Tag Archives: revenge

Letting It Go: TorahCycle Miketz

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Miketz 2014The old adage goes, Revenge is a dish best served cold. That suggests it’s better to be tough (so you are not hurt again) and cunning (until you can get even). Not good for anyone, including those who’ve been hurt. Ditto for immediate responses of anger, physical violence, and words that cannot be unspoken. All set us on a path to unhappiness, disease, dis-ease, and a generalized sense that the world is an unfriendly, even hostile, environment.

But hurt is a heavy burden. You know the difference between the lightness you feel when you are joyous and the weight sadness brings to your soul. In the movie 21 Grams, that miniscule amount is the difference between a living person and their empty husk. Would it be more on a very bad day?

Other than spirit itself, what weights a soul? Wounds, sadness, anger, regret, unrequited longing, unhappy memories, words spoken and not, scars of body, mind, and heart.

The grudges and hurts of a lifetime form a subliminal refrain. Something your parent or a teacher said. The ex you can’t get over. A bad review, criticism from a friend, a mistake you can’t forgive yourself for making, the chance you didn’t take. It all festers. Whether we want revenge, oblivion, or another chance, we’re unlikely to get it this time around. We need forgiveness, from and to ourselves and others.

In this week’s reading, Joseph, now a governor of Egypt, looks down from his dais at the very brothers who sold him into slavery. They’ve come petitioning for sanctuary and grain.

What’s a guy to do? Embrace and thank them for initiating events that brought him to high position? Or hide behind the masks of office and test them, see if they are worthy of his help?

It’s the rare person who would choose the former. But bearing a grudge keeps him caught in a dark place too. He escaped the pit and slavery, but they cast a shadow on his soul. The forgiveness he is working on towards those who wronged him will benefit him as much as those who treated him badly.

Often times we bury our wounds in our bodies. We encapsulate them emotionally but they fester in our aching backs or sour tummies. They simmer, keeping us unbalanced, hurting, and unavailable to be fully present

It’s amazing what letting go of old pain can do to heal us. Recent studies have shown that memory transfers cellularly to future generations. So lineages of abuse and trauma get multiplied. What if we infected one another with forgiveness and goodness instead?

Q: How can we interrupt the cycle? A: No revenge: cold, warm, or otherwise. Keep releasing the anger, grief, and sadness, no matter how old or seemingly small. Remember it; look at it and let it go; then sweep out of your soul. Rinse and repeat. You’ll know when you’re clean.

From Peter Heller’s new novel The Painter:

      It’s not possible to hold that much pain.

There was a silence and then she said, Even the earth rests. The moon swims up, thin as grass, and the stars, and you can see every one. It is a much quieter song.

 

All or Nothing?: TorahCycle Ki Tzeitzei

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Ki Tzeitze 2014I got an image earlier of a wadi (a valley, ravine or other potential channel for water), most often heard in the context of Three hikers were washed away in a flash flood in the wadi.

That’s how I respond to this week’s reading. Life’s going along in its fashion, things more or less in their place. Changes ongoing but not dramatic, maybe even subtle. Life in motion and at rest, at the same time. The world feels natural and manageable.

Then suddenly Whoosh. A Big Shift. An idea or feeling that’s so hard to wrestle with that you’re washed away in its complexity.

Torah offers a strong narrative about personal development, told through stories and history. We’re also given a gazillion mitzvot (rules about daily life). They’re a good template for a life of goodness and justice. But I care a lot more about the big questions, the kind that sweep over you like the rushing water, and are as difficult to tame.

This week’s perhaps the deepest: to forgive or not. The last line is You shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget

Huh?

Are we supposed to forget or to remember? To remember, but make everyone else forgets? To remember forever so the violence that Amalek signifies never happens again? To be hyper-vigilant? How will that help us make peace?

I’m framing the question as: Do we remember and never forgive? Or can we forgive, even if we do not forget?

Are there harms so egregious they cannot be forgiven? What happens to us if we do not? if we allow the harm that has been done to define us? Who do we become? And what happens to the collective that we share?

The 20th century alone has names and places that make our understanding of evil simply stop cold. So do equally painful stories of abuse in the lives of friends and loved ones. Much as we might try, we can’t assuage their horror and the pain.

The desire to strike back is great, with a flood of emotions just as intense and formidable as the waters rushing through the wadi. Forget forgiveness; we want revenge. We want to have the stories heard, and to have evildoers punished. Neil Gaimon’s new graphic short story The Truth Lives in a Cave in the Black Mountains is a tough microcosm of these emotions. I understand it, but it’s sad.

My own hurts are small in comparison, and I don’t have any moral authority to say Forgiveness makes this world a better place, so please find a path to it. But I’d like to think that we’re hardwired for kindness as well as justice, and that we can learn to be good to one another in ways that will break the cycles of anger and violence. That we can remember the harm not to stoke the fires of revenge, but to remind us to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

It shouldn’t be an all or nothing world. If we can inch our way towards forgiveness, perhaps we’ll be able to make more peace.