Sinat Chinam - Righteous Hatred
in which we hate + reject the grace offered us and choose to act in anger + blame + shame
“Happy is the man who embraces fearful awe always,
But he who hardens his heart falls into misfortune.” (Proverbs 28:14)
Once upon a time in Roman occupied Jerusalem during the time of the Second Temple, a wealthy influential bloke decides he would throw a big party, he wanted a grand affair everyone would talk about long after it ended. He instructs his assistant to be sure to invite his bestie Kamtza. His assistant invites bar Kamtza instead, a politically influential well connected bloke. Small catch—the host hates bar Kamtza. So bar Kamtza shows up in his finery, thinking the invitation genuine and an olive branch to bury the enmity between the host and himself. Community leaders and Sages and everyone who’s anyone in the society has come to this bash.
The host sees bar Kamtza, gets angry and tells him to GTFO, bar Kamtza offers to pay for himself, for half of the cost of the celebrations, for everything, bar Kamtza begs the host please dude, don’t embarrass me in front of all these people like this. The host remains obstinate, and says no, GTFO, personally throws him out. The Sages see the host’s nasty behaviour and say nothing. Feeling humiliated and angry, bar Kamtza goes to the Emperor and tells him hey y’know there’s a mutiny happening, right? The Emperor wants to know more, bar Kamtza says, just send a sacrifice to the temple on behalf of the Roman Government, see if the Sages will sacrifice it, betcha they don’t, then you have your answer.
The Emperor gives bar Kamtza a calf, bar Kamtza takes the calf to the temple, cutting its lip deliberately, making a blemish on the animal which renders the animal unsuitable for sacrifice according the Jewish law and which does not render it unsuitable for sacrifice according to Roman law. And so, bar Kamtza deliberately places the Sages in the difficult position of having to choose whether to violate the temple law for peace or reject the sacrifice and risk pissing off the Romans and facing temple destruction and exile.
All but one of the Sages agrees that the law of Torah would side with peaceful coexistence. Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkulus vetoes the majority decision with what the Talmud calls unwise humility, today we would call this concern trolling. Basically, Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkulus raises false concerns. What if we allow this sacrifice and then everyone starts bring blemished animals to the temple? Maybe we should kill bar Kamzta so we can forget this whole incident? The unwise humility of Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkulus convinces the Sages to do nothing. He leads them into an overthinking jag, the Sages crash and burn in decision paralysis. The same Sages who sat silently at the party and watched the host humiliate bar Kamtza now worry about political repercussions of their predicament. The Sages deny the Roman sacrifice, and the Romans take that response as evidence of a Jewish rebellion. The war between the Romans and Jews begins, ultimately leading to the destruction of the Second Temple.1
The dynamics described in this story (from Gittin 55b, 56a, 56b) have a name.
Sinat Chinam. Traditionally translated as Baseless Hatred, I prefer to call it Gratuitous Hatred. I think of Sinat Chinam as rejection of grace. The story, a parable, illustrates the way people behaved at a time of great volatility and as tensions between factions grew strong and relations devolved. What happened in this story? Failure to understand, rejecting the opportunity to mend a broken relationship, failing to take responsibility, lack of self examination, choosing ego over G-d. Let’s look at each character and the impact their decisions and actions had on the final outcome.
The Host. Whatever the original disagreement, the host exhibited a level of hatred uncalled for, gratuitous, for spite. He never bothers to investigate how his long time enemy received an invitation to his fancy bash, he doesn’t ask questions or fact check himself. He lets his anger drive the bus here, missing the opportunity for peacemaking and mending the relationship presenting itself.
Bar Kamtza. In response, bar Kamtza exhibited a level of contempt disproportionate to the situation by misrepresenting an entire nation of people as planning an uprising. He doesn’t stop to consider the proportionality of his response—to destroy the entire nation—to the offense, his public humiliation. He doesn’t bother to find out why he was invited and then rudely kicked out. He just goes with anger and seeking vengeance.
The servant. He doesn’t own his mistake, which because it went unknown to the decision-makers and players involved, led to a catastrophic political disaster that collapsed the entire nation, not even in private to his boss. We cannot fix the errors we do not know happened. So the host could not fix the mistake his own staff made because he never considered the mistake was from within his staff and he blamed bar Kamtza for crashing his party.
The Sages. They sat through the party, uncomfortably watching the disagreement and the public humiliation of bar Kamtza. They chose safety over standing up for what is right. Their inaction contributed to the final disastrous outcome.
However, considering that the people during the Second Temple period were engaged in Torah study, observance of mitzvot, and acts of kindness, and that they did not perform the sinful acts that were performed in the First Temple, why was the Second Temple destroyed? It was destroyed due to the fact that there was [gratuitous]* hatred during that period. This comes to teach you that the sin of [gratuitous] hatred is equivalent to the three severe transgressions: Idol worship, forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed. (Yoma 9b:8)
* the original text uses the Hebrew word חִנָּם, which we would know as gratuitous in modern conversational English. This Sefaria translation provides the English word wanton and I prefer gratuitous because of the relatability factor for readers.
Did you catch that? The sin of gratuitous (i.e. factional) hatred = the combined sins of (idol worship + forbidden sexual relations + bloodshed).
Sinat Chinam, often called Baseless Hatred in English, describes the factional hatred in Jewish society that led to the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of Jews from the homeland. Following this second exile, the Romans erased the connection of the Israelites to their ancestral land by renaming it Palestine. The Yoma Tractate of the Talmud, which discusses the destruction of the Second Temple, uses חִנָּם., which means gratuitous-baseless in this context means gratuitous, ie. motivated by pleasure or ego, as opposed to by a value or seeking or love of G-d. Baseless means more than for no reason, it means done in vain. The word baseless in this phrase intends to convey the impulsivity and reckless nature of the behaviour, without cause because no thought went into it.
In Exodus 22:26 G-d describes Himself as חַנּ֥וּ, meaning gracious. What if we could think of G-d as grace? What if we think of חֵ֜ן, grace, as an invitation from G-d, to approach Him in a personal relationship? 2
What if we redefine Sinat Chinam as hatred of grace? When Grace = G-d, how does this change things for you, reader? Vanity demands we reject grace in order to placate our egoist need for glory. Anger demands we reject grace in order to serve vengeance. Impulsivity demands that we reject grace to serve a fleeting ego need. Sinat Chinam describes a baselessness perhaps, in its worship of or fixation upon, the fleeting materialistic objectives of power play between factions.
It’s important to remember that humans hooman like we always have for thousands of years. We build families and communities and professions and associations. We teach and trade and transact. We live our best lives and we emote and think and connect and build institutions that make up a society. We cultivate a culture to sustain that society. The culture we choose to express ourselves through and to nurture ourselves and our children with determine our political landscape. The Song of Songs reference in the graphic above draws the distinction between cultivating a cultural foundation that teaches the people in any society to become a wall of silver versus a door of cedar.
A wall provides a formidable protection for a fortress. A door provides a portal for entry. Cedar has a structural weakness that renders it vulnerable to infestation by devouring its internal substance, and according to Rabbi Shimon b. Lakish (in the Yoma 9b Talmud tractate) the author of the Song of Songs text uses the sasmagor worm infestation of a cedar tree, i.e. destruction of the internal substance of the tree via desiccation, as a metaphor for the factional hate infestation of a society. As the sasmagor worm reduces the cedar tree to an empty shell of itself, having the outward appearance of perfection and being dead inside, similarly did factional division in Second Temple Jewish society devour the unity and spirit of the people, exiling G-d from their midst.
The Netziv described the Second Temple generation as perverse and twisted generation … [that generation] walks perversely, wandering from the rational path. [Similar to a twisted rope consisting of strands of various grade], so are their actions twisted, interweaving evil acts with the good … though they were righteous and pious, toiling in Torah study, they were not upright in their societal behavior. And so due to the baseless hatred for one another residing within their hearts, they suspected anyone who was not religious in accordance with their viewpoint to be a Sadducee or heretic. [This deficiency in the Torah scholars’ character] led to rampant murder along with a transgression of all the other evils in the world, causing the Temple’s destruction. (Haamek Davar on Genesis, Introduction to Genesis, translation by Rabbi Elchanan Greenman, 2019)
FACTIONS OF SECOND TEMPLE SOCIETY
Pharisees (modern day Rabbinic Judaism descends from this group)
Sadducees (breakaway sect of corrupt high priests who rejected the Oral Torah and wanted to ingratiate themselves with the Romans)
Sicarii3 (anarchists and terrorists who opposed all forms of governance)
Zealots (Hard nationalists who opposed the Pharisees and wanted to fight the Romans at any cost)
Early Christians (the radicals who followed a dissident man known as Jesus and formed a breakaway sect based on his revolutionary ideas)
Netziv uses the words tzaddikim, an orthodox sect of the Righteous, meticulously devoted to law, chasidim, an orthodox sect of the Pious, motived by love and going beyond the law, yesharim, those who follow the (ie values-based) Path of the Just. Second Temple Society persons LARPed righteousness and piety by going through the motions in gang signalling fashion—they did all the right things and followed the rules and played the pious and righteous roles. Yet the Righteous and Pious did not follow the Path of the Just, because the path of factional hatred takes those who embark upon it in the opposite direction of the Path of the Just.
Does this resonate? How can you apply the story of the Fall of Second Temple Society to present times? How can you relate to Sinat Chinam and the story of bar Kamtza? How do you see the bar Kamtza story playing out in your social and political world? Can you see through the lens of this story that the personal sorta does become the political, that it can become difficult to separate them out from one another, so to say I will not get political seems self limiting in the context of Sinat Chinam, doesn’t it? More on this in a future post! I see parallels to this political history playing out in my political and social context and I will be writing about them in the days to come.
Incidentally, as a little Catholic girl growing up I heard about Jewish history from the perspective of those who followed a revolutionary named Jesus and believe he is G-d incarnate, i.e. the tearing of the temple veil and G-d’s presence leaving the Jewish temple on the crucifixion of Jesus is told as part of the story of The Passion of Christ in the Catholic canon. Having now explored the actual accounts of the events leading to the second temple destruction, I can see with more depth and rigour the power and validity of Sinat Chinam as a concept.
Atheists, think of this as a relationship with your Self. Having a personal relationship with G-d is a big fancy religious gang signalling term that really practically speaking means what in polyvagal theory we call reaching your ventral vagal level on the polyvagal ladder, your safe social state of being. If the G-d stuff weirds you out think of it in terms of knowing yourSelf—because anyway, G-d remains inaccessible when we are not in a state of balance to receive Him. Again, that’s gang signalling religious speak that means what polyvagal neurobiological science tells you. G-d is a way to know and relate to and live with your human self. If there’s a soul it’s the vagus nerve, the conduit of our physical and emotional being. Religion and connecting with G-d, then, is about self examination with a view to be a loving and gracious person, not much more than that.
Catholics and Christians might feel some kind of familiarity with the word Sicarii because of Judas Iscariot and the possible linguistic connection between Iscariot and Sicarii