This is the sermon I delivered last night at Temple Beit HaYam.
What is it that gets you the most angry?
There is all kinds of anger. There is the anger that can erupt in a family when people feel that they have been mistreated by the people they love and trust. There is the anger that happens in work places when people are frustrated that others have not kept their commitments to do the work they depend on. There is the anger that people of different outlooks and ideologies experience when they see society moving in a direction different from what they had hoped.
Whole nations and whole societies can become angry. That is what happened to the United States after the September 11 attacks when we fumed with rage at the people who attacked us. It is what has been brewing in the Middle East for more than 60 years as the Israeli people have struggled just to exist in the face of enemies all around them.
There is righteous anger, in which people’s passions rise against injustice and the failure of a community to live up to its highest standards. And there also is self-righteous anger, in which people use their sense of victimhood as a cudgel to strike against others.
In all of these different types of anger, there is also the possibility of the anger that exists within our own psyches. We often find ourselves at war with ourselves or with our memories. When we feel that we ourselves have not lived up to our expectations for ourselves, that result can be anger that bubbles up from deep within our souls and which we use to punish ourselves or to strike out against others.
Anger can be productive—it can motivate us to change the things that need to be changed. Anger can be destructive—it can cause us to do and say hurtful things to others, even beyond the limits of reason and beyond our own self-interests.
In this week’s Torah portion, there is a story that exemplifies many of these types of anger. The story may also teach us something about anger, its place, how we can use it, and how we might choose to temper it.
Jacob had spent the last twenty years working for his mother’s brother, Laban, herding his flocks and working in his fields. Laban had promised Jacob that he could marry his daughter Rachel for seven years of labor. But after the seven years, Laban tricked Jacob and gave him his older daughter, Leah, instead. Jacob then worked another seven years for Rachel, the true love of his life. After that, Jacob worked another six years for Laban to amass his own wealth. In all of those years, it seems, Laban continued the pattern of tricking and deceiving Jacob; but Jacob never complained once.
Finally, after twenty years, Jacob decided that he had had enough. Instead of confronting Laban, though, he resolved to sneak off away from Laban, taking with him his wives, his children, and all of the wealth he had made in his years of serving Laban.
Jacob told Rachel and Leah, “When I look at your father’s face, I see that he doesn’t see anything favorable about me as he used to. Yet, the God of my father has been with me. You two know that I have worked as hard as I could for your father, but he has deceived me, changing my pay ten times, though God has not let him harm me.”
The sister-brides told Jacob that they agreed, “Do we still have any stake in our father’s house? It is clear that he now sees us as outsiders, now that he has spent all the money he got from marrying us off to you.” It’s time to get out of here.
It is a sad story, but maybe not an unfamiliar one. How many of us have seen families torn apart, or experienced it ourselves? When children grow up, their interests can change from the interests of their parents. If the change is not managed well, long simmering resentments can break out into animosity, distrust and schism. That is what appears to have happened between Laban, his daughters, and Jacob.
Jacob put his wives, his many children and all his belongings on camels and took them away from the only home they had every known. He was giving up on Laban without ever saying a word to him about his resentments.
Something happened, though, before they could leave, and the Torah gives no explanation as to why. Rachel went into her father’s tents and she stole the household idols that were a common feature of homes in the Ancient Near East. Why? Did she want them for herself? Or, did she just want to hurt the father who had hurt her, and so she took from him the thing he prized the most? We don’t know. Maybe, she didn’t know, either. Most importantly, Jacob was completely unaware that Rachel took the idols.
Of course, Laban found out about Jacob’s escape. Of course, he noticed the missing idols. Of course, he went out after him. When Laban caught up with Jacob, his daughters and his grandchildren, all of the long simmering resentments started to come out into the open.
“What did you mean by keeping me in the dark and carrying off my daughters like captives of the sword?” Laban cried. “Why did you flee in secrecy and mislead me and not tell me? I would have sent you off with festive music, with timbrel and lyre. You did not even let me kiss my daughters and grandchildren goodbye! It was a foolish thing for you to do!”
In that moment, we can well sympathize with Laban. Of course, he is angry. Of course, he is hurt. Who wouldn’t be?
Finally, though, he recognized that he is not going to win this argument. If Jacob and his daughters wanted to leave, he had no way of stopping them. In resignation, he said, “Very well, you had to leave because you were longing for your home.” And then he thew in one more accusation: “But why did you steal my gods?”
Now, we imagine the situation from Jacob’s perspective. He had put up with this lying, scheming old man for twenty years, so he thought he knew his tricks. “What is all of this nonsense about stealing gods?” Jacob must have thought. He must have imagined that it was some new ploy that Laban was trying. But he would have none of it, and so he told Laban to search through his belongings. If anyone in his party was found to have stollen the idols, he said, “They shall be put to death.”
Now the bitterness and pain of anger is revealed. Our breath catches a bit when we hear Jacob condemning his beloved to death. Fear, anger and ignorance have combined in Jacob to make him say something he should never had said. It is only by good fortune, and by Rachel’s cunning, that the idols remained undiscovered.
At that point, Jacob lashed out at Laban and told him things he should have said years before:
“What is my crime, what is my guilt that you should chase after me? You rummaged through all my things. What have you found of all your household objects? Set it here, in front of everyone, and let the world decide between the two of us!
“For twenty years I worked for you. Your female sheep never miscarried and I never ate a single one of your male sheep. I never brought you an animal that had been killed by beasts. I made up the loss myself. I worked through scorching heat that ravaged me by day, and frost by night. Sleep fled from my eyes. Had God not been with me all that time, you would have sent me away empty-handed. But God took notice of my plight and the toil of my hands, and God gave judgment last night.”
The anger is red hot, and it is completely understandable. Jacob was in a fury with Laban for the mistreatment he had suffered. And yet, what did Jacob fail to see? Laban, too, felt cheated, lied to, robbed not only of his idols, but also of his family. In his anger, Jacob assumed the worst, and worse than the worst, about Laban. He turned him into a caricature of himself, as if he were a man who lied and cheated just for the pleasure of it. He failed to see Laban’s humanity.
The Torah paints a picture that is familiar to many of us in our own lives. It is a situation in which both sides are driven to extremes of pain and feelings of loss, and a situation in which an anger—which is both justifiable and unreasonable at the same time—has driven a wedge between two people.
What do we do in our lives when we are overwhelmed by such feelings. Do we harbor that anger and let it seethe within us forever? Do we become distracted by it and do we allow it to nestle within our very identity? Individuals who feel that they have been mistreated can allow the story of their victimization to become the central story of their lives. In some ways, that has been the guiding principle of political dialogue in our country in the last few years as levels of anger and distrust are played out in national debates between the ideologues of so-called Red States and Blue States. In some ways, the Jewish people, too, have become tied to our own story of victimization over the years of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors.
Anger can be righteous and it can be powerful motivation toward righting injustice. As the story in this week’s Torah portion shows, though, righteous anger can too easily slip over the line into self-righteous anger. Misunderstandings, passionate excess and plain old ignorance can lead us into saying things and doing things against our perceived enemies that we might regret if we had a fuller perspective.
The next time you are driven to anger in your family, in your workplace, or in your community, can you take the time to look at the bigger picture? Can you step back far enough to wonder what household idols have driven you, or have driven your adversary, to the words and behaviors that fuel your anger? Can you see the humanity of the other person?
In the story of Jacob and Laban, the two men do come to a way of dealing with their mutual anger and distrust. Laban said to Jacob, “Come, let us make an agreement, you and I, that there may be a witness between us.” The two men gathered stones and built a pillar that would be the dividing border between them. They could not even agree on what the name of the pillar would be, but they could agree, over a meal, that they would each keep to their own side of it.
Laban declared, “This mound is a witness between us this day. May Adonai watch between us, when we are out of sight of each other. If you ill-treat my daughters … though no one else can see, remember, that God will be watching.”
How do we resolve anger? Not by pretending that it is not there and not by forging false friendships. In the story, anger is resolved when adversaries agree to disagree about the things that keep them apart, but agree that there is a higher value that they both share. “I may not like the way you choose to live your life,” we imagine Laban saying to Jacob, and Jacob to Laban. “However, I know that there is something that you value above yourself. So do I. Let that thing—whatever it is for you—keep us from allowing our anger to tear us further apart. Let us protect what we have by not allowing anger to destroy us.”
In the end, it is a message that is both practical and deeply spiritual. We cannot allow anger to rule our lives, even when it is righteous or well intentioned. At some point, we need to put aside anger and find our way toward peace.
Shabbat shalom.
What is it that gets you the most angry?
There is all kinds of anger. There is the anger that can erupt in a family when people feel that they have been mistreated by the people they love and trust. There is the anger that happens in work places when people are frustrated that others have not kept their commitments to do the work they depend on. There is the anger that people of different outlooks and ideologies experience when they see society moving in a direction different from what they had hoped.
Whole nations and whole societies can become angry. That is what happened to the United States after the September 11 attacks when we fumed with rage at the people who attacked us. It is what has been brewing in the Middle East for more than 60 years as the Israeli people have struggled just to exist in the face of enemies all around them.
There is righteous anger, in which people’s passions rise against injustice and the failure of a community to live up to its highest standards. And there also is self-righteous anger, in which people use their sense of victimhood as a cudgel to strike against others.
In all of these different types of anger, there is also the possibility of the anger that exists within our own psyches. We often find ourselves at war with ourselves or with our memories. When we feel that we ourselves have not lived up to our expectations for ourselves, that result can be anger that bubbles up from deep within our souls and which we use to punish ourselves or to strike out against others.
Anger can be productive—it can motivate us to change the things that need to be changed. Anger can be destructive—it can cause us to do and say hurtful things to others, even beyond the limits of reason and beyond our own self-interests.
In this week’s Torah portion, there is a story that exemplifies many of these types of anger. The story may also teach us something about anger, its place, how we can use it, and how we might choose to temper it.
Jacob had spent the last twenty years working for his mother’s brother, Laban, herding his flocks and working in his fields. Laban had promised Jacob that he could marry his daughter Rachel for seven years of labor. But after the seven years, Laban tricked Jacob and gave him his older daughter, Leah, instead. Jacob then worked another seven years for Rachel, the true love of his life. After that, Jacob worked another six years for Laban to amass his own wealth. In all of those years, it seems, Laban continued the pattern of tricking and deceiving Jacob; but Jacob never complained once.
Finally, after twenty years, Jacob decided that he had had enough. Instead of confronting Laban, though, he resolved to sneak off away from Laban, taking with him his wives, his children, and all of the wealth he had made in his years of serving Laban.
Jacob told Rachel and Leah, “When I look at your father’s face, I see that he doesn’t see anything favorable about me as he used to. Yet, the God of my father has been with me. You two know that I have worked as hard as I could for your father, but he has deceived me, changing my pay ten times, though God has not let him harm me.”
The sister-brides told Jacob that they agreed, “Do we still have any stake in our father’s house? It is clear that he now sees us as outsiders, now that he has spent all the money he got from marrying us off to you.” It’s time to get out of here.
It is a sad story, but maybe not an unfamiliar one. How many of us have seen families torn apart, or experienced it ourselves? When children grow up, their interests can change from the interests of their parents. If the change is not managed well, long simmering resentments can break out into animosity, distrust and schism. That is what appears to have happened between Laban, his daughters, and Jacob.
Jacob put his wives, his many children and all his belongings on camels and took them away from the only home they had every known. He was giving up on Laban without ever saying a word to him about his resentments.
Something happened, though, before they could leave, and the Torah gives no explanation as to why. Rachel went into her father’s tents and she stole the household idols that were a common feature of homes in the Ancient Near East. Why? Did she want them for herself? Or, did she just want to hurt the father who had hurt her, and so she took from him the thing he prized the most? We don’t know. Maybe, she didn’t know, either. Most importantly, Jacob was completely unaware that Rachel took the idols.
Of course, Laban found out about Jacob’s escape. Of course, he noticed the missing idols. Of course, he went out after him. When Laban caught up with Jacob, his daughters and his grandchildren, all of the long simmering resentments started to come out into the open.
“What did you mean by keeping me in the dark and carrying off my daughters like captives of the sword?” Laban cried. “Why did you flee in secrecy and mislead me and not tell me? I would have sent you off with festive music, with timbrel and lyre. You did not even let me kiss my daughters and grandchildren goodbye! It was a foolish thing for you to do!”
In that moment, we can well sympathize with Laban. Of course, he is angry. Of course, he is hurt. Who wouldn’t be?
Finally, though, he recognized that he is not going to win this argument. If Jacob and his daughters wanted to leave, he had no way of stopping them. In resignation, he said, “Very well, you had to leave because you were longing for your home.” And then he thew in one more accusation: “But why did you steal my gods?”
Now, we imagine the situation from Jacob’s perspective. He had put up with this lying, scheming old man for twenty years, so he thought he knew his tricks. “What is all of this nonsense about stealing gods?” Jacob must have thought. He must have imagined that it was some new ploy that Laban was trying. But he would have none of it, and so he told Laban to search through his belongings. If anyone in his party was found to have stollen the idols, he said, “They shall be put to death.”
Now the bitterness and pain of anger is revealed. Our breath catches a bit when we hear Jacob condemning his beloved to death. Fear, anger and ignorance have combined in Jacob to make him say something he should never had said. It is only by good fortune, and by Rachel’s cunning, that the idols remained undiscovered.
At that point, Jacob lashed out at Laban and told him things he should have said years before:
“What is my crime, what is my guilt that you should chase after me? You rummaged through all my things. What have you found of all your household objects? Set it here, in front of everyone, and let the world decide between the two of us!
“For twenty years I worked for you. Your female sheep never miscarried and I never ate a single one of your male sheep. I never brought you an animal that had been killed by beasts. I made up the loss myself. I worked through scorching heat that ravaged me by day, and frost by night. Sleep fled from my eyes. Had God not been with me all that time, you would have sent me away empty-handed. But God took notice of my plight and the toil of my hands, and God gave judgment last night.”
The anger is red hot, and it is completely understandable. Jacob was in a fury with Laban for the mistreatment he had suffered. And yet, what did Jacob fail to see? Laban, too, felt cheated, lied to, robbed not only of his idols, but also of his family. In his anger, Jacob assumed the worst, and worse than the worst, about Laban. He turned him into a caricature of himself, as if he were a man who lied and cheated just for the pleasure of it. He failed to see Laban’s humanity.
The Torah paints a picture that is familiar to many of us in our own lives. It is a situation in which both sides are driven to extremes of pain and feelings of loss, and a situation in which an anger—which is both justifiable and unreasonable at the same time—has driven a wedge between two people.
What do we do in our lives when we are overwhelmed by such feelings. Do we harbor that anger and let it seethe within us forever? Do we become distracted by it and do we allow it to nestle within our very identity? Individuals who feel that they have been mistreated can allow the story of their victimization to become the central story of their lives. In some ways, that has been the guiding principle of political dialogue in our country in the last few years as levels of anger and distrust are played out in national debates between the ideologues of so-called Red States and Blue States. In some ways, the Jewish people, too, have become tied to our own story of victimization over the years of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors.
Anger can be righteous and it can be powerful motivation toward righting injustice. As the story in this week’s Torah portion shows, though, righteous anger can too easily slip over the line into self-righteous anger. Misunderstandings, passionate excess and plain old ignorance can lead us into saying things and doing things against our perceived enemies that we might regret if we had a fuller perspective.
The next time you are driven to anger in your family, in your workplace, or in your community, can you take the time to look at the bigger picture? Can you step back far enough to wonder what household idols have driven you, or have driven your adversary, to the words and behaviors that fuel your anger? Can you see the humanity of the other person?
In the story of Jacob and Laban, the two men do come to a way of dealing with their mutual anger and distrust. Laban said to Jacob, “Come, let us make an agreement, you and I, that there may be a witness between us.” The two men gathered stones and built a pillar that would be the dividing border between them. They could not even agree on what the name of the pillar would be, but they could agree, over a meal, that they would each keep to their own side of it.
Laban declared, “This mound is a witness between us this day. May Adonai watch between us, when we are out of sight of each other. If you ill-treat my daughters … though no one else can see, remember, that God will be watching.”
How do we resolve anger? Not by pretending that it is not there and not by forging false friendships. In the story, anger is resolved when adversaries agree to disagree about the things that keep them apart, but agree that there is a higher value that they both share. “I may not like the way you choose to live your life,” we imagine Laban saying to Jacob, and Jacob to Laban. “However, I know that there is something that you value above yourself. So do I. Let that thing—whatever it is for you—keep us from allowing our anger to tear us further apart. Let us protect what we have by not allowing anger to destroy us.”
In the end, it is a message that is both practical and deeply spiritual. We cannot allow anger to rule our lives, even when it is righteous or well intentioned. At some point, we need to put aside anger and find our way toward peace.
Shabbat shalom.
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