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A time to love and a time to hate

With this week’s news of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death, the reaction to this evil person’s destruction — he was the head of ISIS — has been fascinatingly mixed and somewhat morally confused and perhaps even warped.

Al-Baghdadi was a vicious terrorist and a serial rapist of women.

It says in Proverbs: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls.” It’s interesting that we are exhorted not to rejoice; clearly this addresses the normal human expectation of wanting to rejoice when justice is meted out to evil or when the threat of evil has been vanquished. As I understand it, it means, “do not rejoice on a personal level.” I take no joy in the fact that a once pure born baby, created in the image of G-d, turned out to have made a series of choices that led him to a path of evil. In fact, this is a tragedy.

But on a philosophical level, on the level of justice as well as on a practical level, the level of safety, there is definitely a sense of joy for having eliminated a monstrous evil, as well as on a practical level, a relief and joy in knowing that a truly dangerous threat has been eliminated.

Famously, the book of Ecclesiastes gives us the wisdom of “To Everything There Is A Season,” a succession of paired contradictions, united by the idea that there is a time for each. The poem begins with birth and death, closes with war and peace — immediately proceeded by love and hate.

“A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.”

Every state of being, every human emotion, is part of the tapestry of the human experience. The wisdom of life, as Ecclesiastes highlights, is to know the time, the right time, to express each one.

Most of the poem illustrates states of being, but toward the closing stanza a human emotion we normally recoil from — hate — is introduced. Naturally, we all know there is a time for love and instinctively want to experience it. Even the word or idea of war, in this incomplete and still broken world we live in is understood; sadly, there are times when it is necessary and justified.

But hate?

It sounds so counterintuitive.

When is there ever a time for hate?

None of us wants to think of a world where hate is a part of it. Yet, it is. In Judaism, there are contexts, very limited, where fine-tuned hate is part of the Judaic legacy. Sometimes, it is necessary to discern the radical circumstances that warrant hate. It’s easy to say, everything is love. Yet, if everything is love, then nothing is love. It’s easy to say, forgive everyone no matter how heinous a violation, but then forgiveness is meaningless. If everything is forgiven, the idea of free choice and consequences is thwarted. Struggling and contending with the reality of evil, sometimes unforgivable evil, is what can potentially bring true love, true repair, into the world. For if hate or evil is acknowledged, then an opening can be made for its elimination or transmutation, thus creating space to invite in its contradicting quality, love.

Unbridled hate is a dangerous force of poisonous destruction. But regulated hate — a hate that is meted out symbolically — while it may be a difficult emotion that elicits deep discomfort, is nonetheless part of the symphony of human emotions that crystallizes its opposite, that which we do want to increase in the world: love. We symbolically mete out hate when we annually wipe out the memory of Amalek.

A Talmudic dialogue is told between the Tannaitic sage in the Mishnaic era, Rabbi Meir, and his erudite wife, Bruria. When thugs were causing Rabbi Meir trouble, he prayed, based on a verse from Psalms, “Let sins be uprooted from the earth, and the wicked will be no more,” for their deaths. Upon hearing this, Bruria countered that the verse doesn’t say, “let the sinners be uprooted” but “let the sins be uprooted.” Therefore, she said to Rabbi Meir, do not pray that the people should die; rather, they should repent, and in this way the wicked will be no more.

Bruria speaks to the powerful human ability of change and transformation. The wicked can change their ways. Let the terrible actions of the people be repented. Sins, rather than sinners, can be eliminated.

This idea is well and good for offenses within a certain realm. But when there are monstrous people whose existence is such a total, immersive evil, to the point where they symbolize evil, a reaction on the part of humankind is needed. True evil must prompt a reaction equal to it, and that reaction is hate; a hate that can serve as a guard against the shameful abdication of responsibility.

Yet, for some reason, these last few days I’ve been exposed to less than negative reactions to the elimination of this monster, al Baghdadi. It almost feels like apologetics.

Seth Franzman, recent author of After ISIS put the question best: “In Western society we are inspired by ‘me too’ and we support women’s rights and we speak about toxic masculinity and mansplaining and man spreading and we oppose sexual harassment and sexual assault. But in our same society, when someone like ISIS leader al-Baghdadi dies, we refer to him as ‘austere scholar’ . . . with no reference to the fact that he enslaved women and raped them, sexually assaulted and sexually harassed . . . he led a gang of toxic masculinity.”

“So why the double standard? Why does Western society seem to accept certain far-right religious hate types [when they’re abroad;] it says it doesn’t like ‘bro culture’ but has a kind of fetish for that culture so long as it is linked to ‘violent extremists’?

“Is it because Western society has an internal contradiction? It preaches tolerance at home and one type of values, but then accepts the diametric opposite abroad; even in a globalized world, leading many youth to embrace ‘violent extremism’ abroad.”

“Or is it just the legacy of colonialism and racism and a sense of arrogant superiority that views victims of ISIS as not equal?”

A person as dangerous and radical as al-Baghdadi elicits tough questions, including . . . should his death be a justified example of “A Time To Hate”?

Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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