The Intricacies of Love and Hate

In "The Virtue of Hate," from the February 2003 issue of First Things, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik contrasts two exhortations — one Christian and one Jewish — that seem to touch the heart of the difference between the two religions (emphasis in original):

Arguing that the newly empowered South African blacks readily forgave their white tormentors, Tutu explains that they followed "the Jewish rabbi who, when he was crucified, said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." ...

[At the climax of Yom Kippur, Jews] have spent the past twenty–five hours meditating upon their sins and asking for forgiveness. Now, they suddenly turn their attention to those who gave no thought to forgiveness, no thought to God, no thought to the dignity of the Jewish people. After focusing on their own actions, Jews turn to those of others, and their parched throats mouth this message: "Father, do not forgive them, for they know well what they do."

The understanding of knowledge and awareness is the pervasive difference. And it bears not only on the object of hatred, but also on the source of it; the hater should know well what he does, too, as Soloveichik indicates when he writes the following:

The message is that hate allows us to keep our guard up, to protect us. When we are facing those who seek nothing but our destruction, our hate reminds us who we are dealing with.

The disheartening implication of this — disheartening especially because I don't recall ever hearing it disputed — is that love alone is a blinding emotion. "Burning hatred, once kindled, is difficult to extinguish," and hatred "must be very limited [and] directed" — suggesting that it can be applied with circumspection. Love, on the other hand, is granted no such controllability, no such thoughtfulness.

Christian love is not, however, the romantic love of complete abandonment. On the same topic as Soloveichik, Jeff Jacoby writes:

It defies reason and upends morality to claim that God loves both Saddam Hussein and the innocent Kurds he gassed to death -- that He bestows His love on Osama bin Laden no less than on the 3,000 souls he butchered on 9/11.

The minimized possibility, in this, is that God's love is not an indulgent, all-permissive love. Good parents teach their children right and wrong, and they will be disappointed when a child goes astray and stern when imparting the lesson. Their love, however, is constant. The modern popular imagination can only resort to pleas of denial to explain parents' persistent love even for progeny who turn toward evil, but that is an indictment of the modern popular imagination, not of love nor of God.

Christian love between people is not worship or adoration; it is the desire to serve, to help, and one cannot help others without honestly acknowledging their true natures. That is the difficult challenge: not to hide truth, blinding ourselves to the inroads that evil has made in others so that we can love them, but to realize others' faults and love nonetheless. Thus, in loving our enemies, we seek to comprehend the cracks through which evil has seeped into them and to help them free themselves of it.

This will involve insisting on repentance and recompense (and let us not underestimate the pain of coming to terms with direct personal culpability for travesties). It will also require care not to invite them to further sin through naive benignity.

Hatred, in contrast, blinds by diminishing the role that the hated person plays in our prescriptions. Hatred is predictable, because it is grounded in the intention to harm rather than the intention help its object. Hatred makes those who harbor it vulnerable to any enemy willing to accept it with a shrug. Hatred also blinds those who would make it a virtue to important lessons. Soloveichik relates the following as an example of the way in which hatred "allows us to keep our guard up":

The rabbis of the Talmud were bothered by a contradiction: the book of Kings describes Saul as killing every Amalekite, and yet Haman ["the Hitler of his time"], according to his pedigree in the book of Esther, was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king. The Talmud offers an instructive solution: after Saul had killed every Amalekite, he experienced a moment of mercy, and wrongly refrained from killing King Agag. This allowed Agag a window of opportunity; he had several minutes before he was killed by the angry Samuel. In those precious moments, Agag engaged in relations with a random woman, and his progeny lived on to threaten the Jews in the future.

In the Catholic Bible, this scene is chapter 15 of the first book of Samuel, which would support an entire discussion on its own. For now, the relevant point is that Soloveichik is presenting it as teaching the lesson that more hatred of Agag in Saul would have prevented Haman from ever having been born. (Properly gauging hatred, it would seem, is a tricky matter indeed.)

I see quite a different point: Haman was born, and hatred to the point of utter genocide did not prevent it. And the solution is to hate more? This is merely one thread in the entirety of the Old Testament, of course, but perhaps subsequent history would have been entirely different had Agag been treated according to the modified rule that Christians follow. I find it thematically suggestive that Haman's rampage begins when the Jewish Mordecai is alone among the king's servants in refusing to bow to him; enmity begets exchanges of genocide.

Rabbi Soloveichik states that there is "no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous," and the more one considers it, the more the question seems to relate to elemental beliefs. From a Christian point of view, the most profound reality that those who killed Jesus "knew not" was that theirs was an act of deicide. Borrowing a phrase from Jacoby, "those who torture and murder without qualm, who are pitiless in the pain they inflict on others," ignore what is sacred in every human being. In charity, we hope that they know not the spiritual truth of what they do.

That charity, as an expression of love, is critical for our own well-being. In order to hate, no matter how under control we believe the emotion to be, we must also turn our eyes from the sacred in those whom we hate. For hatred's sake, we deny that, somewhere within them, God is part of their true natures. In doing so, we deny that He is necessarily part of our own.