Parshas Balak, tells the story of Hashem instructing the prophet Bilam not to curse the Jewish people, a nation Hashem holds dear and has blessed. The episode carries a lesson that extends well beyond the biblical narrative, touching on a question many find themselves grappling with today: is it ever permissible to curse a fellow Jew, even one who has caused real damage to the Jewish people or to those who learn and grow in Torah?
Rabbi Yosef Farhi shares a teaching from Rav Ben Tzion Abba Shaul that he describes as genuinely surprising. It is natural, the speaker notes, to feel anger toward people in positions of power who create hardship for religious Jews or for those striving to grow spiritually. The instinct to curse such a person can feel justified, especially given the verse stating that Hashem hates those who hate Him, which would seem to permit hating someone who acts as an enemy of God.
Yet Rav Ben Tzion Abba Shaul, drawing on the Yerushalmi, offers a different framework entirely. He compares hating another Jew to a right hand hating a left hand. Just as one cannot take revenge against, or hold hatred toward, a different part of one's own body, so too every member of the Jewish people forms part of a single shared body. Hating another Jew, in this view, is not simply a moral failing directed outward, it is a kind of self-contradiction.
The teaching does leave room for an exception, but a demanding one. A person who has genuinely reached the level of loving every Jew as he loves himself may, according to this view, be in a position to confront and even oppose someone who has caused harm to the Jewish people. But for a person who has not reached that level of love, hatred toward a fellow Jew, however justified it may feel, comes not from righteousness but from the yetzer hara, the evil inclination.
The message is a humbling one, particularly for those quick to direct anger or condemnation at fellow Jews seen as causing damage, religious or otherwise. The question, Rabbi Farhi explains, is not only how badly the other person behaved. It is whether the one doing the cursing has first earned the right to.
