Last week, I gave a short presentation on the most celebrated verse in Leviticus: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18) I pointed out that it is immediately preceded by another verse commanding us to “not hate your brother in your heart.” Before we can hope for the high ideal of loving our neighbors, I suggested, we first have to struggle with the baser task of rooting out hatred from our hearts.
After class, a student approached and asked, “But is it okay to hate our enemies?”
We might begin by asking a prior question: Should we regard anyone as an enemy at all, or should we strive to move past such categories altogether? But if we decide it is morally imperative to have enemies (or simply concede that we do in fact have them) we can then ask: Should we allow ourselves to feel hatred for them — or even compel ourselves to, as one position in the Talmud (Pesachim 113b) maintains? Or is it possible, as some religions suggest, to actually love our enemy? Is that also Jewish ideal?
I mumbled my way through some of these questions, leaving my student as confused as I was. Only later did I remember an alternative possibility offered by the great 16th-century mystic philosopher Rabbi Yehudah Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague. His magnum opus, Gevurot Hashem, is a study of the miraculous nature of the exodus from Egypt. Our ancestors certainly had enemies in that story. And indeed, the Maharal, known for his sharp pen, has plenty of terrible things to say about the Egyptians in the opening chapters of the book.
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But his tone begins to shift in chapter four, when he asks: If Egypt was such an evil, wretched nation, how could it have been the place where Israel, the holiest of nations, was formed? He answers:
For one thing is activated by its opposite, only when its opposite acts upon it — for a thing is not activated by itself … So it is precisely because [Israel and Egypt] were in opposition that they were so connected. That is why they acted upon one another. For sweetness does not act upon darkness, nor does heat act upon darkness. Heat acts upon cold, just as sweet acts upon sour — because they share a quality.
This principle, that opposites are inherently related because they exist as two points on a spectrum, is central to the Maharal’s thought. As he says in the opening line of another of his books: “When a good thing is known from its opposite, that is true knowledge.”
The Maharal is not the first to suggest that opposites can inform one another, and that we therefore learn about things per contrarium — by contrasting them. That kind of logic can be found in Aristotle, and then in the medieval scholars influenced by him. As the Maharal uses it here, the suggestion appears to be that our enemies can serve as a kind of reflection that helps us understand ourselves better.
But the Maharal is adding something else here when he says that one thing is “activated” by its opposite, and that Israel and Egypt “acted upon one another”? In the next chapter, he elaborates:
For even though two opposite forces can antagonize one another, nevertheless, because they are opposites, together they make up a complete whole. It is for this reason they are connected, so that they can come together to complete the whole.
The implication here is rather provocative. Now it seems that not only does my enemy help me understand who I am, but more than that, my enemy holds some part of the truth that I do not. If I stand in opposition to someone else, it must mean that my position represents only part of the total picture of reality. For reality itself is a unity, a wholeness created through the harmonization of opposites. The Maharal seems to be saying that evil, too, is an important part of our existence.
We might object that it’s one thing to say that light and dark, hot and cold, or sweet and sour, are all essential parts of the grand scheme of creation. But aren’t there evil forces so despicable they simply don’t belong in the world at all? The Maharal anticipates this question:
Do not ask if this principle applies only to opposites like fire and water, each of which has an important place in reality, but not to opposites like good and evil. That is not the case, for even though evil is a lesser reality, nevertheless good and evil together complete the whole picture of reality. And so this, too, is a necessary part of creation.
From this it follows that we should value our enemies. They are our other halves, our unexpected partners in creation. This does not mean that we must love them, exactly. But neither will it serve us to dismiss them as worthless or to waste energy hating them.
Rather, the Maharal is pushing us toward the challenging proposition that we need our enemies, for they hold some part of the larger truth that we are missing. If we could learn to identify and integrate that truth, it would allow us to come closer to wholeness. In such a fully integrated reality, finally, there would no longer be a need for enemies at all.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 17, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
