Emuna 1 – Anger 0
Even really level-headed people sometimes morph from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde over a person in a car in front of them not seeing that the light has changed.
The Seven Pillars of Faith, Part 4
In the Seven Pillars of Faith, the Fourth Pillar of Faith: Not Getting Angry
“When one hears someone insulting them, they should keep silent and hold their peace.” (Likutey Moharan 1:6)
Should a forty-one-year-old woman who is six months pregnant and hormonal like never before in her life write an article about not getting angry? Some, and by some I mean my husband, might say, “No. That woman should not. She should read articles about how to not get angry. And her husband and friends should read articles about how to not get angry when she bites their heads off and overreacts to everything.” Sure, there is some truth in that. But look at it this way, Hashem, the Great Conductor, is making sure every note is played when it should be played. He in His infinite wisdom knew that during a particularly hormonal and turbulent week a woman who needs to think about taking temper control to a new level would benefit from pondering this subject. So I will not argue with the Creator.
Read the quote from Rabbi Nachman again. It is one of the most profound, action oriented, and demanding requests that can be made of a mere mortal. There are tales of righteous people doing this told to generation after generation of Torah believers for a reason. When a person is able to do this, to rise above insult, we look on in awe as if they have just accomplished a super human feat. I think they have.
There is a delicious kosher shawarma joint here in Atlanta owned by an Israeli. It is really quite yummy. Once I popped in for a pita full of something delicious. In front of me was a middle-aged Orthodox gentleman and his wife, nicely dressed. They were standing a little bit away from the counter solemnly looking down at a little red and white checked paper boat in his hand that was full of falafel balls. The woman looked stressed as she shook her head back and forth. “No, no. This won’t work. It still has parsley in it. It can’t have any in it at all.” Her husband sheepishly brought the portion back to the cashier who looked a little bit afraid of returning anything else to the cook. The cook popped his head around the corner, muttered something in Hebrew with the cashier, and took it back for what was at least a third try.
In a normal restaurant anywhere I have ever lived, there is no way the whole scene would have unfolded like that. Of course now I can look back on it and deduce with a fair amount of certainty that she was pregnant and hungry like no one’s business and totally understand her extreme revulsion over the thought of eating even a fleck of parsley. That falafel might have been the one thing she could conceive of eating and it needed to be just right. But she was not clearly pregnant to the cook or to the young guy behind the counter, yet everyone – especially her husband- was focused on one thing: making sure this woman got the food she really wanted even if they needed to cook it over and over to get it right. No one yelled at anyone. No one made her feel uncomfortable. They just super politely handled a touchy situation without uttering, at least aloud, any curse words.
Why is it so remarkable that someone should not explode over such a situation? What’s the big deal really? OK, so the restaurant loses a little bit of money. They also pretty much guarantee that the couple will come back again. They do something nice for someone. I’m sure the cook and his buddies in the back got to snack on the previous orders she returned. So who is hurt? Yet we all know that in most places in the world the husband would have had to pay for every darn order if the cook would have been at all willing to even make a special batch sans parsley. In most places in the world, someone would have declared “Enough!” and nasty insults would have been hurled over something as trivial as a stupid ball of falafel.
Our egos are so fragile that it takes almost nothing to instigate a battle. Even a really level-headed person can morph from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde over a person in a car in front of them not seeing that the light has changed. The Evil Inclination seems to be on high alert waiting to savor a moment when we declare our superiority to our fellow man and let loose on someone over literally nothing. There is no insult in failing to recognize the changing of a light, yet in a flash we are taking it personally and many of us are leaning on the horn, frightening the other driver, and making the passengers in our car a little bit uncomfortable too, over nothing. Of course there are times when we must withstand actual insult. If it is hard for us to withstand someone accidentally cutting in line in front of us, or some such minor infraction, how on earth can Rabbi Nachman actually expect us to ‘hold our peace’ when someone really lays into us with scathing invectives?
Rabbi Brody writes about this a great deal in The Trail to Tranquility. Everything that happens to us comes from the Creator. We have freewill, but God, being all knowing, all powerful, and existing outside of space and time, is able to place every insulting moment we experience right where we need it to be. Our soul needs to have the experience that God is putting before us. As Rabbi Brody has put it, God is using the person in front of you as a stick with which to hit you. I know that sounds rough, but that’s how insult feels. Should we be angry with the stick? And since we know that God’s love for us is so immense it is impossible for us to even conceive of it, we know that God doesn’t want to hurt us. He wants for us to derive some sort of benefit from the situation, even one that is God forbid, extremely taxing and painful.
That is why this is a pillar of faith, a fundamental support that holds up our faith in the Creator. Everything is coming from Him, not just the gifts that are easy to receive. If we only say thank You for the easy gifts, then what are we to do with all of the other experiences we have in life? As challenging as some of our lives have been, imagine how much easier we have had it than so many millions upon millions of people. It is relatively easy for us to find many blessings that are so delightful to receive we have to force ourselves to stop and say thank You, to not take them for granted. Imagine the life of a child who is an AIDS orphan in Africa. If we don’t recognize that it all comes from the Creator, then God forbid, we can end up turning away from God and diminish Him in so doing. We can end up thinking about some other force in the universe that must be in control, delivering the bad stuff to us, which clearly undermines one’s faith. It all comes from God, so we are forced to reflect on why we needed to experience something and to humble ourselves.
When we are insulted, if we can find the strength to say, “This too is for the good” even aloud to the person insulting us, then we are doing something profound and great and something to takes incredible strength. We are saying to the person, “I know God is using you to tell me something. I am going to focus on Him right now, not your mistake.” We are depriving the fire of the oxygen it needs to keep burning and are filling our souls with divine light.
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