Banishing baseless hatred

A Jewish self-help volume scientifically explains the phenomenon of hatred as a primitive neural response to a past event or anticipated event, and outlines how to avoid it.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
hate israel facebook 248.88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
hate israel facebook 248.88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
‘Baseless hatred” (sinat hinam) was identified by the talmudic sages as the damning factor leading to the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of the long exile. That baseless hatred is a terrible thing seems to be one of the few points of agreement among Jews in the past 2,000 years.
Now along comes a Seattle neuropharmacologist with a plan of action. It’s tempting to smirk at the very thought.
And perhaps Baseless Hatred is indeed somewhat quixotic.
But it’s well worth reading this Jewish self-help book that scientifically explains the phenomenon of hatred as a primitive neural response to a past event or anticipated event, and outlines how to avoid this response. (The focus on gray matter no doubt prompted the cover illustration of a human brain; a redesign could be advantageous for greater marketing appeal.) The author labels hatred among Jews a “severe human trap” that has had, from biblical days, a direct correlation to losing our homeland: “The hatred-exile connection became a sort of existential paradigm that holds the key to unanswered questions about the mysterious nature of the Jewish people, its survival, and its recent return to the Land of Israel after nineteen centuries.”
Distinguishing between hate as a necessary defense mechanism for survival, and hate as an extreme response to be curbed, he identifies the antidote as arevut, or what he calls the “Judah principle” because of the biblical Judah’s willingness to take responsibility for his brother Benjamin.
The siting of the Temples on land overlapping the portion of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin was not arbitrary, Levy argues, and suggests that without a sense of unity, “the Temple no longer had a reason to exist.”
Yet the goal of banishing baseless hatred among us appears to be no closer to resolution than it was millennia ago, given almost daily confrontations and clashes between Left and Right, secular and religious, rival hassidic sects and branches of families.
Approaching the topic from a scientist’s perspective, Levy outlines a practical method starting on a micro level, by training one’s advanced neural system to develop empathy for individuals in our personal sphere. He posits that baseless hatred begins as a one-on-one dysfunction “that transforms another Jew into an enemy and thereby destroys the integrity of the Jewish people” because it is “incompatible with the requirement of mutual responsibility.”
Where to start? With an awareness of real or perceived “hate triggers” in everyday dealings with siblings, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, co-workers, neighbors and friends – interpersonal relationships that can be visualized as a series of emotional concentric circles leading out from ourselves in the center.
In Levy’s jargon, these individuals constitute our “personal hatred map,” and it is precisely here that we must begin training ourselves to avoid reactions that lead to hate. Presumably success on the personal hatred map can then lead to success on the broader hatred map, which cannot be as well defined. “Unlike the personal map, which is the same for people all over the world, this broad hatred map presents challenges that are very different in the Diaspora and in Israel,” he writes.
The middle portion of the book analyzes baseless hatred toward the Jewish people rather than among the Jewish people, analyzing the “Palestinian issue” as an outcome of Islamist hatred rather than a land dispute. Islamist hatred, according to the author, “is rooted in an interpretation of Islam... that makes it mutually exclusive with the existence of the State of Israel.”
He goes on to speculate that fostering true arevut among Jews is the answer to both internal and external baseless hatred. “Within the State of Israel, the logic of the arevut proposal is that unity leads to morality and morality leads to peace: after the Jews eliminate baseless hatred, will the rest of the world continue to hate them without cause?” It is clear that Levy’s intended audience is mainly religiously observant Jews. He admonishes readers to avoid feeling superiority or self-righteousness toward less stringent Jews, or dismissive of more overtly religious groups as fanatics: “A truly religious person should not come to believe that the behavior of others is a threat to his or her survival since this represents a lack of true faith.”
The notion of shalom “never implied uniformity but actually harmony among different groups who each have their uniqueness or singularity,” he reminds the reader. “In short, diversity does not have to be an impediment to Israeli unity; it can be turned into an asset for the country, especially if individuals show that they can overcome the traps of stereotypes.”
The beauty of the book’s hypothesis, though it may strike some as naïve or simplistic, is its insistence that by concentrating our efforts on our own families and circles of influence, we can make enormous gains against baseless hatred.
We certainly have nothing to lose, and potentially much to gain, by trying Levy’s method.
BASELESS HATRED By René H. Levy Gefen Publishing House 212 pages; $25.96