Man Teaching Talmud Passage Decrying Baseless Hate Assures Congregants Their Hate Not Baseless

What if Bar Kamtza had been a Trump supporter?

New York, July 27 – A spiritual leader giving a discourse on the lore surrounding today’s observance on the Jewish calendar, the ninth day of the month of Av, told his audience not to worry about an ancient teaching that blames unjustified animus for the ills the Jewish people have suffered for millennia, because the animus the audience feels – toward those who disagree with them on political and social issues in particular – is most certainly justified. Righteous, even.

Rabbi Stewart Bodnik of Temple Shalom Al Yisrael conducted a portion of a webinar today exploring some of the ancient sources of the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, the traditional date of the destruction of both ancient temples – one in 586 BCE, the other in 70 CE – and the persecution and exile associated with both events, along with a host of other calamities with the same anniversary. A notable Talmudic passage in the tractate of Gittin diagnoses the roof of the dysfunction as “baseless hatred,” invoking a story about a Jerusalem man whose nemesis so humiliates him that as vengeance, the man engineers a slander that results in Rome invading Judea and wreaking destruction and exile.

“It’s certainly a sobering account,” Rabbi Bodkin told his listeners. “But we also have to understand the difference between this narrative and our own situation. Bar Kamtza, the ‘villain’ of this story, was dealing with someone who simply hated him. But what if Bar Kamtza had been a Trump supporter? Or an opponent of gender-affirming care for minors? What if Bar Kamtza – or, for argument’s sake, the unnamed host of the party from which Bar Kamtza was loudly expelled – had expressed skepticism of the official account of COVID-19’s origins? What if Bar Kamtza refused to accept that the government should pay for abortions on demand?”

“I think we can agree that in any of those alternative situations,” the rabbi continued, to a host of emphatic nods from the session participants, “the hate would not qualify as ‘baseless.’ In fact I would venture, that if anything can be binding in Judaism at all – we are, after all, Reform congregation – then everyone would be duty-bound, nay, ethically-bound, to hate Bar Kamtza.”

“What I’m saying is, we do have to be careful of baseless hatred, but not all hate is baseless,” he summarized. “Sometimes hate is a sacred obligation – such as when the person in question refuses to accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change and will not support Net Zero policies for whatever reason. Go ahead and hate that person. If there were a God, that’s what God would want.”

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