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Rabbi Shmuley

March 23, 2011 | 3:42 pm RSS

Christian love versus the obligation to hate evil

Posted by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Hearing about a bomb going off in Jerusalem is entirely different when you have two daughters living there. You scramble for your phone. You search out your kids. Any potential delay in their answering their cells is painful. You finally get through. Thank G-d, they’re alright. But what of those who aren’t? Those maimed and killed who were also someone’s daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers.

The news lately has been sickening. And while the Japanese earthquake is not something we can control, the knifing of three-year-old-children in Israel, bombs against civilians in Jerusalem, live fire against protesters in Bahrain, and the use of helicopter gunships against Arab civilians in Libya is something we can stop.

So why don’t we?

Why does evil continue to flourish so mightily in the year 2011? How is that Gaddafi, who owns the home literally next-door to me in Englewood, New Jersey, could get away with blowing up planes and discos for forty years and only when he starts using RPG’s against demonstrators can be declared by an American president to have ‘lost the legitimacy to rule’? Why has the Mafioso Assad family continued to rule Syria for decades? And how can Palestinian-terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah continue to murder Jewish civilians and pay barely any price with the international community?

Because we have forgotten how to hate evil.

Early Christians like St. Paul embraced the Jewish Bible but rejected what they called the ‘vengeful’ G-d of the Old Testament. In his place they gave us Jesus, a deity who they said was synonymous with love. Hate no longer had any place, including hating evil. So whereas the Hebrew G-d of the Israel says explicitly in the book of Malachi, “I love Jacob but I hate Esau,” where the former is representative of those who struggle for peace and the latter is a symbol for those who live by the sword, Jesus says in the New Testament that one must love even one’s enemies and turn the other check to an attack, seemingly advocating passivity in the face of blind cruelty.


Shortly I will argue that this sanitized version of Jesus – a rebel against Rome who was put to death by the empire for opposing Caesar and Roman rule – is utterly inaccurate. But the effects of the misapprehension are felt till today. In the twentieth century genocide was commonplace. A few of the better-known examples include the Turks slaughter of the Armenians during the First World War, the German holocaust of the Jews, the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields in Cambodia in 1975-78, the Hutus hacking to death the Tutsis in Rwanda in April 1994, the ethnic cleanings of Croats by Bosnian Serbs, and the wholesale slaughter of black Christians in the Sudan by white Muslim Janjaweed militias.

How did the world allow so much suffering? Because we practice love without hate, which means we often lack the motivation to stop monsters from committing their crimes against innocents.

Is anyone surprised that China, whose president was recently given only the second state dinner of the Obama presidency and who is currently brutalizing reigning winner of the Noble peace prize, is also opposing the use of force against Gaddafi in Libya? So why do we accord this government so much respect?

At times it becomes almost comical, as when the Carter Administration actually lobbied to have the Khmer Rouge be recognized in the UN as the legitimate government of Cambodia. Or when Kofi Anan, at the time head of all UN peace-keeping forces worldwide, forbade General Romeo Dallaire of Canada, who commanded the UN peace-keeping force in Kigali, from using force to stop the Rwandan genocide. Anan would later be rewarded for his lack of abhorrence for genocide with becoming UN Secretary-General.

But can love really exist without hate? Can someone claim to love the 1.5 million children who were killed by Hitler without hating the SS who gassed them and dashed their brains against rocks? Can you love the 800,000 Rwandans who were savagely cut up by machetes in Rwanda without hating the Hutus who just a few hours earlier were their friends and neighbors? Can you claim to love peaceful protesters in Tehran while refusing to hate the tyrant Ahmadinejad who mows them down in the streets? And can you love the victims of Pan Am 103 without hating Gaddafi for raining their bodies down over Lockerbie?

And spare me the argument that once you start hating the terrorist it can spill over into hating innocents as well. Firstly, the same argument can be made against love, that once you embrace it you may end up loving the wrong people, like a husband or wife having an affair. Please. We discerning adults are plenty capable of controlling our emotions and directing them to legitimate targets. We hate Hamas for their honor killings of young girls with boyfriends or their murder of gays in Gaza without letting it spill over into hating the guy who stole our parking space.

Indeed, this is what Jesus himself meant. He never said to love G-d’s enemies, but your enemies. G-d’s enemies are the religious police in Saudi Arabia who allow young girls to burn alive in their high schools rather than run from the inferno without a face covering. Your enemy is the guy who got promoted over you at work.

Likewise, by turning the other cheek Jesus never meant that if Osama bin Laden blows up New York we should let him take Los Angeles as well. Rather, he meant that if you hear that someone you consider a friend said something unpleasant about you try and transcend the provocation. Any other understanding would make a mockery of one of the greatest moral teachers of all time.

Jesus hated the Romans for their cruelty and Luke (13:1-2) describes the brutality of the Roman proconsul Pilate, which Jesus uses as an illustration for his students. “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?”

Indeed, if we don’t begin to hate and fight evil, more victims will suffer and more innocents will die.

Shmuley Boteach, ‘America’s Rabbi,’ is the author of 25 books, most recently ‘Honoring the Child Spirit’ and ‘Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.’ He is about to publish a book on the Jewish Jesus and his fight against Rome. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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March 7, 2011 | 1:06 pm

Portman’s bold attack on an anti-Semite and Huckabee’s untimely critique

Posted by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Just as I was about to write a column praising Natalie Portman for attacking racist John Galliano, along comes Mike Huckabee to attack her as a unmarried-and-pregnant-negative-role-model. There’s a time for everything, Mike. And this was the wrong time. But before I respond to Mr. Huckabee – man for whom I have much respect – let me first tell you why Ms. Portman elicited my praise.

Our world constantly excuses evil. The Hitlers and Stalins of this world are spoken of as ‘sick,’ as if they committed their evil out of delusion and mental illness. That’s how you now hear people speaking about Gaddafi - he’s a weirdo, he’s high as a kite – instead of calling him what he really is, evil and cruel to the core.

Over the past two weeks Hilary Clinton and President Obama have been saying that Muammar Gaddafi has ‘lost the legitimacy to rule,’ surely, the most painfully laughable phrase uttered by a Secretary of State and President of the United States in recent memory. Er.. he only now lost the legitimacy to rule?  And while he tortured and imprisoned political opponents for forty years and blew up airliners and discotheques he had legitimacy to rule? President Obama, who shook Gaddafi’s hand in Italy, has this Messianic hang-up where he believes that he can somehow transform brutal killers like Gaddafi into upstanding citizens instead of boldly declaring them to be the evil killers they are.

About five years ago I wrote a column that said that although most of my close friends are staunch liberals, I myself could never embrace liberalism because it refuses to hate evil. And the inability of the two most powerful people in the United States to get up and say ‘Gaddafi is, was, and always will be a despot’ is sad proof of my earlier conviction.

So it was with glee that I read Ms. Portman’s courageous statement in the wake of John Galliano exposing himself as a Jew-hater. When Mel Gibson made a film depicting Jews as Christ-killers, Hollywood, and the Jews of Hollywood – with the notable exception of my former agent Ari Emanuel – excused him and continued to work with him. Even after he got drunk and called us ‘F-ing Jews’ who incite all the world’s wars, Hollywood still cast him in films. It wasn’t until we discovered that he also hates women, African-Americans, and Lord knows who else that he was finally shunned.

But this time when a famed designer, an ‘artist,’ made his admiration for Hitler known (was it all those stylish SS uniforms that caught your eye, John?) a leading actress who had just won an Academy award told him to go to hell. Saying she was ‘shocked and disgusted,’ she declared herself proud to be Jewish. Party on Natalie!

So perhaps Mr. Huckabee should have thought twice before choosing this particular moment to attack a Hollywood hero who stood up to evil.

Not that Huckabee doesn’t have an important overall point. It is disconcerting that few in Hollywood seem to believe that children should be brought into the world amid the security of marriage and surely our stars of the big screen would agree that most children love to see Mom and Dad as husband and wife.

But having said this, Ms. Portman is quite simply the wrong target. Mr. Huckabee’s ire ought to be directed toward the men who are the real problem.

Once there was a code of honor among men to treat women with commitment and respect. If you lived with a woman and wanted to have a child with her you granted her the ultimate compliment of publicly declaring your love and commitment to her by making her your wife. Marriage is a where a man selects one woman and simultaneously deselects every other woman on earth, thereby establishing the object of his live as the one and only.

Today, however, there is a broken code of male honor. Men treat women casually and hedge their bets. And why not? If you can have a woman commit to you without having to reciprocate the whole marriage thing seems a bit gratuitous.

This is a regular mistake made by social conservatives. Last week Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptists, published a column in the Wall Street Journal enjoining religious conservatives not to give up the fight on abortion, the most divisive of all social issues in America. But why can’t we find language that is actually unifying? Both the left and the right agree that respect for women is a paramount virtue. Yet, most abortions are the product of men sleeping with women whom they don’t love, impregnating them, and abandoning them. These are not men but inseminators, hormonally-driven walking sperm banks. Abortion thrives in a society that has witnessed the end of love and the rise of the hook-up. Yes, women have to learn to respect themselves but more importantly parents and schools must inculcate within men a desire to be gentlemen again.

So instead of beating an endless drum on abortion, why not focus on the real problem. Is there anyone of any political persuasion who would condone men using women as masturbatory material and disappearing from their lives?

Granted, men who have a child with a woman in a serious relationship, like Portmans’ beau, Benjamin Millepied, are not in this category and indeed he is her fiancé. Still, there are way too many men who leave the picture as soon as the woman is pregnant.

In his comments Huckabee himself acknowledged that it’s the men who are the problem, which makes his attack on Portman even more curious. “You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock,” he said. “61 percent of Hispanic kids—across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.” But it’s not the women who are abandoning these kids, Mike, but the men.

And the same applies to so many of these recent racist tirades, nearly all of which are being committed by broken and messed up men.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” is the international best-selling author of 25 books and has recently published “Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life,” and “Honoring the Child Spirit: Inspiration and Learning from Our Children.” Follow him Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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