Do Not Hate Your Brother in Your Heart
The Hidden Hatred and Its Accumulation
Leviticus 19:17: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart.” The prohibition is specific: not hatred in general (which is a vague and broad category) but hatred “in the heart” — the hidden, unvoiced kind that the hated person never knows about. Expressed conflict, while painful, has an anatomy: it can be identified, addressed, and potentially resolved. Hidden hatred has no anatomy that the community or the hated person can engage. It exists entirely within the person who carries it, growing without check or correction.
Genesis 37:4 records the condition that precedes the crisis: “They hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him.” The “could not” is the Torah's observation of what hidden hatred does to the hater: it removes the capacity for normal relationship. The brothers were not merely angry at Joseph — their hatred had reached the level where ordinary speech was impossible. This is the internal state commandment #358 prohibits: the accumulated, suppressed hatred that corrodes the capacity for relationship even before any external action.
Rebuke as the Antidote
Leviticus 19:17 immediately provides the alternative: “hocheach tochiach et amitekha” — you must in any wise rebuke your neighbor. The double verb form (infinitive absolute + finite verb) signals emphasis and obligation: this is not optional. The Torah pairs the prohibition on hidden hatred with the positive command of rebuke because the two are connected: hidden hatred grows in the absence of expressed grievance. Rebuke — bringing the wrong into the open and naming it — creates the possibility of resolution that hidden hatred forecloses.
The halakha on rebuke (Arakhin 16b) provides precise conditions: rebuke must be private, not public; it must be genuine — aimed at correction, not at releasing the rebuker's anger; it must stop short of shaming the person. “And not suffer sin upon him” (the verse's closing phrase) is interpreted as: do not let your silence allow the other person to continue sinning, and do not shame them in the act of rebuking. The rebuke that shames is itself a violation. The commandment to rebuke and commandment #358's prohibition on hidden hatred form a pair: don't suppress the grievance silently; do express it in a way that respects the other person's dignity.
Joseph, Absalom, and the Silence That Becomes Crisis
The Nevi'im contains two major narratives of hidden hatred that illuminate commandment #358. In Genesis 37, Joseph's brothers nurse their hatred in silence. No rebuke is offered — neither to Joseph for his dreams nor to their father for his favoritism. The silence compounds until the crisis at Dothan, where the murder plan is hatched (37:18–20) and moderated to sale into slavery (37:26–28). Two decades of family rupture follow. The repair in Genesis 45 and Genesis 50 shows what the years of hidden hatred cost: Joseph weeps; the brothers are still afraid of his memory of the wrong twenty years after their reunion.
In 2 Samuel 13:22, Absalom's hatred of Amnon was visible to the text's narrator but hidden from everyone in the court: “Absalom spake unto Amnon neither good nor bad.” The visible symptom — a total absence of speech between two brothers — was Absalom's commandment #358 violation made external. The hatred that could not be spoken was also not resolved. Two years later it produced premeditated murder. The connection Leviticus 19:17 makes between hidden hatred and the command to rebuke is exactly what is missing in both narratives: the rebuke that might have discharged the grievance and prevented the violence was never offered.
- Joseph's Brothers — Gen 37:4: “they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him.” The paradigm of commandment #358 violated and its consequences: two decades of family rupture, Joseph's years in Egypt, the brothers' permanent fear that the account was still open.
- Absalom — 2 Sam 13:22: “Absalom spake unto Amnon neither good nor bad.” Two years of silence concealing hatred, followed by murder. The hatred in the heart that had no rebuke as an outlet had violence as its only remaining exit.
- Joseph — Gen 50:19–21: his response to his brothers' fear after Jacob's death shows the positive: “Fear not... ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” No residual hidden hatred; the account genuinely released. The contrast with his brothers' decades of hidden hatred is the Torah's illustration of the commandment's positive vision.
Read the source passage in the Torah reader.
Read in the Torah Reader — Leviticus 19:17