"Hatred". A pair of words that allow any hatred to seem unnecessary, irrational, distorted. After all, it does not make sense to hate someone from your people / immediate environment / your family. It's exaggerated, to hate like that, unnecessary, just.

When people say "I hate eggplant", it's a real free hatred, almost a contempt for the word. But sometimes we rightly hate, and we have a great reason to hate. Someone who has done something to us that will not be done, someone who has hurt us or someone who has lied to us, is allowed and legitimate to hate him. 

And to reconcile with someone like that takes a lot more than words. To complete, or at least stop hating, one has to pay a very heavy price. And the big question is not whether we want reconciliation, after all the bottom line is most people prefer to live in peace and quiet and tranquility rather than in constant conflict and what accompanies it. The question is whether we are willing to pay the price of reconciliation.

We are surrounded by instant reconciliation: leftists and rightists, religious and secular, Ilana Avital and Israel Oglebo. Everything is considered a bloody conflict and therefore anything can be resolved in an "exciting" television meeting or in a "penetrating" discussion. Both parties arrive at a restaurant or studio, bring a camera, pour out their heart and hop - a hug at the end. Every year we receive a booklet of reconciliation recipes for the holiday, on Shavuot you will bake a cheesecake and a pie, on Tisha B'Av you will be reconciled, what does it matter what you have as long as the photos are beautiful? 

Sentences like "we are one people" are thrown into the air. There is also "you know, in the heat of things." And we have not yet addressed the genre of burnt-out fuse, the same ones that testify to themselves that they "warm up quickly and then calm down." Nothing was really resolved, no one went through a process, nothing changed, but hey, we paid our debt to Tisha B'Av and we feel superior and humane, here we discovered the person behind the image, the group behind the stereotypes. 

It's just that all these encounters, bottom line, are ego encounters. They supposedly make you give it up because you took a step towards who you hate and reached out, but in fact they increase it more. Why? Because you have not really given up on anything, not on a position or money or territories or a big, sharp pain that pierces every time you remember. Because 10 minutes after this meeting you will be you again and the other side will be him again until some creative researcher decides to meet you again in front of the camera on Tisha B'Av in two years.

At the end of this meeting you will be back to being you and the other side will be back to being until some creative researcher decides to meet you again in front of the camera on Tisha B'Av in two years. 

Reconciliation changes atmosphere and situation and reality. But for that to happen, he must first and foremost change you.

True reconciliation is to really give up something that is very important to you, something that is in your blood, in your soul, an organ in your body. 

True reconciliation does not make you smile, hug, happy, it is not a celebration or a cheer of festivals. It hurts and burns and burns like a bleached sword on bare skin.