This is the tradition's indictment of itself and it is not a subtle one. A man sends an invitation to his friend Kamtza; the servant delivers it to his enemy Bar Kamtza, who arrives at the banquet and is publicly ordered out. He offers to pay for his food, then for half the party, then for the whole thing, and is thrown out anyway — in front of the assembled rabbis, none of whom object. Humiliated, he goes to the emperor and engineers a rejected sacrifice, and the revolt and the destruction follow. The Talmud says explicitly that Jerusalem was destroyed because of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, and elsewhere gives the general verdict: the Second Temple, where Torah and commandments and acts of kindness were practised, fell because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred among Jews. The move is deliberate and unusual — a defeated people writing a national catastrophe as its own moral failure rather than as the crime of the empire that carried it out. It is quoted constantly in contemporary Jewish argument, usually by whichever side feels hated.