At the beginning of January, two people, in two very different parts of the world, died. Both were consumed by passion for a cause.

Helen Suzman will be remembered as one of the few white South African politicians to oppose the odious theology of apartheid. She served in South Africa’s parliament for 36 years, again and again challenging the country’s leaders on their oppression of the black majority in that country.

She was a close friend of Nelson Mandela, visiting him and other opponents in prison and enduring years of taunts, obscene phone calls and threats to her life.

Many Jewish South Africans who also opposed apartheid voted with their feet, leaving the country during its years of distress – and enriching Israeli and Canadian Jewish communities in doing so.

But Suzman, born to Lithuanian Jewish parents who immigrated to South Africa, stayed the course. While not a fan of the worldwide boycott of her country, since she believed it harmed the very people it was intended to help, nevertheless she was at all times an outspoken critic of this policy of exclusion and lived to see it dismantled.

Her passion for justice never failed. Not content with helping to end apartheid, she remained a critic of the recent government, which fostered outlandish ideas about AIDS and continued to support the terrible Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

The same week that she died, another person passed into history. Nizar Rayan was killed during the first phase of Israel’s attack on Gaza and its Hamas leadership.

Rayan was also passionate – passionate about his hatred of Israel. He was, according to reports, a “hardline theologian and military commander.”

Give him his due. He believed passionately that Hamas leaders should live among the people openly – unlike many who apparently live in hiding, coming out only to shoot rockets or people. He believed so passionately in the cause of Israel’s destruction that he sent his own 22-year old son as a suicide bomber into Israel, and to certain death. His surviving son reportedly remains “committed to the resistance.”

Rayan fought with his own troops, according to press accounts of his death, and was an “iconic” figure, revered for his passionate and total commitment to the destruction of Israel. He died along with many family members and at least two of his four wives in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Consider these two lives and the passion each felt for the causes they espoused.

Suzman committed her life to creating a more just society in her homeland. When it was physically dangerous to do so, she spoke out when terrible things happened, including the murder of black activist Steve Bilko – a death that she insisted had to be examined. Even after leaving parliament, she helped oversee the first multiracial elections in South Africa and was proud to be deemed an enemy by Mugabe.

Today, South Africa, for all its problems, is a place she was proud to call home. It owes her much.

Rayan, too, was proud to be a fighter against the state he perceived as the enemy, even sacrificing his own son in a bizarre parody of the Christian belief in atonement through the crucifixion.

But what is Rayan’s monument? Continued warfare, a failed and ruined Gaza that’s incapable of feeding its own people and that’s spending aid money only for rockets with which to terrorize Israel.

And why did Rayan die in a refugee camp? Years after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, why are there still camps, instead of more homes, farms and businesses?

Even the ability of Gaza residents to work in such shared places as the Erez industrial area was taken away due to attacks. Greenhouses left by evacuated settlers were destroyed, not revitalized.

The Jewish icon of passion for a cause was Pinchas, who upon seeing an Israelite man copulating with a Midianite woman drove his spear through them both, thus supposedly earning the priesthood. But the rabbis were very quick to declare that his was a one-time act, not to be repeated.

Halachah, not individual passion, was to drive rabbinic Judaism.

The rabbis wisely realized that passion for a cause that’s not contained by moral codes would quickly lead to chaos.