Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem.

This coming week, with the fast of the 17th of Tamuz, begins the Three Weeks of mourning for the destruction of the Temple and the exile. The Talmud tells us that destruction comes to the Jewish people when they are divided, when there is hatred among us. This turns out to be true of all nations.

We live in a world divided by political parties, ideology and world views. Today’s political divides are fundamentally different from those of the past; in earlier eras, one side accused the other of having the wrong ideas about how to solve problems, but today each side sees the other as the problem itself. One group or political party does not see the other as misled, but as bad and dangerous. In a polarized world, the other side is not just ignorant of how to solve the problems but the other side is the problem, and thus must be gotten rid of. Today most people are not interested in what a particular policy says, but rather, who proposed it.

The core of Democracy is compromise. But how can one compromise with someone or some group they see as evil? This attitude weakens a country and ultimately leads to its downfall, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his last book wrote:

“I believe that we are undergoing the cultural equivalent of climate change, and only when we realise this will we understand the strange things that have been happening in the twenty-first century in the realms of politics and economics, the deterioration of public standards of truth and civil debate, and the threat to freedom of speech at British and American universities. It also underlies more personal phenomena like loneliness, depression and drug abuse. All these things are related. If we see this, we will already have taken the first step to a solution (Morality, page 2).”

In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts camping and separated them into two groups at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground. What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another (Washington Post 1/20/24).

In a sense, the threats that Israel faces and the war that Israel must fight using its “people’s army,” helps it to avoid the extreme hatred and vindictive division which plagues some other countries. It is deeply saddening that Israel’s (admittedly too thin) unity is the product of threat and loss, but with God’s help, Israel will make it through this difficult time with strength and have learned the lesson of the three weeks: to cultivate unity and baseless love rather than give into the hate with which our world is so rife.