There is a comforting story we tell ourselves. It holds that suffering ennobles, that the persecuted become the most reliable guardians against persecution, that a people who endured the full inventory of human cruelty would, of all peoples, carry its lesson in their bones. It is a beautiful idea. You would think that history’s foremost victim of intolerance would have learned, better than anyone alive, the virtue of tolerance.

Consider the standard our own tradition set, and how high it set it. A gentile came to Hillel and asked to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel did not recite the Shema or the Decalogue. He said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” The audacity of that answer is easy to miss. The entire revelation — the covenant, the law, the long argument with God that constitutes Jewish civilization — reduced to a single sentence of restraint. And note that Hillel chose the negative form. Not “love your neighbor,” which is aspirational and cannot be commanded into a heart, but “do not do what is hateful to you,” which is a floor. It is the minimum. It is the least we owe one another, stated as the irreducible condition of everything else.

And we do not keep it. We fail at it most reliably, and most consequentially, among ourselves.

The rabbis were merciless about this, because they had watched it happen. The First Temple, they taught, fell to the three cardinal sins — idolatry, bloodshed, forbidden unions — and the sentence ran out in seventy years.........

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