If you must be angry, do it properly

To ram home the message that we should all be meek and gentle rather than tetchy and irritable, many people like to quote from the Gemara (Shabbat 30b) :

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: לְעוֹלָם יְהֵא אָדָם עַנְוְותָן כְּהִלֵּל וְאַל יְהֵא קַפְּדָן כְּשַׁמַּאי

Our Rabbis taught: A man should always be an anvetan like Hillel, and not a kapdan like Shammai.

Anvetan is usually rendered “gentle”, “humble”, “forbearing” or “patient”, while kapdan is usually rendered “hot-tempered”, “angry”, “irritable” or “Impatient”.  From this it is assumed that Hillel was all sweetness and light while Shammai was a bit of a grumpus. As if to fortify this impression, the Gemara goes on to give three case histories involving applicants for conversion to Judaism. Each receives short shrift from Shammai but is then welcomed by Hillel.

Can these characterisations be accurate? After all, it is from Shammai that we learn (Avot 1:15) to greet everyone with a happy, smiling face. These don’t read like the words of a man with an antisocial bent.

According to Rav Kook (cited by R’ Chaim Druckman, Avot leBanim) this traditional understanding of the Gemara is wrong. So how should we learn it?

We should start from the premise that both Hillel and Shammai have important lessons to impart to us. Hillel demonstrates to us the correct way to be an anvetan, and there are many stories in which we see examples of this quality. Shammai, who like Hillel is an individual with outstanding personal qualities, shows us the correct way to be a kapdan. From our literature we learn of the circumstances in which, acting as a kapdan, he either defends the honour of the Torah or tests the resolve of an applicant for conversion. He certainly doesn’t blow his top for the sake of personal gratification or in consequence of any loss of self-control.

What then is the Gemara teaching? If you are to act the anvetan, follow the example of Hillel. If you are to act as a kapdan, follow the example of Shammai. And if you have a choice—as we all do in our relations with our fellow humans—to be either an anvetan or a kapdan, we should choose to be the former.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Managing other people's anger

What does Pirkei Avot have to say about anger management? Anger is a normal human reaction and we are all humans so, while anger is not prohibited, we are praised for being slow to anger and swift to calm down again (Avot 5:14). It’s also a good idea not to engage as a teacher anyone who gets angry with students or pupils (Avot 2:6).  A further teaching, at Avot 4:23, has recently found its way into a Times of Israel blogpost on account of its topicality. There, among other things, R’ Shimon ben Elazar tells us:

אַל תְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרֶֽךָ בְּשַֽׁעַת כַּעֲסוֹ

“Do not appease your friend at the height of his anger”.

In her article, “Liz’s Legacy”, Ariella Cohen comments on the recent debacle when the heads of three of the most prestigious universities in the United States—Harvard, MIT and Penn—testified at a Congressional hearing to the effect that a context-appropriate call for genocide against the Jews would be tolerated on their campuses. Penn head Liz Magill subsequently sought to apologise for her statement and later resigned. In the course of her blogpost Cohen comments:

After the Congressional hearing, I was more upset by Liz Magill’s attempted apology than by her original remarks. Some things cannot be apologized for. Especially not while the wound is raw. You cannot emotionally rip somebody (or group of people) apart and then tell them the next day that you didn’t actually mean it. Or rather you can, but it’s completely unacceptable. We know from Pirkei Avot 4:23 that Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar teaches: “Do not appease your friend in the time of his anger…” I don’t think Liz regularly reads through Pirkei Avot, so she is probably not familiar with this teaching. But it is an extremely smart and poignant one which she violated. Trying to calm someone (or in this case, Jews all over the world) immediately after severely affronting them on a national level is ill-advised.

Avot Today has already commented on the concept of context and is not revisiting the issue here. The question now before us is whether Cohen is right to apply this mishnah from Avot. While I am in agreement with the general content and thrust of her article, I would respectfully question whether she is taking R’ Shimon ben Elazar’s teaching further than it actually goes.

First, let us consider who is being appeased. The mishnah as it stands does not differentiate between appeasing a friend (i.e. anyone at all) you have angered and someone who has been angered by something from outside your relationship with your friend. The Me’am Lo’ez assumes that it refers to placating a person you have personally angered, while the Sforno’s commentary appears to imply the opposite and the Ru’ach HaChaim makes it refer to appeasing God. In all cases, however, the mishnah presupposes some sort of direct and immediate relationship between the would-be appeaser and the one who is angry. Having the angry person in sight, in the words of R’ Yitzchak Greenberg (Sage Advice), enables the would-be appeaser to gauge whether the latter has used up all his anger before seeking to calm him down; it is only then that he will likely be amenable to reason and/or to any soothing speech. This is clearly not the case when the cause of the anger is a public statement that goes viral and angers many millions of people, spread over five continents, who are almost entirely unknown to the speaker and unreachable in terms of human contact.

Secondly we should ask whether, in the case of a public statement of this nature, one should delay at all before issuing an apology or retraction. The feelings of 16 million Jews are only one factor to be considered. Failure to implement an immediate damage limitation exercise runs the risk that others will publicly approve the offensive words and cite them as a respectable authority for the extermination of the world’s Jewish population. Others again may feel emboldened to commit acts of violence against Jews and vandalism against their property. If there is even the smallest risk of such an outcome, no time should be lost in waiting for the world’s Jews to stop being angry.

The last word goes to Rambam. In his commentary on Avot he says simply that a person should not make statements except in a situation where they will have an effect. This is ultimately a judgement call that each individual must make for himself. In my view, Liz Magill was wrong to say what she did, but right to apologise sooner rather than later. What a shame it is that her words of apology did not sound more convincing.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Having a good shout?

In my secondary schooldays I got shouted at a great deal. In this I was not alone. Most of my classmates got shouted at too. Our teachers—most of whom had served as officers in the British army during the Second World War—appeared to be enraged by even minor infractions of school rules, of which inevitably there were many. Only in later years did I come to appreciate that my teachers were not angry at all. In fact, they were quite jovial souls at heart. However, they had become accustomed to barking out orders to the soldiers under their command and assumed that this was the normal, indeed the best, way of achieving not just obedience but educational excellence in Latin, Greek, History and other subjects which, having read at University before the War, it was now their lot to teach.

Pirkei Avot cautions us with regard to anger. Being demonstrably slow to anger is an attribute of God himself (5:2, 5:3). Rabbi Eliezer (2:15) and an anonymous Tanna (5:14) both recognise that we do sometimes become angry but teach that we should not allow ourselves to anger easily, while being slow to anger is listed as one of the qualities a person needs in order to master Torah (6:6). Anger is regarded as a corrosive character trait and is even equated with idolatry (see eg Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot 2:3). But what of displaying anger, even when one is not particularly angry?

In his commentary in Tiferet Tzion on Avot 6:6 R’ Yitzchak Ze’ev Yadler reminds us that, even when it is necessary to display anger, one should first ensure that there are grounds upon which that display is justified. And even then, unlike my school teachers, one should first speak softly to see if that has the desired effect, rather than starting at maximum volume and blazing away as though one is still on the battlefield.

Next week Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jews alike will be reciting Selichot, penitential prayers, ahead of the High Holy Days.  A key feature of Selichot is that of reminding God that he is slow to anger. If we are to make an issue of this, we should at least make an effort to be as slow to be angry with others as we hope God will be with us.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

When anger is all the rage...

One of the shortest and most succinct mishnayot in Avot is credited to Rabbi Elazar HaKappar:

הַקִּנְאָה וְהַתַּאֲוָה וְהַכָּבוֹד מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם

In translation: “Jealousy, lust and [the quest for] honour remove a person from the world”.

The harmful consequences of jealousy, lust and the quest for kavod (loosely speaking, “honour” or “respect”) are well known and well attested, both in real life and in literature. But they are surely not the only personal qualities that have the effect of causing self-destruction as well as wreaking terrible harm on those who are the objects of such unwanted attention. Indeed, there is something missing. The mishnah’s shortlist list does not feature anger, even though Jewish sages over the centuries have not only condemned it but have likened it to idolatry. Why then does Rabbi Elazar HaKappar omit it?

A possible answer is that anger does not flare up in a vacuum: it is usually caused by something. And, if one considers carefully the deepest and most powerful forms of anger that one experiences, it is possible to allocate them to one of three causes: jealousy, lust or the thirst for honour.

This analytical process works fairly well for most types of anger.  Road rage, for example, can be traced back to the acute disrespect shown by a fellow road user. So too can the anger not just felt but all too frequently inappropriately expressed by parents when their children are disobedient. Jealousy and lust can be seen to work in tandem, where a person’s unrequited physical passion for another is compounded by jealousy that the object of one’s desire prefers the attentions of someone else.

The bottom line: perhaps, if we look carefully at the reasons for our anger and seek to understand them better, we will be better equipped to curb our anger or, better still, find a positive and constructive means of channeling it.

********************

Based on an idea of Rabbi Reuven Melamed (Melitz Yosher al Pirkei Avot).

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

'Some thoughts on exile' revisited

On 12 January I posted a piece, ‘Some thoughts on exile’, in which I discussed some of the mishnayot in Pirkei Avot that deal with exile. In that post I mentioned the idea, raised in an article by Rabbi Pinchas Winston, that exile was not purely a physical phenomenon because it also had a psychological dimension: a person might be “exiled” in their mind, their conscious thoughts and their emotions. He summarized the position thus:

There is no greater exile than not being yourself. It may sound trivial because, how can you be anyone but who you are? But the very fact that psychological depression is a national disease and anti-depressants are such a lucrative prescription drug today answers that question head-on. It is exhausting to watch how hard people have to work just to maintain an image they want to project, but which has little to do with who they really are.

I liked this idea but questioned whether it was truly sustainable.

Since writing my post I have found that Rabbi Winston is not alone in examining exile in terms of its mental element. Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky’s Netivot Shalom commentary on the Torah, on parashat Vaeira, contrasts two species of exile: communal (galut haperat) and personal (galut hayetzer hara). Communal exile can be remedied by taking the Children of Israel out of Egypt, while personal exile demands that each individual is detached from his negative traits and vested with a fresh set of positive values. Without this process, a person cannot switch his commitment from servitude to Egypt to service of God. In popular parlance, we might say that it’s not enough to take the Children of Israel out of Egypt: we must also take Egypt out of the Children of Israel.

The Netivot Shalom does not claim to be the originator of this idea. He cites the Toledot Yaakov Yosef of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonne on parashat Vayishlach, which in turn cites the Ba’al Shem Tov in support of the proposition that personal redemption should precede the communal. He also describes the same concept in his partial but eloquent commentary on Pirkei Avot, at the end of Avot 5:11, but without citing his predecessors. To my embarrassment I must have read this many years ago without it ever sinking in.

Dealing with anger

No-one who follows the narrative of the Torah at this time of year can miss the theme of anger. Pharaoh is angry with the Children of Israel, then rebukes his midwives; both God and the Children of Israel become angry with Moses; the taskmasters are angry with the slaves; the slaves are angry with one other; Jethro tells his daughters off for not inviting Moses home, and so on. It is not a happy time.

Much the same can be said of Israel today, where the politics of anger is reflected in outbursts of abuse, name-calling and demonisation of real and imagined opponents to the extent that extreme views on both sides of the current debates are regarded as normative and prospects for cooperation, compromise and consensus continue to fade.

Pirkei Avot teaches us about anger. It is assumed that we cannot suppress our anger entirely and maybe do not need to do so, but we should at least be slow to anger. Avot 5:2 and 5:3 illustrate how God, as a sort of divine role model, is extremely slow to anger, waiting up to ten generations before making a final decision as to what to do. Avot 5:14 also praises the person who is slow to anger but swift to regain composure while stigmatising as wicked the person who is quick to anger but slow to calm down. Rambam (Hilchot De’ot) recognises the need to keep anger under control rather than attempt to eliminate it completely—the position that Ramban appears to adopt in his much-published letter to his son, the reason being that only by distancing oneself from anger can one internalise the virtue of humility.

Frustratingly, Avot does not offer any simple solutions. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar (Avot 4:23) warns us not to make things worse by trying to calm someone down when they are in mid-rage. Then, at Avot 4:1, Ben Zoma teaches that the person who is truly strong is one who curbs his yetzer, the evil inclination. Even if one assumes that expressions of anger are the consequence of yielding to one’s yetzer, there can be no catch-all technique for resisting it since every individual feels things differently and responds in his or her own unique manner to the sort of provocations that lead to rage. However, a few thoughts spring to mind.

1. Does your anger correspond to someone else’s happiness? It is common for people to lose their temper on losing a game, an argument or an election. This is potentially a sort of zero-sum rage since, if the outcome was the other way round, the loser might be just as angry in turn. In any situation in which there must be a winner and a loser, anger of this nature is predictable and unproductive.

2. Can your anger only be expressed in one way? Screaming, flailing our limbs and having a tantrum are the first ways we humans demonstrate our anger but, as we grow older and develop a wider range of emotional responses and social skills, we do have options. It is not always possible to do so but, where it is, we should seek to ask ourselves which outlet for our anger is the most effective, constructive or capable of giving the greatest relief or personal satisfaction.

3. Have we identified the object of our anger? In crude terms, anger can be said to be directed at one of three targets: (i) oneself; (ii) other humans and social institutions; and (iii) God. Once we know the target of our anger, we can consider how best to handle it. Anger that is directed against oneself—particularly when we are forced to take responsibility for our own mistakes—can be counterproductive but can also be addressed by looking at the cause of our self-anger and considering how we can avoid repeating it. Millennia of experience indicate that we have no reliable means of measuring how God responds to our anger, but that prayer might sometimes provide a more comforting and constructive substitute for railing against Him. That leaves anger which is directed against fellow humans, and this is the zone which is principally governed by Avot. No, Avot does not offer perfect solutions for all instances of other-directed anger, but it does encourage us to keep a lid on it to stop it boiling over—something that we can aim to achieve by practising the difficult task of self-control.

In raising this topic, I hope to stimulate thought and generate constructive suggestions about anger. Please share them if you have them.

Diapers on the doorstep

A couple of days ago I was surprised to find a neat bundle on my doorstep: a small white bag containing some used diapers. It was not difficult to trace their origin: we have close neighbours with a small child who is as yet not house-trained.

The immediate question I faced was that of what to do.

Had this happened to me in my pre-Pirkei Avot days, I know how would have responded. My first feelings would be those of anger bordering on outrage, fuelled by the fire of righteous indignation. How could anyone dare to do this at all, let alone to a close neighbour! I would have contemplated a number of vigorous responses. These would have included (i) ringing at the neighbours’ door and demanding an explanation while dangling the offending bag in front of whoever had the misfortune to answer the doorbell, and (ii) posting the bag into their letterbox. These initial feelings would have been suppressed only with some difficulty and in the knowledge that, if I utilised the letterbox option, I might be spotted by another resident of the building and branded a trouble-maker.

Now, as a Pirkei Avot man, I find the situation much easier to resolve.

Placing a bag of used diapers on a neighbour’s doorstep is not a usual form of behaviour. Indeed, during the three years in which we have lived in such proximity, this has never happened before. Our relationship with our neighbours, though never close, has always been polite and respectful. Neither they nor we are noisy folk and, to the best of my knowledge, none of us have done anything that might give rise to offence.

In the absence of any evidence that our neighbours were evil or motivated by malicious intent, this seemed the ideal opportunity to judge them favourably in accordance with the precept of Yehoshua ben Perachya (Avot 1:16).

But what reason might they have which could exculpate them? Hillel teaches (Avot 2:5) that one should not judge another person unless one is standing in his or her place. Our neighbours look to me as though they are in their early 30s.  Truth to tell, I can hardly remember anything of being in my 30s at all: the decade was a constant round of broken nights, stressful days and of dashing from one crisis to another as I tried to build a career while bearing my share of responsibility for babies and small children whose demands were many but who lacked the vocabulary to express them. Perhaps our neighbours were struggling, just as I had done, with similar burdens and had inadvertently dropped the diapers on our doorstep when they were interrupted by an emergent crisis and later forgot that they had not taken them all the way down to the refuse bins.

This was all very well in terms of exculpating my neighbours, but I was still left with the unwanted bundle. What should I do with it? When Rabbi Yose HaCohen is asked (Avot 2:13) to identify the good path that a person should choose for himself, he answers that it is the path of being a good neighbour. Now what would a good neighbour do here? I would forgive my neighbours, make sure not to say anything about this incident at all unless it became a regular event, and take the bag down to the refuse bin myself. End of story.

The best part of this little episode is that, by saying nothing to our neighbours, I avoided the risk of falling out with them—and that I avoided both getting angry and wallowing in those feelings of righteous indignation that feel so good at the time but can be so destructive.

Av, Avot and Anger

A central theme of the solemn date of Tisha be’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av) is the causative link between what we lost—two Temples and two thousand years’ occupancy of the land God gave us—and the things we did in order to lose it. Put simply, we did wrong; God warned us to stop but we persisted. God, who alone knows how to regulate the scale of His anger in light of His divine wisdom, became blazingly angry and punished us. While we mourn our losses, the takeaway message of the day is not about the past but the present as it affects the future: that we should get our act together now and act in accordance with God’s will, not contrary to it. This message is alluded to in the fifth chapter of Avot, at 5:24, in a mysterious passage cited in the name of Yehudah ben Teyma:

“The brazen [go] to Gehinnom; the meek [go] to the Garden of Eden. May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Holy Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days; and grant us our portion in Your Torah”.

The status of this Mishnah has been challenged on the view that it originally marked the end of Avot, with the sentence that refers to the rebuilding of the Temple being tacked on as a prayer. However, this passage is an integral part of Avot as we have it today and, taken as a whole, it suggests that if we are meek, not brazen, and do God’s will rather than openly flout it, we are entitled to call upon Him to restore the Temple that was wiped out when we flouted it in the first place.

God’s destructive response to our disobedience was not a cold, calculated one but was accompanied by a blaze of anger. So what does Avot say about anger? For us humans it is something to avoid. A person who is irascible should not be a teacher (2:6), and anyone who is quick to anger and hard to placate is a rasha—someone who is evil. Yet anger is a divine attribute and God is twice praised as being slow to anger (5:2, 3), even though the full impact of his anger, once unleashed, can be devastating.

Avot teaches that, both at the time of Noah and the Flood and in the era of Abraham, God patiently waited a full ten generations before allowing Himself to become angry, even though each generation as a whole behaved less well than its predecessor. Is there any significance in our knowing this? If God punishes us for our sins, should it matter to us whether he has unleashed His anger on earlier generations of miscreants or not?

The loss of each Temples came some somewhere in the region of 400 years after it was established. Now, though there is no single way to measure the duration of a generation, we do see the word used colloquially for a period of 40 years in the context of the Generation of the Midbar—the refugees from Egypt who died in the desert, barred from entering the land of Canaan after they accepted the false testimony of the Spies. Taking 40 years as a generation we see that, in the case of both the First and the Second Temple, God delayed His anger for ten generations before He acted in accordance with it—just as He did so in the mishnayot of Avot.

What message does this have for us? First we must accept that, if we cannot actually eliminate our anger when dealing with one another, we should seek to emulate God’s example and be as slow as possible before giving in to it. Secondly, before choosing whether to do God’s will or to defy it, we might consider stopping to think whether we perhaps are a “tenth generation” on whom God’s anger might be vented, and then act accordingly.

Angry -- but with whom?

Mishnah 5:14 of Pirkei Avot talks of people being classified into four types of temperament:

(i)  The person who is easily angered but easily placated—his reward is offset by his loss. 

(ii) The person whom it is hard to anger but hard to placate—his loss is offset by his reward.

(iii)  The person whom it is hard to anger but easy to placate is a chassid, a pious person.

(iv)  The person whom it is easy to anger but hard to placate is wicked.

The Mishnah is usually assumed to be referring to a person who gets angry with other people. The plain text does not demand that this be so. Sometimes a person gets angry with God, and sometimes with himself. Does this Mishnah apply equally to these scenarios? 

In principle there is no reason why it should not. If anger is a corrosive and damaging emotion, it will adversely affect the well-being of the person who feels it regardless of the cause of that anger.  However, there is a difference. However much anyone rages against God, there is absolutely no way that this anger, or the person who feels it, can do to hurt or harm Him. When angry with oneself, any damage done is counterproductive since the object and the subject of the rage are one and the time. It is only when anger is directed against fellow humans that it can lead to the sort of destructive and vengeful action that can undermine the social basis of human civilization.

Anger: felt first, shown last

It is impossible for a normal person to feel no anger at all, since anger is one of the most basic emotions; indeed, it is something we share with many members of the animal kingdom. The object of the exercise from our point of view is to take our anger and channel it towards constructive ends rather than simply indulge in a spot of self-indulgent rage or upset others when we might do better to have a go at improving them.

Keep it under control!

At Avot 2:15 Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus teaches that one should be slow to anger: this suggests that it is a sort of nuclear option, to be kept in reserve for when everything else (offering reasons, being polite and friendly, exercising iron self-control in not retaliating) fails.  Rashi points out that this is what God does in Numbers 12:7-9.  The scenario is that Moses' siblings Miriam and Aaron are talking critically about Moses behind his back, in a manner of which God certainly disapproves. God displays His anger, but not before first telling Miriam and Aaron why.  

We should follow this example. Apart from the fact that there is an unimpeachable precedent for doing so, there is a practical benefit too.  If you show your anger first and then explain why, the person you are talking to will be smarting from the power of your rage and will pay less attention to your reasons: show your reasons first and then -- if it is really necessary -- show your anger and you will have made your point more effectively.