Gratuitous love

Today is Rosh Chodesh Av.  Besides being Beans’s birthday on the Jewish calendar (and Bill’s half-birthday), it is also the beginning of the Nine Days, the intense mourning period which leads up to Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, in which we fast for 25 hours in mourning for a host of disasters in our history, the most significant of them the destruction of the Second Temple.

I’ve had a lot of things on my mind lately which seem to speak to this.  This morning I found in my inbox an email from our friend and teacher, Rav Mois Navon.  Rav Mois, who is one of the founders of www.tekhelet.com (which advocates for restoring the mitzvah of wearing a thread of specially-dyed thread in one’s tzitzit), also maintains a website of his divrei Torah, has written a d’var Torah on the subject of the meaning of sinat chinam, translated as “gratuitous hatred,” the main sin to which is attributed the Temple’s destruction.  After a discussion of the sources, Rav Mois defines gratuitous hatred as follows:

Within every person lie desires, drives, or in the terminology of the Mishna, an evil inclination. This inclination (yetzer) is raw power and is only labeled as “evil” due to its propensity to be abused for evil pursuits (Tanhuma, Ber. 7). To satisfy his desires, man uses his physical senses, depicted in the Mishna as the “eye”. Thus, if man seeks to tilt his inclination toward negative pursuits, his eye becomes an accessory to that evil, roving jealously to acquire all that he sees. What distinguishes man’s use of his “inclination” and his “eye” toward the good or the evil is, in a word, motivation. If one’s motivation is rooted in selfishness then he will use his “eye” to satisfy his “inclination” at the expense of everyone around him – he will in this sense act like one who “hates everyone” – for no reason.

According to Rav Mois, the antidote to this sin is, in the words of Rav Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, gratuitous love, or love based on selflessness.

Gratuitous love.  Sounds like what the US and much of the Western world experienced in the late 1960s with the invention of the birth control pill and recreational drugs.  But this ain’t the 1960s no more, and I think it means something entirely different in the Jewish world of today.

I had a dream a few nights ago.  A couple of months ago, the Peach and I were clashing several times a week over her accusations against me of immodesty.  (My threat to send her to Beans’s school, where she’ll be in a class with boys and won’t hear nearly as much about modesty as she does now, seems to have quieted her down.)  In my dream of a couple of nights ago, I was sitting in a shiur with a number of other Jewish women.  The rabbanit giving the shiur was an Indian Jewish woman visiting Israel who must have had considerable draw for me to leave my house and chores, and she ended up being very interesting.  After the shiur (which I don’t remember at all), she opened the floor to questions of any kind.  I shared my problems with Peach and her obsession with my modesty “issues.”  This rabbanit looked at me and smiled.  “You keep Shabbat and kashrut?” she asked.  “Yes,” I answered.  “You look like a modest person to me,” she answered.  “You’re already doing more than most of the Jewish people is doing.  I don’t think you should be worried about the rest.”

Now THAT was a good dream.  Besides massaging my bruised ego over the whole modesty issue, it made sense to me.  What if every Jewish woman in the world kept a kosher kitchen and observed Shabbat?  Wouldn’t that be progress?  What if every Jewish woman in the world covered her hair, but didn’t necessarily keep kashrut and Shabbat?  Would that be okay?  Definitely not.

What if all peace really broke out and Jews of any background (even non-halachic ones) were allowed access to Orthodox Jewish education?  What if Satmar-trained brute squads were dispatched to “encourage” husbands to give their chained wives divorces (their famous line being, “Tomorrow your wife will be free to marry.  It is your choice whether it be as a divorcee or a widow”)?  What if kashrut supervisors charged reasonable fees, did their jobs honestly, and the whole industry became de-politicized?  What if cabinet ministers and high-ranking government officials made enough money to discourage the rampant corruption that exists among them?  (There is an excellent article by Rabbi Asher Meir in his “Ethics @ Work” column in the Jerusalem Post about this.  I’ll post the link as soon as I can access it.)  What if generosity were not seen as gullibility?  Patience as passivity?  Success as winning at a zero-sum game?  What if we could each do our best, and assume everyone else is too?

Rav Mois’s d’var Torah gave me plenty to think about.  Check out this and other divrei Torah by him at Divrei Navon.

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