The car that struck eight-year-old Charlotte Herzberg as she rode her bicycle in Monsey, New York, was driven by her father’s closest friend and study partner of seven years.
Yudi Herzberg arrived at the scene minutes after the call from his wife and saw two Hatzolah volunteers he knew well working over his daughter. One of them would not meet his eyes. Then he saw the car, and understood.
What happened in the next moments decided everything that followed. Herzberg understood that he was standing at a fork, and that the road grief would carry him down by default ran straight toward blame. He would not take it. This was a test, he concluded, and the only thing God wanted to know was whether a man could lose a child and still refuse to hate.
Before he left for the hospital, he walked over to his friend and embraced him. That night, after doctors told him Charlotte could not be saved, he stopped at the man’s house and embraced him again. The two of them still learn Torah together every morning.
Since then, more than 2,600 people have pledged an act of shalom (peace) in Charlotte’s memory. Feuds forty years old have ended. Estranged children have knocked on their parents’ doors.
We have just come out of Tisha B’Av, which makes the timing of this story hard to ignore.
Every Jewish child learns that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred. We repeat it so often that it has become background noise, a tidy moral we file away with the fast day. But look closely at what the Sages actually claimed, and the diagnosis is far more unsettling than the slogan.
They were describing a generation that kept the Torah. The Temple stood. The sacrifices were offered daily. The academies were full. By every measurable standard of religious observance, that generation was doing what God had asked of it. And it was annihilated.
How does a people lose everything while doing everything right?
The Netziv, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin of Volozhin, confronts the contradiction directly. Our Sages describe that generation as righteous and immersed in Torah. They also describe it as consumed by hatred. Both descriptions are true, he concludes, because the hatred grew out of the piety rather than in spite of it. They were scrupulous men who suspected anyone serving God differently than they did of being a heretic.
The hatred did not come from the absence of Torah. It came dressed in Torah.
This is why the Temple could not save them. God had told them from the beginning that it would not.
“You shall not hate your brother in your heart,” Leviticus commands, and in the very next verse, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:17-18). These are not pleasantries appended to the real business of religion. They sit in the middle of a chapter about holiness, alongside the prohibitions on theft, false witness, and cursing the deaf. The God of Israel does not accept an offering from a man who despises his brother. Isaiah said it with a bluntness that still stings:
In order for God to accept our worship, he says:
The Jerusalem Talmud draws the conclusion that most of us would rather not hear. Any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt, it says, is regarded as though it destroyed it. We are not paying off our ancestors’ debt. We are choosing, year after year, whether to repeat their sin.
Which raises the question that matters. If baseless hatred brought the house down, what raises it?
Rav Kook answered in one sentence, and it is among the most demanding sentences in modern Jewish thought. If we were destroyed, and the world destroyed with us, because of baseless hatred, then we will be rebuilt, and the world rebuilt with us, through ahavat chinam, baseless love.
Baseless love is not affection for people who have earned it. That kind of love runs on reasons, and reasons can be revoked. Baseless love is love that outlives the collapse of every justification for it. Love for the brother who was wrong and never admitted it. Love for the fellow believer whose politics you find intolerable. Love for the man whose car struck your daughter.
Zechariah, speaking to a generation that had watched the First Temple burn and was trying to build a second, made the terms explicit. The fasts of the fourth month, the fifth, the seventh, and the tenth will become seasons of joy and gladness, he promised, and then he named the condition: love truth and peace. Not conquer. Not construct. Love peace, actively, the way you love something you are pursuing.
Keep reading past the condition and you find what waits on the other side of it. Peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will come, Zechariah says, and many nations will seek the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem. Then he describes the moment itself: ten men from all the languages of the nations taking hold of the corner of a Jew’s garment and saying, let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you (Zechariah 8:20-23).
Zechariah is not describing spectators. Anyone holding that garment is holding it because he believes the God of Israel keeps His promises, and he is waiting for the same redemption we are. The condition Zechariah set is not ours alone to meet.
The generation Zechariah addressed did rebuild. Nearly six centuries later their descendants lost it again, not to Rome’s engineers but to their own contempt for one another.
We are the generation the prophets described, gathered from the nations, standing on the land, watching the promises arrive. Whether the last of them arrives depends on something absurdly small and nearly impossible: the phone call you have not made, the brother you have written off, the person you have decided is beyond reach.
Yudi Herzberg lost more than any of us should ever be asked to lose, and what he built out of it was peace. That is the charge Charlotte left behind, and it does not require a tragedy to answer. It requires a phone call, a door, a first move you have been waiting for someone else to make. Build peace, and hasten the redemption we are all waiting for.
