Why Hitler Saw Jews as a Threat to Humanity
7 min read
Fear builds imaginary worlds. Love sees the real one.
We’ve all had those nights where we wake at 3:00 AM and a minor worry suddenly feels like an absolute catastrophe. That difficult email, which seemed manageable at noon, feels like the end of our career in the pitch black of night.
Nothing in the real world has changed, but our anxious minds have rewritten reality.
That tendency to construct a terrifying world that doesn’t exist sits at the heart of Jewish history.
As Tisha B’Av approaches and our attention turns to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Sages direct us to a much earlier event. Long before the Temple’s physical walls fell, something had already collapsed in the Jewish psyche. The story begins centuries earlier, on a desert night when the nation wept over a catastrophe that existed only in their minds.
That night, the spies returned from surveying the Promised Land with a troubling report: there was no way to enter the land without being decimated. God’s promises, they concluded, could not be trusted. So the nation wept in their tents, convinced they were doomed.
The date was the ninth of Av, and those tears planted the seeds of every national tragedy that followed.
The obvious question: wasn’t their fearful reaction entirely human? They were newly freed slaves being asked to conquer fortified cities and fight literal giants. Even if they believed in miracles, they knew that victory might still come at a terrible cost. How many of them might fall?
Their failure came when fear ceased to be just an emotion and began rewriting reality.
Their failure, then, could not have been that they were afraid. Fear is human and understandable. Their failure came when fear ceased to be just an emotion and began rewriting reality.
They didn’t just report that the cities were strong; fear magnified the danger until the walls “reached the heavens.” They didn’t merely say the inhabitants were tall; they diminished themselves until they appeared “like grasshoppers in our own eyes.”
The dangers were real, but fear spun them into an outsized narrative that displaced everything else they knew. And their own words unwittingly revealed where that narrative had taken shape: “in our own eyes.”
The Talmud captures the gravity of that distortion in God’s response: “You cried a crying of nothing (bechiyat chinam); I will establish for you a crying for generations.” (Ta’anit 29a)
We often translate bechiyat chinam as “weeping without a cause.” But as we have seen, their fears were entirely reasonable. The dangers were real; they weren’t nothing.
The “nothing,” then, was not the physical reality before them. It was the catastrophic future they had entirely made up.
Crying for nothing is crying over the catastrophic future they had entirely made up.
They took a navigable challenge and elevated it to an impossibility. Worse, they took a lifetime of unmistakable Divine protection and recast it as evidence that God had brought them into the desert just to destroy them. The Torah records their devastating conclusion: “Because God hated us, He took us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites, to destroy us” (Deut. 1:27). They rewrote a lifetime of love as hatred.
Yet outside their tents, nothing had actually changed. The manna had fallen that morning. The Clouds of Glory still blanketed them. God’s commitment was entirely intact. The catastrophic world they wept over existed nowhere but in their own frightened imaginations.
“Crying for nothing” means crying over a reality that does not exist. It is the ultimate cognitive distortion, where fear no longer merely clouds our vision; it replaces it.
Now we can understand the underlying cause of the destruction of the Second Temple. The Sages say that it was destroyed, despite the generation’s occupation with Torah study, mitzvot, and kindness, because of sinat chinam, commonly translated as “baseless hatred.” Understanding chinam as “existing only in our imagination” reveals that sinat chinam is not simply hating someone for no reason; it’s hating a version of a person that we have entirely invented.
Once fear teaches us to misread God, it’s only a matter of time before we begin misreading one another.
When we engage in sinat chinam, we stop interacting with the real human being in front of us. We react instead to the stories we have written about them, until the actual person disappears beneath the monster we’ve constructed.
Bechiyat chinam (crying for nothing) and sinat chinam (hating for nothing) are the same failure of imagination aimed at different targets: the distortion that turned a loving Creator into an enemy now turns a neighbor into an existential threat.
If our ruin began with a failure of sight, rebuilding must begin with its recovery.
Ahavat chinam is often translated as “unconditional love.” But perhaps that asks us to begin too far down the road. Ahavat chinam may start with something more basic: learning to encounter another person as they are, rather than as our fears have imagined them.
Fear and suspicion pull us inward, trapping us within the stories we construct. Love draws us out of our own heads and turns our attention toward the person who is actually there. It allows us to see with a clearer eye, one less clouded by the distorted images within us.
A close friend doesn’t return our call. Within a day, fear has drafted the story: they’re annoyed with us, they’ve been drifting for months, the friendship was never what we thought. Nothing has actually happened: no fight, no insult, only silence and imagination. Love reads the silence differently: they must be swamped; I hope everything is all right. Love extends generosity before suspicion, and curiosity before judgment.
This is what our Sages call ayin tova—a good eye. It is the commitment to look past the defensive walls constructed by our fears and meet another human being on their own terms.
Yet love asks the good eye to look deeper still. This may help explain the familiar saying that “love is blind.”
The rebuilding begins the moment we open our eyes to the sacred world that truly exists.
At first glance, a “good eye” and blindness sound like opposites. Yet perhaps love is blind not because it fails to see another person’s flaws, but because it refuses to see only them. An ayin tova takes in the surface honestly, then keeps looking deeper, toward the tzelem Elokim within—an image of God that no failure or distortion can erase.
We live in a fractured world, made raw by polarization and by algorithms that reward our worst assumptions. The temptation to retreat into our tents and weep over imagined catastrophes has never been stronger.
This Tisha B’Av, as we sit on the floor and mourn, we might remember that the outer, physical Temple fell because the inner temple, the human heart, had already been shattered by suspicion and fear.
The repair, therefore, must begin where the destruction began: in how we see.
When we practice ahavat chinam, when we choose to love “for nothing,” we choose to look beneath the surface. We dismantle the fortresses of fear we built to protect ourselves, constructing in their place a space of trust and genuine sight, repairing the temple of the heart.
The destruction began the night we wept over a world that did not exist; the rebuilding begins the moment we open our eyes to the sacred one that does.
