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When we are provoked, we must generally respond without shaming our antagonists, nor allowing anger to cloud our judgement.
It is not always ethical to go along with others’ wishes.
Saying yes when our principles require the answer to be no, is to compromise
our own integrity. In the context of marriage, saying yes against our
principles or needs, has this result: “the lips may be moving one way, but
the heart may be saying no silently until the heart breaks from the weight of ’nos’[i]."
Sometimes, disagreement escalates into identity conflict[ii] and becomes a contest of
claiming the moral high ground – each party trying to be deemed the “good one”
and cast the other as the villain. It can then become especially tempting to inflict
pain on one’s opponent. Especially for people who have been hurt deeply – and
who hasn’t been - there can be an urge to lash out. This blog post will explore
the merit of being agreeable in disagreement.
Let us consider what happened between Moses and the Israelites in the desert. “There was no water for the people to drink, so they gathered onto Moses… (the wording in Hebrew is very similar to the modern expression “pile on”). The people quarrelled with Moses, saying, “If only we had died when our brothers died… Why did you bring [us]… to this desert… and why did you take us out of Egypt… to this terrible place with no grain or figs or vines or pomegranates? ...[iii]”.
While there was a legitimate water problem to solve, the rhetoric from the Israelites was a broad rejection of Moses and God. Let’s think of the relationship between the people and Moses and God as a marriage. Only a short time ago, God - with Moses as his visible messenger - was the knight in shining armour that rescued the Israelites – damsel in distress – from the oppression of Pharaoh. The people threw caution to the wind and displayed great faith in God and Moses, his servant[iv], walking after Him bravely into a desert, where nothing had been planted[v]. But the honeymoon didn’t last, and the Israelites’ stance was like yelling “Why did I ever marry you? I wish I never met you.”
In response to this attack on Moses, Moses lost his temper with the Israelites, and he used a derogatory label to shame them. In his anger[vi], Moses muddled God’s instructions to him about how to miraculously draw water from a stone. Although God told Moses to speak to the rock to draw water from it, he, instead, hit the rock with a stick. God was disappointed with the way Moses handled this situation, and told him that, because of this failure, Moses would not bring the people to the promised land[vii].
Moses had plenty reason to feel angry. The people had, yet again, delegitimised his leadership and life’s achievements. This attack came at a particularly vulnerable time for Moses as he mourned the death of his sister, Miriam[viii]. Yet, one commentator sees Moses’ angry reactions as a significant failure.
The amazingly kind, Berditchever, taught that you can rebuke people, using two different methods. One approach is positive and builds people up. It reminds the people that their very souls originate immediately beneath the Creator’s throne in heaven. It tells people about their ability and privilege to provide God with the pleasure he gets from His people performing His will. The other method of admonishing people involves putting people down and shaming them.
When the positive method is used, it introduces positive energy into the physical world, so that the creations willingly provide for the people. In the case of Moses, if he had spoken positively to the people, then the rock would have responded to Moses’ words with flowing water. However, when people are denigrated, the creations are not in a state of flow. The only way to get them to provide for humans, is with great coercion symbolised by their being beaten with a stick[ix].
There will be times in our lives when others’ disrespect toward us, or unwillingness to support our wishes, might make us feel like we are spiralling down to feel small like a mouse “insignificant, under the foot, hiding, timid and on the run”. It is at such times that we overcompensate for such feelings by swinging in the opposite direction, to become a “monster… obnoxious, and overbearing”[x]. This reaction is understandable but ultimately very destructive - it interrupts the flow of the good things we need and want for ourselves and the people around us.
[i]
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
[ii] Heen, S. Patton, B. Stone, D. 2021, Difficult
conversations, Penguin
[iii]
Numbers 20:2-5
[iv] Exodus 14:31
[v] Jeremiah 2:2
[vi]
Sifre to Numbers 31:21, see also Talmud Pesachim 66b, every man who rages, if
he is wise his wisdom will leave him…
[vii]
Numbers 20:7-12
[viii]
Numbers 20:1
[ix]
R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Kedushas Levi, on Chukas, Vdibartem El Haselah,
p. 303, Sifrei Ohr Hachayim edition, Jerusalem
[x]
Brenner, M (2011) Conscious Connectivity, p.70, drawing on the work of Pat
Palmer
