There is a fact about religious history that most believers prefer not to look at directly: the faiths that proclaim love most loudly have, more often than not, produced the most organized and sustained hatreds.

Christianity, whose founding text commands its adherents to love their enemies, generated two millennia of contempt for the Jewish people, culminating in the cultural soil from which the Holocaust grew. Islam, which presents itself as a religion of peace, has within it strands that have produced organized violence against Jews from the seventh century to October 7, 2023. Judaism, which sets the bar lower — asking only that one not do to others what is hateful to oneself — produced no comparable tradition of hatred toward outsiders.

This is not a comfortable observation. It is also not an accident. The asymmetry has a structure, and the structure deserves to be named.

The architecture of the rules

Consider the two great ethical formulations side by side. Hillel, asked on one foot to summarize the entire Torah, said: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary. This rule places the diagnostic on the emotion of hatred itself. To live by it, one must continually ask whether what one is about to do would feel hateful if done to oneself. Hate is the boundary that cannot be crossed. Leviticus had already prohibited it as an inner state — you shall not hate your brother in your heart — and the rabbis extended this further: one may hate evil deeds, but not the evildoer.

The Christian command to love your enemies sets, on its face, a higher bar. And in the lives of saints, it has produced extraordinary moral beauty. But positive aspirations carry a peculiar structural weakness that negative prohibitions do not. There is a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)