The First Temple, why was it destroyed? Because of idolatry, murder and adultery. The Second Temple, when they were occupied in studying Torah, doing mitzvahs, and acts of loving-kindness, why was it destroyed? Because there were those who were intolerant of others without cause. Which teaches us that senseless intolerance is equal to idolatry, murder and adultery combined. (Talmud Yoma 9b.) There is no sin of senseless intolerance listed in Torah. And yet, while the cardinal sins of Torah demanded only 70 years of exile, intolerance is so sinister, so powerful, it can take us almost two thousand years to heal from its wounds. In simple terms, it’s much easier to deal with obvious, open failures and repair them. Intolerance, however, comes concealed beneath layers of justifications and self-righteousness. When you don’t believe you’ve done anything wrong, and on the contrary, that you were fighting a holy war, it’s hard to make up for all the damage caused. Yet there is a deeper reason: Other sins, even the most heinous sins, are symptoms of flaws in the human person. To repair those flaws, each of us is granted 70 years upon this earth—ten years for each of the seven categories of emotions. But intolerance of the other lies at the primal genesis of evil, at the point of fissure and subsequent fragmentation that occurred in the earliest...