REFLECT:

From Rabbi Sharon Brous (IKAR)

When Bryan Stevenson pulled into the parking lot of a prison for a legal visit, he saw a pickup truck with Confederate flag plates and guns. A bumper sticker read: IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS, I’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN DAMN COTTON. As he entered the prison, a white guard with a confederate flag tattooed on his arm strip-searched and humiliated him, violating protocol for legal visits. The guard told Stevenson that the truck outside was his.

Stevenson was there to meet with Avery, a Black mentally ill man serving time for murder. As he researched Avery’s story, he found that he had been passed from one abusive foster home to another, 19 in his first eight years. He suffered unthinkable physical and emotional abuse, which Stevenson ultimately presented in a multi-day hearing before a judge. After the hearing, when Stevenson returned to the prison, the same guard, the one with the truck, approached him. He said he had been in court during the hearing and heard the stories about Avery’s life.

“It was kind of difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about,” the guard said. “I came up in foster care too… Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse… I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry… Sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.”

Sinat hinam, gratuitous hatred, they say, was the cause of the destruction of the Beit haMikdash (Yoma 9b), our holiest site. It came in the form of not only cruelty, but also cowardice. It was rooted in a willful dismissiveness of other people’s humanity, and it permeated all aspects of the society. It became so normative, and so toxic, that it destroyed the community from within.

The only way out of sinat hinam is deep reflection and behavioral transformation. The guard in the story held in his heart unexamined, gratuitous hatred. It was rooted in his own pain, his own trauma, and it manifested in acts of cruelty toward others that felt fully justified to him. It was only when he listened, when he stretched open his heart, that he was able to see Avery’s humanity for the first time. And doing so freed him, too. He softened. He shifted from anger to tenderness. When the hatred dissipated, he was only a man, who had once been a small child who had also suffered abandonment and abuse. And Avery was a victim of the same abuse, deserving of his compassion.

We may not wear our hatred tattooed on our arms or our bumper stickers, but I wonder how willing we are to consider the unexamined, gratuitous hatred in our own hearts? What would it take for us to own that hatred, to acknowledge and reckon with it, so that we might one day be released from its grips?

The Rabbis suggest that the way to counter sinat hinam is ahavat hinam—senseless, gratuitous, open-hearted. Love that’s rooted in the awareness that the other is, like you, an image of the Holy One. Not only does the work of eradicating the sinat hinam in our hearts invite us into a kind of softness toward the other, and toward ourselves, but it may be the only way our fractured society can release itself from the stranglehold of racism and together finally begin to build a different kind of future.

READ: Chapter 10 of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, available here or at any independent bookstore.