The wisdom of Moses’ command not to despise Egyptians still shines through today. If the people continued to hate their erstwhile oppressors, Moses would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt but would have failed to take Egypt out of the Israelites. They would still be slaves, not physically but psychologically. They would be slaves to the past, held captive by the chains of resentment, unable to build the future. To be free, you have to let go of hate. That is a difficult truth but a necessary one.
No less surprising is Moses’ insistence: “Do not despise an Edomite, because he is your brother.” Edom was, of course, the other name of Esau. There was a time when Esau hated Jacob and vowed to kill him. Besides which, before the twins were born, Rebecca received an oracle telling her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the elder will serve the younger.” (Gen. 25: 23) Whatever these words mean, they seem to imply that there will be eternal conflict between the two brothers and their descendants.
At a much later age, during the Second Temple period, the prophet Malachi said: “ ‘Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?’ declares the Lord. ‘Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated …’ ” (Malachi 1: 2-3). Centuries later still, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said, “It is a halacha [rule, law, inescapable truth] that Esau hates Jacob.” Why then does Moses tell us not to despise Esau’s descendants?
The answer is simple. Esau may hate Jacob. It does not follow that Jacob should hate Esau. To answer hate with hate is to be dragged down to the level of your opponent. When, in the course of a television program, I asked Judea Pearl, father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, why he was working for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims, he replied with heartbreaking lucidity, “Hate killed my son. Therefore I am determined to fight hate.”
As Martin Luther King said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Or as Kohelet said, there is “a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” (Eccl. 3: 8)
It was none other than Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai who said that when Esau met Jacob for the last time, he kissed and embraced him “with a full heart.” Hate, especially between brothers, is not eternal and inexorable. Always be ready, Moses seems to have implied, for reconciliation between enemies.
Contemporary Games Theory suggests the same. Martin Nowak’s program “Generous Tit-for-Tat” is a winning strategy in the scenario known as the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Tit-for-tat says: start by being nice to your opponent, then do to him what he does to you (in Hebrew, middah kneged middah). Generous Tit-for-Tat says, don’t always do to him what he does to you or you may find yourself locked into a mutually destructive cycle of retaliation. Every so often ignore (i.e. forgive) your opponent’s last harmful move. That, roughly speaking, is what the Sages meant when they said that God originally created the world under the attribute of strict justice but saw that it could not survive. Therefore He built into it the principle of compassion.
Moses’ commands against hate are testimony to his greatness as a leader. It is the easiest thing in the world to become a leader by mobilizing the forces of hate. That is what Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic did in the former Yugoslavia and it led to mass murder and ethnic cleansing. It is what the state controlled media did – describing Tutsis as inyenzi, “cockroaches” – before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It is what dozens of preachers of hate are doing today, often using the Internet to communicate paranoia and incite acts of terror.