Getting to Know Your People - 003 The Necessity To Hate Evil

Hatred Tells Us A Lot About Love

The Torah writes, “Do not hate your brother in your heart, and you must love your fellow like yourself.” Love can be used either positively or negatively, and so can hatred be used positively or negatively.

The holy sefarim write that all opposites share the same root. Thus, love and hatred have the same root. In order to understand what loving another is, we also need to understand what hatred is.

Hating a Sinner

The Gemara ^[1] says that it is permitted to hate a wicked person, depending on certain conditions. The question is: How can it be that we may hate another Jew?

Even more so, we know that the general purpose of Creation is to come to have complete achdus (unity) with everyone. If we are allowed hate sinners, how can we ever have complete achdus?!

 Furthermore, ahavas Yisrael is the “great rule of the Torah”, as Rebbi Akiva says, and it means to love everyone, with no exceptions. If we hate the wicked, then we don’t love everyone in Klal Yisrael! So how are we allowed to hate the wicked??

The sefer Tanya says that even when we hate the wicked, we are not allowed to hate the sinner himself. We must still love the sinner himself; we must rather hate the evil within him that he is committing. This approach helps us a bit, but it is still hard to understand how hating the wicked will not negatively affect our Ahavas Yisrael.

In order to understand this, we first need to know why it is permitted to hate evil. Normally, when a person hates another person, it is because the other person is bothering him or antagonizing him. There are many reasons why a person hates someone, but they are all the same: the other person is being a nuisance and he is being bothersome.

That is true about the average situation of hatred. Such hatred comes from our nefesh habehamis, the animalistic layer in the soul, which is only the external part of the soul. Such hatred is petty, unjustified hatred. But when one hates the evil that a sinner does, this is a different kind of hatred. It is a hatred that doesn’t come from pettiness, but from the Nefesh Elokis in us, the G-dly soul in a person. The only reason why one hates evil is because there is a part in his soul that hates evil, and this is his G-dly soul. When hatred comes from this pure place in the soul, it is not evil.

How does a person get rid of his petty hatred for someone else? Through emunah. A person realizes that no one else can harm him unless Hashem willed him to do so – “A person cannot lift his finger below unless it was announced above.” Through emunah, one realizes that it is not really the other person who is bothering him, because everything comes from Hashem.

The solution for petty hatred towards others is the same reason why the deeper kind of hatred is permitted. When a person hates evil, he isn’t hating the other person for bothering him or hurting him personally. He hates the evil because he fears Hashem, and it is not a personal matter at all. It is about Hashem.

We will give an example to explain this. If someone has a dirty house and it bothers him, he doesn’t hate his house – he hates the dirt in his house. The same is true for hating the evil acts of a sinner. I don’t hate him; I hate the thing he does which is evil.

Hating the evil is part of Ahavas Yisrael

There is another reason why hating evil doesn’t contradict Ahavas Yisrael. The holy Ohr Hachaim says that by hating the evil in a sinner, one can uplift the sinner to a higher level in spirituality. Since one still loves the sinner himself and only hates his evil, he helps the sinner become connected to Klal Yisrael.

It is thus clear that hating evil not only doesn’t contradict Ahavas Yisrael, but it is actually a branch of ahavas Yisrael. The way we have ahavas Yisrael to the wicked is by hating the evils that they commit yet still loving them as people.

The Dangers of Kiruv

There is a terrible mistake that many people who are involved in kiruv[2] make, though. A person who does kiruv, out of his great love for another Jew, might come to love the sinner without any boundaries – loving him entirely, even the evil he commits.

This is misguided love. True ahavas Yisrael is to love even sinners, but this does not mean to totally embrace them and love every aspect in them. One must hate the evil that another person does, and he must not feel “accepting” towards how the sinner acts. A person must love every Jew, even sinners - but to love even what he does is the downfall of those who go too far in their ahavas Yisrael.

The Arizal said that ahavas Yisrael can bring the person to the greatest spiritual heights, but it can also be the source of a person’s entire spiritual downfall. Pursuing ahavas Yisrael thus contains a danger. Those who are regularly involved with people who sin as they are trying to draw them closer must be careful to treat them with love, but the evil that they do must be despised. Only this kind of ahavas Yisrael can be effective kiruv.

If a person loves a sinner so much to the point that he is entirely accepting of him, accepting even the sins that the other person commits, he is guilty of drawing in a wicked person into Klal Yisrael. It is like bringing a man with dirty clothing into the King’s palace. Only when we hate the evil that the sinner does do we remove the “dirt” that is on him, and then we can bring him into the palace of the King.

Why can’t we love a sinner totally? It is because ahavas Yisrael isn’t a purpose unto itself. If it would be a purpose unto itself, we would be allowed to love everything about a sinner, even the things he does. But ahavas Yisrael has a deeper root: it is branch of our love for Hashem and our love for the Torah, which contains His will. If we have ahavas Yisrael but we are missing love for Hashem and love for the Torah (when we become accepting of evil acts and lifestyles of other people), then we are missing true ahavas Yisrael.

Some raise a point that if the whole purpose of ahavas Yisrael is all to achieve achdus (unity) to be at “one” with other Jews, then we must have complete achdus even with the wicked, and that we should be more accepting of their evil acts. This is wrong! Although the purpose of ahavas Yisrael is to reach achdus, we must understand that ahavas Yisrael is a way that leads towards serving Hashem. The goal of ahavas Yisrael is not ahavas Yisrael for its own purpose – the goal is to reach a greater love for Hashem.

Ahavas Yisrael must have a solid, firm plan, and it must be built properly, according to the guidelines of our Torah. Only with loving Hashem and loving His Torah’s mitzvos, can our love for other Jews be considered to be true ahavas Yisrael.