Love is Blind?

One of my favorite concepts from the first chapter of I and Thou by Martin Buber was that hate, not love, is blind. There is a lot of hate in our world, and much of it comes from not understanding other people and not being willing to see their humanity. According to Buber, “hate is by nature blind. Only a part of a being can be hated.” You have to ignore common human experience to hate.

I can just imagine a situation right now, where an American says, for instance, that they hate Iraqis or Palestinians. They associate all of these people with acts of terrorism committed by only a few, and turn their anger and hurt into hatred. But to do so, they have to ignore (or choose to not see) the humanity we all share! It’s easy to hate what we don’t know and are unwilling to understand. It would be much harder to hate a muhajjabe Palestinian woman (who covers her head), if you see her in her everyday life, making bread for her family, consoling her children when they fall down, taking care of her aged father… this might sound a little melodramatic, but it’s really what I thought of. Buber’s words make it so clear: Hate, by nature, is blind because you have to ignore the humanity that binds us all in order to hate.

Love, in contrast to all of this, cannot be blind for it must see the whole being to be real! We commonly speak of love as being blind, but in reality, for the love to be true, one must see their beloved in all of her beauty and ugliness, and yet still choose to love her. This is the example the Bible gives us of God himself, who sees our inmost, depraved being, and yet loves us anyway.

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