The other day I felt embarrassed when I reflected
on how I had performed in an important meeting. Unfortunately, I had talked too
much and listened far too little. On reflection, as I went into that meeting I
felt quite anxious about the anticipated outcomes of that meeting but I was too
preoccupied with work to deal with the fear. Dealing with our fears and
grievances ensures they don’t fester and explode into an avalanche of words, or
even violence. In this blog I reflect on my encounter with Kathryn Jones, a
tall woman of Muslim faith and Anglo-Saxon-Australian heritage, who is a
survivor of sexual abuse as a child and years of crushing domestic violence
(1). She is a passionate advocate for thinking based strategies to counter it.
However, I also want to explore how violence and fury might arise not out of
mere thoughts but rather out of deeply held beliefs and ideals. As an example
of the latter, I examine the case of Pinchas (or Phineas) that opens the Torah
reading of this week and appears to approve of the extrajudicial execution of a
sinner (2).
Thoughts are powerful. At a recent Islamic
Schooling Conference, I heard from Professor Stephen Dobson about one common
thread between the Norwegian
far-right terrorist Anders
Behring Breivik and the attacker of the Mosques in New Zealand. In both
cases, there were long simmering grievances that we can assume were never
adequately dealt with.
At the same conference I had the privilege of
listening to Kathryn Jones talk about resilience. In her book,'Step Up, Embrace
the Leader Within', Kathryn writes movingly of her profound pain: “My forehead
rested heavily on the prayer mat soaked by the flood of tears…" She felt
“worn down, beaten and empty”; (3) as her suffering in her abusive marriage
became progressively more acute. Despite her childhood and her more recent
pain, when I listened to Kathryn I felt a strong and positive energy emanating
from her. In addition to her mentoring work with Muslim women, she is also
engaged in interfaith outreach work in schools, with the Abraham Institute in
Adelaide, South Australia.
Kathryn typically begins her talk by using a
bubble machine that creates a continuous stream of soap bubbles that rapidly
and continuously appear and disappear. The bubbles serve as a metaphor for
thoughts. “Feelings come from thoughts in
the moment...” (4) Kathryn told us. Jewish mysticism teaches that emotions
are the offspring of our cognitive faculties (5). However, there is a
difference between the traditional insight and Kathryn’s point, in that the
cognitive faculties are not the same as the fleeting thoughts in the moment,
instead they are our underlying processes of cognition, including understanding
and knowing, and also encompass convictions.
What Kathryn did next really struck a chord with
me. She blew up a balloon and kept blowing until the balloon popped in a loud
bang. The balloon was a metaphor for our minds, and holding on to all the air
inside represents ruminating and not
letting go of painful, shameful and angry thoughts. The pressures that
accumulate usually harm the person holding on to those thoughts, and, often
enough, also cause harm to others.
I agree with Kathryn that violence often stems
from the challenges of the human condition, and that it is wrong to intrinsically
link it to any particular faith, as many do in
equating Islam with violence (6). However, religious as well as other
ideals and ideas have often led to violence. One example of this is the way
that the socialist dreams of the Soviet Union led to the purges, gulags and
repression that have had a direct impact on members of my Chabad Jewish
community including my own grandfather. The Torah reading this week has another
example, in which a violent act, done for the love of God, appears to be
condoned.
God rewarded Pinchas for his killing of a
prominent Jewish man named Zimri and a non-Jewish woman named Kozbi, who had
sex during a broader moral breakdown involving prostitution and idol worship
among the Israelites (7). Thankfully, the Talmud tells us that Pinchas' act was
disapproved of by the sages (8), which implies that this exceptional case
should never be taken as license for anyone else to imitate his act (9). Still,
this passage disturbs me. A surface reading of it seems to justify killing someone
for what appears to be an inter-ethnic consensual sexual act. However,
according to one traditional commentary this actually involved coercion. When
Kozbi refused to sleep with Zimri, “Zimri
grabbed Kozbi by her plaited hair...” (10). Be that as it may, it is still
a confronting story.
Without irony, the Torah tells us that the killer
is to be rewarded with a covenant of peace for his act of zealotry. His act of
violence against a man who transgressed God’s expectations of the Israelites is
said to have restored peace between God and the people (11). One commentary
suggests that God’s gift of a covenant of peace was “a protection against an inner enemy, lurking inside the zealous
perpetrator of the sudden deed, against the inner demoralization that such an
act as the killing of a human being, without due process of law, is liable to
cause” (12). We can say that while Pinchas acted out of zealous anger
stemming from his deeply held beliefs, rather than from stewing in lingering
unprocessed thoughts, he was nonetheless at risk of being haunted by the deed
after the fact.
Violence can certainly be driven by outrage
against a violation of a religious or secular ideal. In many cases there is a
need for tolerance of divergent beliefs, in other cases there is a need to
stand up to those who violate standards that are worthy of being upheld. On the
other hand there are a myriad of grievances and hurts that cause harm to the
people who continue to hold on to them; Kathryn’s example of letting it go is
often worth emulating. Perhaps as people resolve lingering anger or resentment,
it will be less likely to bubble out in violence, or even just expressions of
unreasonable irritability with people, harsh words or sub-optimal ways of
dealing with others.
Thank you very much to my son Aaron Menachem
Mendel Kastel for his editing and assistance with this blog post.
Notes
1) Jones, K, (2018), Step Up,
Embrace the Leader Within, Busybird Publishing, Victoria, Australia.
2) Numbers 25:11-15.
3) Jones, K. (2018), ibid, p. 7.
4) Jones, K, (2019) Back to the
Fitra Mentoring Program - Unbreakable Social Justice Through Emotional
Resilience, presentation at the Islamic Schooling Conference, Melbourne
Australian, 14.07.2019.
5) Tanya chapter 6, et passim.
6) Jones, K. (2018), ibid, p. 8.
7) Numbers 25:1-15.
8)
Jerusalem
Talmud, Sanhedrin 9:7.
9) Torah Temimah to Numbers
25:13, note 31.
10)
Talmud
Sanhedrin 82a.
11)
Ralbag,
Be’er Basadeh, on 25:12.
12)
Rabbi Zvi
Yehuda Berlin, in Ha’amek Davar, as quoted in Leibovitz, N., Studies in
Bamidbar, Pub. Department for Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, the
Joint Authority for Jewish Zionist Education, Jerusalem, p.331. Cf. also Ohr
HaChaim Deuteronomy 13:18 for a similar concept in another context.
