Log on to social media or turn on a cable news network, and one can easily find Americans—of many political persuasions—speaking of their partisan rivals as not only wrongheaded, but even as evil. Leon Morris and Zvi Hirschfield find in the Talmud a model for a more constructive approach:

In the Bible, the worst thing a person can be is an idolater. . . . The Bible also sees idolatry as an assault on truth, the foundation upon which a good society is built. In its day, idolatry was the sin of monumental proportions that was always threatening the vitality of the Israelite community. . . . The Bible’s punishment for the sin of idolatry is utter destruction.

The rabbis of the 2nd century CE changed this conversation in a clear way. Their approach was decidedly different from the literal approach of the Bible they studied. Many of them lived in mixed cities alongside populations that worshiped idols. They understood that they would not have the power to conquer Rome. The talmudic tractate of Avodah Zarah, [literally, “foreign worship”], is replete with attempts to draw boundaries that enable faithful Jews to avoid inadvertently supporting the idolatrous practices they disagreed with, while simultaneously embracing a shared public square.

America, it seems, is rediscovering the Bible’s approach to idolatry—but it is the rabbinic approach that is most desperately needed in our time. We simply cannot afford to see our diverse society with its very significant political and ideological differences in biblical terms. The rabbinic tradition helps us to understand that we cannot remove or wipe out difference. We do have to draw lines, of course, as they did. Yet, we need to learn to live with difference.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.