A time to hate
Using a bereaved husband's reaction to the death sentence handed earlier this week to the man who raped and murdered the husband's wife and daughters, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach passes on an important lesson that many of us have forgotten: As it says in Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), there's a time to hate.Over the past few years many of us have lost our moral bearings on the subject of evil and human suffering. Many of my Christian brothers and sisters take Jesus' teachings about forgiving our enemies completely out of context. Jesus said to forgive your enemies. Your enemy is the guy who steals your parking space. But God's enemies are men who can rape and slaughter two young women and their mother and torture them before doing so. In Ecclesiastes King Solomon famously says "there is a time to love and a time to hate." This is that time. We must love the Petit family and hate their murderers. Yes, hatred is a valid emotion when directed at the truly evil.I believe there's an important lesson here for Israelis and how we relate to 'Palestinian' terror. There's nothing wrong with hating the terrorists and those who support them. They are extreme evil.
No, I do not believe in revenge. I believe in justice. But only a true hatred of evil compels us to fight wickedness with every legitimate means at our disposal.
When I lived in England during some of the worst years of the Northern Ireland troubles I once heard a man whose father was killed by the IRA for no reason other than he was a Protestant immediately say that as a Christian he is compelled to love his father's murderers. He said he forgave them for killing his father. But no human being, even the man's son, can confer such forgiveness. The act of taking a human life is a crime against God who created life and endowed it with infinite worth. And such acts of misguided magnanimity and forgiveness make a mockery of human love and a shambles of human justice. Murder in cold blood dare not be forgiven. Murderers who have erased the image of God from their countenance through savage acts of brutality have removed themselves from the human family. They are not our brothers and we are under no obligation to love them. Indeed, any love we have in our hearts must be directed at the victims of violence rather than at their culprits.
Yes, Jesus said 'turn the other cheek.' But is anyone so morally lost as to suggest that he meant if someone rapes your wife, give him your daughter to rape as well? Of course, what Jesus meant was to forgive the petty slights that people enact against you. If a friend pretends not to notice you at a party, forgive them. If your husband loses his temper and yells, yes he must apologize. But be quick to forgive. But Jesus never meant that we should not dedicate ourselves to fighting evil.
Psalm 97 makes it clear. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil." It's repeated again in Proverbs Chap 8: "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil." Yes, hatred has its place, but only under a single condition that was met in the terrible Petit murders: the human confrontation with extreme evil.
Let's go to the videotape.
Labels: morality, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:47 PM
5 Comments:
Frankly for Rabbi Shmuly to tell Xians how to interpret their view of their scriptures is rather idiotic. Whether the source of those scriptures is originally our sources or not is irrelevant. How they've developed and teach whatever view they teach today is their business, not an orthodox rabbi's.
His point is very valid, and if he wants to take good Torah sources that they may also recognize and present them as the basis of his view, more power to him. But to try to tell them how to interpret the sayings of their books and their guy...that's just silly.
Next I'll have Catholic Cardinals and Bishops telling me that Jews have no relationship to the Holy Land.... oh wait, that just happened.
G-d commands us to wipe out evil... when the just man wades his feet through the blood of the wicked, there is justice on earth.
Those who do evil forfeit their lives. And when we condone it and tolerate it, more innocent people will surely die.
We must do that along with hating evil in order to bring about a righteous world in which G-d's sovereignty reigns supreme.
A world of good is worth sanctifying His Name through all eternity.
Hi Carl.
I completely agree on this one.
He's right in what he says & it's great that he's using scripture to point that out to us Christians, thank you! The love your enemy & turn the other cheek passages, indeed the entire "Sermon on the Mount" section these are in, are more often than not lifted out of context, mistaught and misapplied, with serious public policy implications for us all as we see this section being repeatedly cited by political & interfaith groups, even the President, to justify their agendas, including re: the Israeli-"Palestinian" situation & terrorism in general. Typically, we Bible-believing ("fundamentalist")Christians know this passage has nothing to do with such situations, but b/c this isn't a "fundamental" of the faith, we don't contend for right exegesis of it as much as we should between denominations or in the public square.
Elie Weisel was giving a speech in Connecticut and opposed giving the death penalty to these two monsters. I was absolutely stunned. What happened to "When you are merciful to the cruel, you are cruel to the merciful"?
Post a Comment
<< Home