The True Cost of Americans Hating Each Other

Last week, I attended the White House Hanukkah Party. It was a privilege to celebrate the Jewish festival of lights in the people’s house. This tradition, carried out by both Republican and Democratic presidents, is a cornerstone of promoting the miracle of the menorah.

But judging from people’s reactions, you would think I opened fire on a school bus.

The White House protocols were for everyone to be masked, and the event had plenty of room for social distancing. Yes, people took off masks to take photos when they could employ sufficient distance from other guests. But masks — whose necessity I of course fully believe in — were the order of the day, with the exception of people eating latkes and other foods, a standard that is accepted in many states.

Yet the amount of hatred that my attendance unleashed on social media was unprecedented. “You’re an enabler. You enabled Trump’s denial of his election loss to Joe Biden.” Actually, I attended a White House Hanukkah celebration.

“You allowed Trump to get away with trying to steal the election.” Actually, I ate latkes.

The irrational, near-demonic hatred for Donald Trump has now been extended to anyone in his vicinity, including those who simply celebrate Jewish holidays with the country’s elected leader, a practice that will no doubt continue in the White House of President-elect Joe Biden.

In my career as a Rabbi, I have experienced plenty of controversy and hatred, from those who opposed my publishing “Kosher Sex,” to those who fought me on the publication of “Kosher Jesus,” to those who thought I had lost my mind when I appointed a young Cory Booker — today a Senator from New Jersey — as student president of my Oxford University L’Chaim Society in 1992. “You made a non-Jew the head of a Jewish student organization? You’re promoting inter-marriage.”

But nothing I have done seems to have been as controversial as being in Trump’s orbit on Hanukkah.

It’s time to respond.

Now that he has exhausted all legal recourse, Trump must concede the election. And Republicans should embrace President-elect Joe Biden’s “time to heal” approach in trying to unify the country.

But the political left must halt the vitriol they’re fostering. Maturity requires an ability to parse the good from bad in people, things and ideas. Immaturity is where you simply reject — in totality — something you find distasteful, even when it has things that deserve to be applauded or embraced.

I need not vote for Joe Biden to agree that in his fifty-year public career, he has displayed decency and humanity. And I need not agree with all of Donald Trump’s policies to concede that in four years he has utterly reshaped the Middle East and the U.S.-Israel relationship, a fact for which all American Jews should be grateful.

Just a day after the event, Trump announced a peace deal between Israel and Morocco. Let’s not forget that former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry swore that Israel would never have peace with its Arab neighbors or the Gulf States unless they first made peace with the Palestinians.

Kerry could not have been more wrong. It turns out that the Arab states were as weary of Palestinian intransigence as were the Israelis. None of us would have believed the miracles that are taking place in the Middle East. Those who hate Trump so much that they will give him no credit on this achievement are as blind as those who are pretending that Biden did not win the election.

I am grateful to Trump for having secured a lasting peace for Israel with so many previously implacable foes. And I’m grateful to have been invited to celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah at the White House. I hope that President-elect Biden will continue Trump’s policies of unrivaled support for Israel and crushing sanctions on Iran.

It’s a challenging time in America because so many Americans have gone insane with hatred, both on the left and the right. And we’re talking real hatred. It’s disgusting, embarrassing, inane and depressing. Ordinarily, we could have blamed such American insanity on the paranoia that comes from a global pandemic. But then we’d just be shifting responsibility away from the real ones to blame — each of us. Every single one of us.

The Trump haters (including some close friends) — who told me they won’t speak to me anymore because I went to the White House Hanukkah party — should question whether they are uniting a fractured country or ripping it apart. My Republican friends who told me that they will never accept a Biden presidency — just as so many of the Democrats never accepted Trump — should ask themselves the same question. They’re harming the country. And humiliating themselves.

Because the only thing worth hating in life is unalloyed, unconditional evil. Mass murderers, genocidaires and those who destroy human life warrant what I call “Kosher Hate” (the title of a book I am currently writing), the kind of emotional revulsion that causes us to resist and fight wickedness. But your political opponents? Hating them as if they were murderers and terrorists? Seriously?

Hating mere political opponents is immoral not only because it destroys a nation but also because it allows the true evil-doers to go unchecked, as we misdirect our revulsion away from legitimate targets.

Hating mere political opponents is immoral because it allows the true evil-doers to go unchecked.

The consequences of this political hatred are grave. Take the United States during World War II, which was a bystander for more than two years after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor, America would certainly have delayed its entrance in the war — if not stayed out altogether. For some reason, we could not, as a nation, summon sufficient hatred of the Nazis to fight them, even as they conquered all of Europe and began the annihilation of the Jewish people.

After the Holocaust, Jews and others adopted the slogan “Never Again.” Yet the slaughter of innocents has happened again and again in the 70 years that have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz.

The history of the modern world is a history of genocide and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Historian Paul Johnson estimates that at least 100 million civilians were murdered in the twentieth century alone by bloodthirsty tyrants. This is a staggering number. The world could not summon enough hatred of these individuals or their dastardly deeds to bring them to justice.

Depressingly, the trend has continued into the twenty-first century. December 9, 2004, was the fifty-sixth anniversary of the approval of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly. Meanwhile, another genocide was taking place in Sudan.

In sixth millennium that Judaism counts since creation, evil is growing with increasing strength, with brutal regimes continuing to control hundreds of millions of lives and terrorism striking throughout the world. Seventy years after Hitler’s demise, madmen run nations, gas their own people, torture civilians and fill mass graves with the bodies of innocents, which we are currently witnessing in Syria.

Amid the world’s protests of “Never Again!” no fewer than at least seven genocides have occurred since the Holocaust, including Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Bosnia, Darfur and now Syria. Bashar al-Assad has murdered more than 500,000 Syrians and has used chemical weapons against his own people. Other than a missile strike launched by Trump following one of the chemical weapons attacks, the world has been a bystander.

Instead of “Never Again!” the reality has been “Again and Again!”

And one of the principal reasons? We have to learn not only to love the victims of murderer but to hate and resist the murderers themselves. And when we spend all our time directing our hatred toward fellow Americans over political rifts, we allow those who are truly deserving of our revulsion to be overlooked.

It’s time for Americans to stop hating each other and instead work together — amidst legitimate political differences — toward making the world a place that is bereft of injustice and filled with the light of love, peace and human brotherhood.

Boy, would that be a Hanukkah miracle.

Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the author of the forthcoming “Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell.” He is the international best-selling author of 33 books. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RabbiShmuley.