It’s one of those things you’ll hear over and over in the Jewish world: Causeless hatred destroyed Jerusalem. Fix the hatred and rebuild Jerusalem.

The source is a passage in the Talmud, Yoma 9b. First, the Talmud describes the situation that brought about the first destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Babylonians: rampant idolatry, wanton murder and flagrant adultery. And then the sages ask—and you can feel the agony and anguish in the question—about their own era:

And the Second Temple, when they were occupied in Torah, mitzvahs and acts of kindness—why was it destroyed?

Because there existed causeless hatred.

Read that carefully. The Jews weren’t just learning Torah, not just doing mitzvahs, not just acting out kindness—they were fully occupied in these things. From all the evidence we have, it was a time when study of Torah flourished, and along with that, many, many good deeds. People were caring for each other. Not exactly the bloodbath of in-fighting and hatred that one might expect to bring upon us almost two thousand years of exile.

The puzzle gets deeper. There’s one (just one) story to illustrate that causeless hatred, found in the Talmud, Gittin 55b:

Due to Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, Jerusalem was destroyed.

You see, there was a man who had a friend named Kamtza, and a rival named Bar Kamtza. This man made a feast. He told his attendant, “Go and bring me Kamtza!”

But instead, his attendant brought Bar Kamtza.

When this man found Bar Kamtza sitting at his feast, he said to him, “Just a minute! You and I are rivals. What are you doing here? Get up and get out!”

Bar Kamtza replied, “Since I have already come, let me stay and I will pay for whatever I drink and eat.”

The man answered, “No!”

Bar Kamtza replied, “I will pay for half the feast.”

The man answered, “No!”

“I will pay for the entire feast!”

Again, “No!”

And then this man grabbed Bar Kamtza, picked him up and threw him out.

Bar Kamtza said to himself, “The rabbis were sitting there. They didn’t protest. That means they were pleased that I was thrown out!”

So Bar Kamtza devised a means to slander his own people, convincing Caesar that they were planning a revolt. Within three years, Jerusalem was in ruins, the Temple Mount flattened, and our long and arduous exile had begun.

Now, hold on a minute:

It’s very nice that the rabbis are blaming themselves for the disaster, taking the load of guilt upon themselves. Very Jewish.

And yes, such an act of insensitivity was quite inexcusable.

But let me ask just two simple questions:

One: The story gives no hint of who was this man, or who were the rabbis sitting mutely around. The story provides only two names: “Due to Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, Jerusalem was destroyed.”

Now, Bar Kamtza may not have been the most endearing fellow to begin with—it’s not your average mean neighbor who goes slandering the entire nation to Caesar because his feelings were hurt. You might even argue that his reputation somewhat justified the treatment he received.

But Kamtza—what on earth did Kamtza do wrong? He didn’t even come to the party! Why is the disaster blamed on him?

Two—and more importantly: The punishment must fit the crime—because it’s meant to fix up the crime, to rehabilitate the criminal so that this won’t happen again. Now explain to me: How can exile and dispersion throughout the globe rehabilitate a crime of insensitivity at a party?

Jewish Grasshoppers

In our series Is Midrash For Real, we explained how to read stories of this genre, known as midrash. We also introduced one of the masters of midrashic interpretation, the 16th century Rabbi Yehuda Loewe, known as the Maharal of Prague. Here, too, the Maharal comes to the rescue.1

The first thing you have to know is that if the midrash tells you a name, there’s a reason that name is mentioned. The name means something—and in this case, something thematic to the story.

“What is a kamtza?” asks the Maharal. For one thing, kamtza is Aramaic for grasshopper.2

Here you have an interesting creature. It travels in a very great mass (when doing so, we call the same creature locust, or in Hebrew, arbeh—related to the word ribui, meaning many), yet it has no society. As the proverb goes, “There is no king among the locust.”3 No leader, no pecking order, no families—just a mass of alike creatures blown in by the wind.

So, too, says the Maharal, we can have a mass of people that live together, work together, even do nice things for one another—and yet have nothing holding them together other than circumstance. Quite simply: They are living in the same country, keeping the same customs, and so, they might as well get along.

What’s so terrible?

Because that is not the Jewish People upon which the Temple is built.

The First Temple, writes the Maharal, was built upon the sanctity of the Land. The Land of Israel demands sanctity—especially Jerusalem, and especially if you want a Temple there. Once that sanctity was profaned with adultery, murder and idolatry, the foundation was gone, the Temple could no longer stand and the people were forced to leave.

The Second Temple, however, was built upon the integrity of the community. The people returned on their own initiative from Babylon and set themselves the task of resettling the land and rebuilding the Holy City of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. They came as a single whole, as one person with one heart. And upon that Jerusalem and the Temple were built.

So when that integrity of the community began to crumble, the entire foundation of the Temple and Jerusalem crumbled. The very fact that there could be two Jews, one a friend and one a foe, living together in Jerusalem, that itself was a sign that the entire system had been undermined.4 It was a locust society—a mass of individuals held together by nothing but the wind. Circumstance.

The Dispersion Cure

So how is exile and dispersion the prescription to heal a crumbled, fractured community?

Simple, writes the Maharal: Because in such an exile, Jews are no longer a single nation by geographical circumstance—not even eating the same food, dressing the same dress or speaking the same language. Scattered to every corner of the planet, geographically, culturally and psychologically, we are forced to discover the essential oneness of our people that was so easily discarded when living together in one land.

Have we? That is up to us now.

And now is a good time.

Now we have discovered that we have no one to rely upon other than ourselves. Those with whom we marched, we funded, we supported by every means—they had no problem turning their backs on us when we were under assault.

Now is a good time because many of us have awakened from a great slumber. The Jewish-American dream proved to be just that—a dream and a delusion. We were not accepted because we bought into the dream, bought into the culture, bought into society, and packed away our own heritage in the attic. We were never really accepted at all.

Now is a good time because the Jewish heart is raw and ready. Chabad on Campus is thriving with record numbers. Mezuzahs keep climbing in demand. People who two years ago were a sealed box are now eager to discuss their Jewish soul and their faith. Soldiers of the IDF who have never wrapped tefillin in their lives come back from the battlefield demanding an opportunity to get wrapped and say Shema Yisrael with a living Jewish heart.

The question is whether we can take that newly found enthusiasm and bring it together in love and oneness. Can a Jewish Democrat and Jewish Republican join hands? Can a haredi Jew and one who considers himself secular be best friends? Can a Jew who marches for Israel sit together with a Jew who joins the protests so they can speak to one another with respect and dignity?

They both, after all, are Jews. That doesn’t change, no matter their beliefs, their intersections, or their lifestyles. Even if this Jew may slander his own people to Caesar.

You might be thinking we’ve got a long way to go for the entire Jewish people to unite. You might be correct.

But then, it was because of only two individuals, Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, and their interaction with one another that Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple burnt to the ground, and the entire nation cast into exile for nearly 2,000 years.

Perhaps it will take just you getting together with one nemesis to rebuild all that. Perhaps even today.