I Hate Him For What?
A lot of cliches are used in speeches for the Three Weeks: Sina’as Chinam, Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, all the sins that led to the destruction of the Temples, and our need for achdus. Sometimes repeating topics without that extra level of insight leaves us thinking of them in a less meaningful way.
I’d like to shed light on the most common theme of this time period: Hating for Free! Free is usually a good thing. In our society and through the lens of Judaism, maybe it’s brought on its own negative connotation: free love, Free Palestine, new ways to have freedoms of expression. Free, in general, can be good when we enjoy extra freebies in purchases, government handouts…Or free can be bad and actually come at a price!
Free hatred is an amazing thing—amazing or astonishing or unbelievable in its growth and tenacity. When we pick on someone in our minds and don’t like them for something, big or small, this is a form of sinah, and it’s chinam—there’s no real reason for it. Even with something as great as murder, the Torah protects an unintentional rotzei’ach (a beshogeg) with cities of refuge, to the extent that the community creates signs to guide him there and is required to give him the company that he is used to. (A rebbe accompanies a talmid rotzei’ach, and a whole Yeshivah accompanies a Rebbe!)
So there is really nothing at all we are justified in to hate another Yid. Yes—they could have done us ill. Certainly. And yes we could initially be filled with anger, upset, and shock. But at the end of the day, our hatred is for naught. It’s for nothing. It holds no value to it. It’s free.
When we work on Bitachon, on attributing ALL in our life to Gd—the good, the bad, and in the in-betweens—we have no good reason to keep hating, to stay angry and spiteful toward another individual, regardless of the intensity of their actions against us. Hakol hevel!
It’s a difficult stepping stone to get to and to comprehend when we, as real humans, get so enmeshed in our feelings and in our kavod. Pride can be everything. We all have people who we’ve had hard times with in our lives. We all have that. And our pain is valid. The Torah isn’t telling us to go beg them to have a coffee with us!
But our continuous anger is too much. The Three Weeks is the perfect time to take a flashlight and look inside ourselves to find all the underlying resentments and hatred and to start clearing things up. For the next Beis Hamikdash, for our own personal freedom, and for the good of our current relationships.
Drop those sacks of sand, and let that hot air balloon rise into the sky. The price of putting our Bitachon in HaShem is far greater.