

This week’s newsletter is a little different. As we move through the weeks between the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, we enter a period of national mourning known as the Three Weeks, reflecting on the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The Beis Hamikdash was not simply a beautiful building. It was the place where heaven and earth met, where the Jewish people could access a direct and palpable connection to Hashem. Its destruction represents an ongoing absence in the world that we are meant to feel and yearn to restore.

The Talmud tells us the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinas chinam, usually translated as baseless hatred, and the antidote is ahavas chinam, baseless love. But these terms deserve a closer look. Truly baseless hatred is insanity, not a sin. Sometimes people genuinely wrong us. Sometimes communities have real ideological disagreements. But is hatred from pain really the “baseless hatred” that destroyed the 2nd Temple? Also, what, then, is “baseless love”?

The Talmud in Bava Basra makes a remarkable observation about Iyov, a man who Hashem tested him with tremendous suering. He said things that seemed to deny fundamental principles of faith, yet Rava says he should not be held fully accountable because he spoke from pain. If pain can excuse Iyov’s theological statements, the question becomes, why was “baseless hatred”, if defined as “hatred from pain”, severe enough to destroy the Temple?

Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg explains that chinam does not mean the hatred has no cause. It means the hatred grows from a complete lack of personal pain. You hate someone not because he did anything to you but because of principle. Rabbi Gottlieb explains the thinking behind this. Sinas chinam comes from a standards based view of the world. We decide how people should behave, how Jews should look and act and believe, and then measure everyone against that standard. Those who fall short earn our contempt. But this gets things exactly backwards. The Torah is not asking us to judge who lives up to the standard. It is asking us to be responsible for one another.

A person may be sentenced to death by the Jewish Courts yet the torah doesn’t retract the obligation to “Love your fellow as yourself”. Even then. The standard they failed to meet does not cancel the love we owe them.

Ahavas chinam is not naive or sentimental. It is the decision to anchor our relationship with every Jew not in whether they meet our standards, but in the simple fact that they are our responsibility and we are theirs. May we merit this Tisha Bav to genuinely feel the loss of what we are missing, and may our work on ahavas chinam bring us one step closer to the day when that loss is finally restored.