July/August 2000

Hasidim and the Love of Enemies

Maurice S. Friedman, November 1964

Maurice S. Friedman was a conscientious objector in the Second World War and a member of FOR. In this essay he demonstrates how Jewish mystical traditions form a basis for Jewish nonviolence.

What does Hasidism have to say on the subject of peace? First, that one must begin with oneself. "When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world," Rabbi Bunam taught. Peace in oneself does not mean "peace of mind," however, but peace in one's immediate relations with others - in thought, speech, and action, with wife, children, and servants. This means, too, that one does not set oneself, or even one's nation, as one's own goal. What does this attitude toward peace imply concerning reconciliation? That it is a real mutual building in a concrete situation that takes account of both sides of any conflict and never reduces the conflict to one or another of the two sides or to any "objective" or "universal" point of view from above. Human togetherness is seen by one zaddik in the figure of a divine vehicle whose unity must be preserved: "When you see that someone hates you and does you harm, rally your spirit and love him more than before. That is the only way you can make him turn... If your neighbor grows remote from you in spirit, you must approach him more closely than before - to fill out the rift." The wife of Rabbi Yehuda Zevi of Rozdol asked him why he did not say something to the enemies who were out to hurt him but instead did them favors. He replied that the world rests not only upon the righteous man, the zaddik, but also "upon him who, in the hour of conflict, reduces himself to nothing, and does not say anything against those who hate him."

We must work for reconciliation among the peoples, between the races, between labor and management, but we must also work for it in the undramatic situations of our lives - in the everyday. I once witnessed an example of such reconciliation in connection with the reading of Hasidic tales. In the summer of 1961 I conducted three Buber seminars for the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples at its ranch in the Valley of the Moon north of San Francisco. As a part of one of these seminars, the members were asked to read Buber's Tales of the Hasidim and select one to bring to the group, telling what it meant to them and why they selected it. One woman read to us the tale entitled "Drudgery:"

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak discovered that the girls who knead the dough for the unleavened bread drudged from early morning until late at night. Then he cried aloud to the congregation gathered in the House of Prayer: "Those who hate Israel accuse us of baking the unleavened bread with the blood of Christians. But no, we bake them with the blood of Jews!"

When she had finished reading, she told us that her father, a simple man from a poor background, used to tell her and her sisters about his childhood in the Ukraine and about how all the children in his village were warned not to go near the Jews' quarter for fear of being captured and killed to make blood for the Jewish matzoh at Passover. Her father still believed this millennial superstition that has sprung up again and again from the fear and hatred of the alien. The story of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak struck the woman who read it to us not because she too believed this naive yet tenacious myth but because it removed the fear of the alien that lies at its base. It enabled her to experience the situation from the other side - from the side of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak, of the Jewish girls whom he befriended, and of the Jewish employers whom he called to account!