How to Fight and Still Remain One People

A Dvar Torah for Acharei Mot–Kedoshim | Yom HaZikaron & Yom HaAtzmaut

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:

Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua, Ran son of Sara and Kenny. 

This is the week every year when the entire nation gets a kind of emotional whiplash.

On Yom HaZikaron, we stand with the families who have paid the most impossible price. We feel the weight of what it means to be a people — the sacrifice, the grief, the fierce love that holds a nation together even when it is breaking.

And then, with barely a breath between them, we arrive at Yom HaAtzmaut — gratitude, wonder, the almost impossible miracle of being here, still, in our land, together.

But beneath both days, a question waits.

Are we truly together?

Together — as people who can look at one another across the widest divides and still say: you are my brother. You are my sister. I am fighting for you, even when I am fighting with you.

That question is urgent right now. This week's parsha, in four extraordinary verses, offers us a most honest and demanding answer to this question.

Before the Pasuk: What the Torah Already Knows About You

In Sefer Vayikra, just before the famous sequence that commands us to love our neighbor, the Torah places an easily overlooked verse:

לֹא תֵלֵךְ רָכִיל בְּעַמֶּיךָ — לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל דַּם רֵעֶךָDo not go as a talebearer among your people — do not stand by the blood of your neighbor. (Vayikra 19:16)

Gossip and abandonment in the same breath.

The Torah is mapping something deeply human: when we carry hurt that has never been named, it doesn't disappear, it leaks. It comes out sideways — as lashon hara, as cold withdrawal, as the slow accumulation of evidence against someone we have already decided to resent. We don't stand by their blood because we have been quietly bleeding ourselves.

Only after showing us what unprocessed pain does to us, does the Torah say:

לֹא תִשְׂנָא אֶת אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָDo not hate your brother in your heart.

The Torah is aware of human reality. It is writing to people who have real grievances, people who have been genuinely hurt, passed over, dismissed, wronged. It takes those grievances seriously enough to give them a roadmap.

Step Zero: Your Hurt Is Real

Before we can understand what the Torah is asking, we have to be honest about something.

Some people feel attacked, overlooked, and carry wounds that have not healed. Some communities feel the weight of sacrifice is distributed unequally. Some spouses and friends have been genuinely hurt by someone they love. There are entire sectors of Israeli society who feel that the other side does not see them, does not value them, and does not carry the weight alongside them.

From that place of real pain, this pasuk can feel almost impossible.

How do you not hate in your heart when your heart is already on fire?

The Torah's answer is: do not let what you feel become who you are.

There is a difference between being hurt and becoming a person who carries hatred.There is a difference between being triggered and letting that trigger become the lens through which you see the other person forever.

The Torah sees your pain, validates it by addressing it directly. But it refuses to let your pain have the last word.

Important Clarification

This Torah is not speaking about situations of danger. There are people whose behavior is actively harmful — physically or emotionally — and the Torah does not ask a person to return to that. The principle of וחי בהם and the command of ונשמרתם מאוד לנפשותיכם make that clear: a person is obligated to protect themselves. The process described here applies where there is a relationship — where the other person can hear, where something can still be built. Where there is harm, the עבודה is to create distance, not deeper engagement.

The Pasuk: A Precise Technology

Vayikra 19:17–18 is a step-by-step sequence. Each piece depends on the one before it. And the order matters enormously.

לֹא תִשְׂנָא אֶת אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָהוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת עֲמִיתֶךָוְלֹא תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְאלֹא תִקֹּם וְלֹא תִטֹּרוְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ — אֲנִי ה׳

Do not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow. Do not bear sin because of him. Do not take revenge and do not bear a grudge. Love your neighbor as yourself — I am Hashem.

love is not the starting point. Love is the result. Here is how we get there.

Step One: Face What Is in Your Heart

לֹא תִשְׂנָא אֶת אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ

The Torah does not say: don't feel. It says: don't hate — and specifically, don't let hatred live in your heart, hidden, unnamed, quietly doing its work in the dark.

Why does it say hidden hatred? Because that is the most dangerous kind. Hatred that is acknowledged and named can be worked with. Hatred that sits silently in the heart distorts everything that comes after it — every conversation, every glance, every interpretation of the other person's motives.

The first step is radical honesty with yourself. The courage to look at what is actually living in you.

Am I angry? Why?Am I hurt? What actually happened?Is what I am feeling about this moment — or is this moment touching something older and deeper?

This is the beginning of what we might call becoming un-enmeshed — separating yourself from the reaction long enough to see it clearly. You are not your trigger. Your wound is part of you, but it is not all of you. Before you can speak to anyone else, you must first find the part of yourself that is separate from the pain.

Step Two: The Obligation to Speak — But From Where?

הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת עֲמִיתֶךָ

The Torah calls for engagement. Silence, avoidance, and the false peace of pretending nothing happened are not the goal. The doubled language — hocheach tocheach — is emphatic: you must speak. Even if it is hard. Even if it is awkward. Even if you are afraid.

But look carefully at who you are speaking to.

The word the Torah uses is עמיתך — your amitecha. This word comes from the root amat, meaning alongside, parallel, or adjacent. It names the other person as someone who stands next to you but is distinct from you. A separate being. Not an extension of your story about them.

The Rambam, in his formulation of this mitzvah in Hilchot Deot (6:7), uses language that is striking:

צריך להוכיחו בינו לבין עצמוOne must rebuke him — between him and himself.

The plain meaning is: do it privately, not publicly. But there is a deeper layer available here, and it is the heart of everything. Bein l'vein atzmo — between you and yourself first. Before you can truly be present with the other person, you must become present with yourself.

You cannot give real tochacha while you are still enmeshed in your own wound. If you walk into that conversation still merged with your hurt, you are not speaking to the person. You are speaking from your trigger. The person across from you — who may also be hurting, who may also have a story — will not receive it as care. They will receive it as an attack.

The Rambam is explicit about why this matters: tochacha is a mitzvah bein adam l'chaveiro — a commandment rooted in love and care for the other person's wellbeing. Which means the moment you approach it from your wound rather than from your concern for them, you have already stepped outside the mitzvah.

The Torah asks us not to let our trigger become the voice we speak from.

Step Three: Hold Both Truth and Dignity at Once

וְלֹא תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא

This is where most people fail, often because they are hurting.

The Torah is saying: even now, even after you have done the inner work, even when you are completely right, your words can still become a sin. The Talmud (Arachin 16b) makes clear that the sin is humiliation — publicly shaming the other, stripping their dignity, turning one action they did into a total definition of who they are.

Notice what the Torah is asking you to hold at the same time: full honesty and full respect for the other person's humanity.

You can and must say hard things.  But there is a way to say them that leaves the door open — that speaks to what happened rather than to who you are — and a way that slams it shut forever.

The moment you move from behavior to identity — from what you did to this is who you are — you have left tochacha and entered something else entirely.

Here is the difference:

"When you said that, I felt invisible. I need you to understand what that does to me."

versus

"You never consider anyone but yourself. You always do this. This is exactly who you are."

The first is tochacha. The second, even if every word of it feels true, is the chet the Torah is warning you about.

Step Four: Put Down the Score

לֹא תִקֹּם וְלֹא תִטֹּר

Even after the conversation. Even after you spoke and were heard. There is a pull.

To remember. To reference it next time. To hold it as evidence in the case you are building. To carry it as proof of who the other person really is.

The Torah says: put it down.

Because if every future conversation carries the full weight of every past wound, nothing new can ever grow between you. The relationship becomes a courtroom. And in a courtroom, nobody wins — they only accumulate verdicts.

This is not naive forgetting. It is the choice, made deliberately, to allow the relationship to be bigger than its worst moment.

Step Five: Now You Can Love

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ — אֲנִי ה׳

Only now does the Torah arrive here.

Notice: Hashem signs His name at the end of this commandment. Ani Hashem. This is Hashem saying: I am the guarantor of this process. When you do this work — all of it, in order — something becomes possible that I am personally invested in.

Love your neighbor as yourself through the process of facing them honestly, speaking from a clear place, guarding the other's dignity, and refusing to keep score.

This is love as a discipline, a practice, a set of choices made, repeatedly, on the other side of difficulty.

The Anatomy of Sinat Chinam

Chazal teach that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam — baseless hatred. We hear this every Tisha B'Av and nod solemnly. But there is a misunderstanding buried in how we receive it.

We think: our hatred is not baseless. We have real reasons. Real wounds. Real injustices.

That is exactly the trap!

Sinat chinam does not mean hatred without a cause. Almost no hatred is truly without a cause. Sinas chinam means justified indignation that was never processed, never brought into honest speech, never regulated — until the wound became the identity, and the identity became the hatred.

It begins with real hurt. It leaks out as lashon hara. It hardens into contempt. And somewhere along the way, the person we are hating stops being a human being with their own wounds and story, and becomes a symbol — a category, an enemy, a threat.

That is the churban.  The conflict is human and inevitable. What destroys us is what we let the conflict become inside us when we skip the steps.

Now look at the sequence again as a diagnostic:

Skip step one — leave the hatred unnamed in your heart — and everything you do is quietly poisoned by it.

Skip step two — stay silent, withdraw, avoid — and the hatred has nowhere to go. It doesn't dissolve. It ferments.

Skip step three — speak, but from your wound — and your truth becomes someone else's humiliation.

Skip step four — hold the score — and you will never build anything new together.

And you never arrive at love.

But when you do the work — when you face yourself honestly before you open your mouth, when you speak from care rather than from injury, when your words carry truth without contempt, when you put down the ledger — something becomes possible that wasn't possible before.

It is the ability to hold conflict without letting it become hatred. To see the other person as a person — still, even now, even in the middle of a real disagreement. To fight and still remain one people.

That is where love lives. On the other side of this process, chosen again and again.

The Personal and the National Are the Same Map

This is not two different teachings. The Torah gives us one map, and it works at every scale.

Between spouses: Real hurt. Unprocessed grievance. Words that started as truth and became weapons. The slow accumulation of evidence against the person you chose. This sequence is the path back — not to pretending, but to staying human with each other through the hardest moments.

Between friends: The thing that was said that was never addressed. The withdrawal that became distance that became estrangement. הוכח תוכיח — speak — is the hardest and most loving thing you can do. Not from superiority. Not from accumulated resentment. But from the clear, regulated place that says: I care enough about us to say this hard thing.

And between communities — between the different sectors of Israeli society, each carrying its own truth, its own sacrifice, its own sense of being unseen — the same map applies.

There are real wounds in this nation right now, about who carries the weight, and who doesn't. About what it means to serve, and what it means to be exempt. About sacrifice, and whether it is shared.

These are not wounds to be dismissed. The Torah sees them. The Torah validates them by taking the problem of hidden hatred seriously enough to address it directly.

But the question is not whether the pain is real. It is: what are we going to do with it?

Are we going to let it leak into lashon hara — into the contemptuous rhetoric, the dehumanizing language, the posts that strip the other side of their humanity?

Are we going to let it harden into sinat chinam — the hatred that feels justified because it started with a real grievance?

Or are we going to have the courage to do what the Torah demands — which is harder than either silence or attack?

To face what is in our hearts. To become un-enmeshed from our wounds long enough to speak from a clearer place. To say hard things in ways that leave the other person's dignity intact. To put down the score.

A New Reading of an Old Pasuk

Often, people read this sequence as a list of separate commandments. Don't hate. Rebuke. Don't sin in your words. Don't take revenge. Love.

But read together, in order, they reveal something more radical:

The Torah is teaching us that you cannot give real tochacha until you have first done the inner work of becoming yourself again.

The discipline of inner clarity — the un-enmeshment, the separation of what happened from what it activated in you — is not a preparation for the mitzvah. It is the mitzvah. It is what makes everything that follows possible.

When Hashem signs His name at the end — Ani Hashem — He is saying: this is the only path I know to a nation that can love. A nation that has learned the discipline of its inner world deeply enough to stay human with one another all the way through to the other side, even in conflict and disagreement.

For These Days

We are a people that has endured exile and loss — and is still here, still in relationship, still arguing.

On Yom HaZikaron, we remember the cost — the lives given, the families forever changed.

On Yom HaAtzmaut, we recognize the fact that we are still here, building.

Between those two days, the Torah asks a direct question:

Can we carry disagreement without turning it into hatred?

We have strength and conviction. What we need is inner discipline — the ability to face ourselves, to speak with clarity, and to hold the other person's dignity even in conflict.

That is the עבודה of our generation: to carry conflict, and remain whole.

The Torah does not ask us to stop fighting. It asks us to fight in a way that still allows for love.

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ — אֲנִי ה׳