How do we come to the truth or resolve conflict when everyone views the world from a unique vantage point? How do I help create peace in my life and in the world when enemies exist? And especially when those who I believe are evil, probably consider me the wicked enemy and them the emissary of light.
A joke to bring the issue into focus:
A king sits on his throne. Suddenly, one of his knights enters.
The knight looks so tired he can barely stand. His armour is heavily battered and covered with dust, his sword is notched, his helmet is cracked…
*King*: Dear God, John! What happened to you?
*Knight*: Oh, I’ve been hard at work lately, Your Majesty. A heavy blow I dealt against your enemies to the north.
*King*: What? John, but I have no enemies to the north!
*Knight*: Really? (thinks for a moment) Oh well, you do now.
I want to propose that the perception of an “enemy” is a foundational conceptual filter by which we view others, which affects our ability to resolve conflicts and pursue peace. An enemy can be defined as an adversary who is working against our well-being; someone who is acting against our health, survival, values, vision or security; someone who is trying to undermine what we are building, or who is stealing something that belongs to us. The term, “enemy” is a subjective level that can apply to a whole range of phenomena, from interpersonal to international, and even to the hostile forces that lurk within our own psyches.
There are many types of enemies. They can be mortal foes seeking our demise or overly-competitive colleagues threatened by our success. They can be inconsiderate neighbors, a hurtful spouse, or a rebellious child. They can be rotten to their core or possess one rough edge. Either way, the enemy appears to us as a witting or unwitting agent of bad or even evil.
Enemies are real, in the sense that the Torah employs the term liberally. Conflict, war, antagonism, and hostility are well-documented in the Bible and comprise a major portion of its teaching tales. Nearly every saint and hero struggles with enemies, and is also true for the Jewish people as a whole. Enemies are a universal phenomenon. It is unlikely that anyone passes from cradle to grave without having to struggle with at least one of them. It is safe to say that character development and expanding consciousness are measured, largely, by our evolving capacity to deal with the hurt, frustration, fear and anger that get triggered by enemies.
At the same time, from a Torah perspective, articulated in the Shema prayer which comes from the book of Deuteronomy, God is a reality that is completely unified. This means that everything in existence is an expression of this singular Divine Presence. Even the Sa-tan or Satan is an angel or messenger of God sent to test an individual and help them grow closer to God. From a Jewish perspective, Satan is not a fallen angel who opposes God, as articulated by Christian thought, but instead, is completely in line with God’s will. Even the word Satan literally means to obstruct or provide resistance, in the same way that in order to grow stronger physically, we need resistance to push against. From this perspective, enemies can also be viewed as embodiments of the Satan – messengers from God that help us grow.
What I want to offer this morning is a powerful teaching from the Baal Shem Tov, the great 18th century spiritual master and founder of early Hasidism, to determine the most spiritually productive and transformative attitude and approach towards enemies, whether in our families or communities, or in a time of war.
The Baal Shem Tov has a fascinating conception of the soul which I experienced firsthand when my father died. When we use the word “soul,” we are referring to the essence of a person that is present both when we are in this world and after we die. Usually, we think of the soul as something that is located within our bodies that we may see or perceive in each other, but doesn’t extend beyond our boundary. The Baal Shem teaches that the different dimensions of our soul actually extend into our spouses, family, friends, animals, and even our enemies. We are all carrying slivers of each other’s soul. When my father died, I realized that his soul presence was still with me in a very real and tangible way as it always was when he was alive, but I was so focused on his physical form that I wasn’t present to where he always lived inside of me.
Our tradition calls this network of soul connections neshamot tehorot – pure and boundless souls.This pure boundless essence does not fit into anything we can conceive about ourselves – it is boundless. But, the nature of our minds – what psychoanalysis calls the “ego” – is to provide structure and boundary and content into who we think we are and is intolerant of this boundless and pure dimension.
That ego mechanism is also what makes it so challenging to love others just as they are and to extend love to them all. For, as the mind creates such a narrow and mistaken sense of self, it creates narrow and mistaken impressions of others. Those who make our sense of self feel substantial, real, and good at any particular moment trigger feelings of happiness in us. They are grasped as dear and exclusively deserving of love: “my friends.” Those who seem to undercut our ego-construct of self, trigger feelings of mental pain in us become “our enemies.” Billions of other human beings which don’t seem to affect our ego-construct of self at the moment, are dismissed as “strangers” that don’t matter enough to love or hate or even to warrant our notice.
When we commit to narrow thoughts of ourselves, we perpetuate narrow thoughts of those around us, rather than to the actual persons beyond those thoughts. If a stranger cuts in line ahead of me, I might view him instantly as completely contemptible. But maybe he was just thoughtless at that moment. Or maybe he had an emergency and was desperate to get home quickly. But my mind, in that moment, commits to his complete contemptibility in order to commit to myself as completely righteous. And who among us can say they never cut in line before, even accidentally. As long as we continue to react to others as mirrors of our own hidden negativities, our reactions reflect their worst traits back at them in turn. And their negative response again evokes the worst from us.
Others don’t experience themselves as our ego-centered thoughts perceive them, but we react to them as if they did, as if they really were only the sum total of what we think they are at the moment. As if, in a moment of anger, your spouse or child were really just someone who deserves rage and blame, not the sacred object of your care. Or as if the unknown person passing you on the street were really just a “stranger,” nothing more – not a parent, sibling, or child beloved by others, not a fully dimensioned being with all the hopes, fears, and struggles of living and dying in this world. Our momentary thought says, He’s just a stranger, and in that moment we believe that’s all he is, don’t we?
And it’s not just our individual conceptions of who others are, but it is reinforced by social consensus. When everyone around me believes that only these people deserve love while others deserve just to be ignored, disliked, or feared, I become accustomed to reacting similarly, especially if I hear it from my parents. And as I treat others callously in that way and they don’t respond favorably, then I receive the feedback that reinforces my impression of them. Take a look at the anti-semitism that is running rampant in the world right now. People have images of who Jews are and then act accordingly by excluding, bullying, or even using violence What are the groups that you fear or judge? Is it Arabs or Palestinians? Is it Democrats or Republicans? How does our perception of a group of people as enemy affect our openness to be in relationship, to learn and to understand.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches us that just as everything is an expression of the Divine Presence, both good and evil, so too, Moses and all of the righteous ones – the tzaddikim have both good and evil in them just like we do. He then quotes the Zohar which boldly states that the evil in Moses’ soul is actually a reflection of the bitterness, oppression, and hurtfulness of his enemies. Moses’ enemies are actually parts of his own soul and his job is to turn the evil within him into good. What distinguishes the approach of Moses and the righteous ones is that instead of projecting the evil outward onto his enemies, he saw them as mirroring aspects of his own soul that he needed to uplift and transform.
At this point,It’s important to mention that while Jewish law ascribes utmost value to peace, forgiveness, and compromise, it doesn’t advocate pacifism as an unqualified ideal. Besides the inner spiritual work that the Baal Shem Tov is proposing, Jewish law instructs people to resolve their personal disputes by talking things through, with a mediator if necessary. The just resolution of a conflict by an impartial court is a deep Torah value and the obligation to create an honest legal system is one of the Torah’s seven Noachide Laws that apply to all the peoples of the world, not just to Jews.
The obligation or attempt at a peaceful solution to conflict applies on a geopolitical scale as well. Maimonides writes, “We are not to engage in war with anyone unless we first proclaim peace to them…” But if resolution cannot be found, then war is an option and even at times, an obligation. Consequently, Jews are obligated to protect themselves at all costs, even if it means waging war through preemptive attack. The Talmud is clear: “If someone intends to kill you in the morning, wake up even earlier and kill him first.”
Jewish law charts a precarious path between pacifism and self-defense, for these two supreme values often conflict. The Torah states clear guidelines for when armed conflict is permitted, and how to preserve one’s moral standards while engaged in combat. The question of when to shift from diplomacy to war is a complicated assessment that combines military intelligence, Torah principles, and Divine guidance.
While people who do evil need to be confronted in concrete ways to prevent them from doing further harm, the focus on transforming the evil in oneself offers us a way to embody our expansive soul. If one recognizes the presence of enemies as a trigger to cultivate humility and be more honest about the isolation and separation within oneself, then there is the opportunity to elevate that evil within, which then has the potential to turn an enemy, in Hebrew oyev into a friend, ohev (or, one who loves). If we are open to the possibility that we are all part of each other’s souls, and we are committed to our own inner healing and transformation, then we can’t push our enemies and their delusions out of our hearts. Instead, we are asked to find a way to stay open to what our relationship has to teach us, at the same time, that we set the necessary boundaries to keep ourselves safe.
How can we extend love or forgive those who have hurt us? The problem is that we are all in the habit of misidentifying others’ actions as the very source of our feelings of hurt or joy, so we respond with hatred or possessiveness. But feelings of hurt and joy occur within our own minds, as our construction of self is conditioned by our own past actions. Focus on my own concept of self, conscious or unconscious, prepares my mind to feel hurt, ill at ease, or alienated from my innate boundless soul nature. When others say pleasant or unpleasant things to us, our minds then feel what they were prepared to feel by our own sense of self. Others’ words are just the triggers for the current feelings about ourselves we already have. Even if someone harshly criticizes us, if we didn’t have the self-concern, the inner predisposition to feel personally hurt by the words, then we wouldn’t feel hurt.
What about evil people, people who truly seek to harm us and others? Evil people are those most committed to reducing others to their own self-centered thoughts of them. Instead of learning to rely upon their innate capacities for love and wisdom, evil people put their trust in their own reductive thoughts and the deluded emotions that flow from such thoughts. This leads to extreme expressions of absolutistic self-righteousness, megalomania, virulent hatred and prejudice, the ideological reduction of whole peoples to worthlessness, and massive violence.
Many people will use the example of Hitler as a reason to not cultivate all inclusive love, to not do the spiritual work of transforming our relationship to enemies. To believe that some people do not deserve a wish of love, that they are only to be hated, is the belief that Hitler embraced and took to its extreme. We do not confront someone by joining him. Too often one person’s mindless hatred evokes our hatred in response. And even though our hatred of them is based on what they’ve done, not who they are, we don’t realize that we are sowing the same seeds in our hearts that we are trying to eradicate. The very instant that anyone, anywhere decides that others do not deserve love, in that instant, the seed of evil has been born in this world. When that seed is well nurtured by people and societies, it evolves into the greatest acts of extreme hatred and violence. Now, I am not suggesting that the hatred that each one of us may feel for people who do unspeakable evil is comparable to the hatred that prompts them to do such evil. But I am suggesting that it is a seed that can grow into a destructive fire that can eat us up inside even if it’s not destructive to others.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches us to pray for our enemies to be raised and released from the clutches of evil and illusion and for them to do Teshuvah. If the enemy has dimensions of soul that are still redeemable, then our prayer may actually have some impact in awakening hidden good within them. But if the enemy is corrupted beyond repair, then the same prayer for his or her Teshuvah will actually quicken their demise. It may be that speedy removal really is the best possible outcome for a hardened psychopath – for people like Hitler or members of Hamas. Better that he should cut his losses, stop racking up spiritual debts, and begin the “involuntary” teshuvah process in the world of souls. Tzaddikim do not intend for their prayer to have this effect. They genuinely hope and pray for their enemy’s teshuvah and redemption. The decision of life or death rests with the One Who Sees into the hearts and minds of every creature.
By choosing to see those who we have labeled enemies as part of God’s creation and to consider that we can create more skillful ways of relating to them by seeing them as parts of ourselves, we do not ignore the need for boundaries, sometimes strong and uncompromising. Instead, we take responsibility for being an agent of peace and connection in the world, not a sower of hate and division, no matter how justified it seems.
Here’s a fantasy about what might happen if I took a different direction in a sermon about the importance of forgiving our enemies. Let’s say that about a third of the way through the sermon, I tell you, “Raise your hand if you are now willing to forgive your enemies.” Half of you raise your hand, so I continue.
When I’m two thirds of the way through the sermon, I say, “Raise your hand if you are now willing to forgive your enemies.” Three quarters of you raise your hand so I continue.
When I’ve completely finished the sermon, I say , “Raise your hand if you are now willing to forgive your enemies.” All you raise your hand, except one, a little old distinguished woman.
I ask the woman, “Why are you still unwilling to forgive your enemies?”
“Simple,” she replies. “I have no enemies.”
“How old are you?”
“96.”
“And you have no enemies?”
“None at all.”
I’m amazed. “Come up to the front with me!”
We both stand up on the bimah together and I say, “Please explain to our entire congregation how it is possible that you have no enemies!”
“Simple,” says the old woman “I outlived them all.”