Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: World needs ‘kosher hate’ of evil

Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, known for “hot takes” on numerous issues, says the answer to global problems of racism, including antisemitism, is a healthy dose of “kosher hate.”

The informal definition of kosher is “of something genuine” or “legitimate.” And Rabbi Boteach says there can be a legitimate form of hatred, specifically the hatred of evil. His new book “Kosher Hate” was published last month by Wicked Son, an imprint for Jewish books at Post Hill Press.

“In the endless fight against racism, antisemitism, [and] bigotry, we have neutralized the single most important weapon in our armory, which is to hate evil,” Rabbi Boteach said Monday in a telephone interview. “If you hate evil, you fight evil. The Torah has always enjoined moral people to hate evil.”

It’s “not enough” motivation to acknowledge that the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis exist, he said. Nor is it sufficient to stop those intending to kill Jews in Israel and Europe, Uyghur Muslims in China, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or Blacks in America.

“What if you actually hated these groups?” he said. “If you were repulsed by them, you couldn’t be indifferent to them.”

Rabbi Boteach has written several books with titles beginning with the word kosher, such as “Kosher Sex” and “Kosher Jesus.” He asserts that Jesus has been misread on the subject of hate.

“So many of our Christian brothers and sisters have been taught in the New Testament that they’re not supposed to hate, and this is an erroneous understanding of Jesus’ teachings,” he said. “Jesus never said to love God’s enemy, like the mullahs of Iran who stone women and hang gays from cranes. … Your ‘enemy’ is the guy that takes your parking space at the mall.”

In his new book, Rabbi Boteach writes: “We do our youth no favors by teaching them phony universalistic ideas like all people have the same attitudes toward humanity. Teachers cannot be afraid to express fact-based opinions that distinguish, for example, between terrorists and freedom fighters. … More than ever before, the world’s future depends on a return to religious morality with a strict emphasis on loving goodness and hating evil.”

The rabbi said the United Nations “would stop protecting despotic, evil regimes” if the world community had the same conviction to fight evil that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had in leading their nations against the Nazis during World War II.

He said the U.N. would be a “two-tier” system in which liberal democracies with freedom of the press have full participation and dictatorships would have diminished roles.

Under such a structure, “the international community would come to China and say, ‘There will be no Winter Olympics [at] the beginning of 2022 unless you stop the slaughter and persecution of the Uyghurs,’” he said.

Such a body also would cut off international aid to Hamas and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, Islamist militant groups dedicated to annihilating Jews in Israel.

“We would not see people who practice these policies as benign, we would see them as practicing evil, and we would fight and resist that evil,” Rabbi Boteach said.