Below are the notes from the talk given by Jeremy Phillips between Minchah and Maariv on Tuesday 1 September.
In modern secular society we often hear people speaking of the invasive way that other people behave. For example, we don’t like people standing too close to us when we are talking to them. What constitutes an acceptable space varies from culture to culture and also depends on where you are at the time. You can see this in shul every Shabbat morning, when people don’t like to have other people brushing up against them when they are davening their Shemon’Esrei, but they have no inhibitions about pushing up against others during kiddush when they are jostling to get closer to the cholent or hot kugel.
What applies to space also applies to time. There are times when we want people to be close and we want to feel their love or support, and other times when we want those same people to just disappear for a bit, or simply to be quiet and not say anything. A sensitive, empathetic person knows when to come close and when to stand back; when to open his mouth and when to shut it.
When you are dealing with people, getting your timing right is important. So is knowing what’s in good taste and what isn’t. Rabbi Mordechai Ginsbury, who spoke at Beit Knesset Hanassi recently, explains this in his book. Someone might be in the depths of despair having lost a loved one or a business partner; you don’t go up to him and try to cheer him up by saying “What are you so worried about? This might look like a tragedy but can’t you see what a golden opportunity it gives you for the future? You can really cash in on it if you play your cards right”. We just don’t say that sort of thing so an avel, for example, even if it’s totally true. It’s totally in bad taste.
Pirkei Avot has
something to say about this. At Avot 4:23 Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says
אַל תְּרַצֶּה אֶת
חֲבֵרְךָ בִּשְׁעַת כַּעְסוֹ, וְאַל
תְּנַחֲמֵֽהוּ בְּשָׁעָה
שֶׁמֵּתוֹ מֻטָּל לְפָנָיו, וְאַל תִּשְׁאַל לוֹ בִּשְׁעַת נִדְרוֹ, וְאַל
תִּשְׁתַּדֵּל
לִרְאוֹתוֹ בִּשְׁעַת קַלְקָלָתוֹ
What we have
here are four classes of action that are not prohibited in the Torah, but which
you still shouldn’t do. Let’s run through them in English translation.
“Don’t appease your friend in
his time of anger; don’t console him at the time when his dead is laid out before
him; don’t question him when he’s taking a vow; and don’t try to see him at the
time of his degradation.”
Why doesn’t the
Torah prohibit them, one might ask? One answer is that sometimes these things
are the right thing to do, not the wrong one.
If you know the person and the circumstances, and you have the right
degree of empathy and common sense, you will certainly do them. Rabbi Ya’akov
Shlomo Landman, in his Mussar Avot, cites an instance when Rabbi Shlomo Zalman
Auerbach visited a woman whose husband had just been murdered on the very same day
she gave birth to a son, in order to give her strength and support. But this
sort of intervention in another’s grief can easily go wrong, which is why this
mishnah is framed as four negative guidelines. Basically, if you don’t know
whether you should intervene, the rule of thumb is the rule of “better not”.
Many questions
can be asked on this mishnah. For example: are the four guidelines listed by
Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar an exhaustive list of things we should take care not to
do, or are they just examples of a wider rule that we can express as “Take care
not to trespass on other people’s feelings and personal space”? or “Be patient
and careful before you interfere with other people’s feelings”?
I like to think
that they are simply samples of the sort of situation that most commonly arises
in normal human relationships. For example, people do get angry and lose their
tempers to the point at which they quite lose control of themselves. Think of
the spectacle of seeing a school teacher, having being wound up in class by a
pupil who is brighter than he is, totally exploding and then saying or doing
the most extraordinary things. Likewise, all of us have probably gone through
the process of losing one or more loved relative and have known the devastating
and immobilising power of grief. As for oaths and vows, we may not take them in
the Torah sense these days but we take important decisions that have an impact
on the lives of others as well as ourselves. And as for those moments of shame
and degradation—we pray that they will never happen to us but know that we
should not want to show our face at such a time.
However, these
four things surely don’t constitute a complete list of situations in which people
invade each other’s time, space and feelings—and really hurt them. For example,
a clumsy attempt to comfort and console a bereaved person even after the burial
of a loved one can be just as painful as one that is made while the avel is
still preoccupied with the burial arrangements. A good example is the person
who turns up at a shiva for someone who had been ill and bedbound for years and
comes up with classic lines like “It must be a relief for you, now you don’t
have the responsibility of looking after the niftar day and night”. The
same applies to people who remind others of their former humiliation or
degradation even years after the event. Into this category go people who remind
gerim of what they used to get up to before they converted to Judaism, and the
same applies to ba’alei teshuvah.
Anger
A time for
anger
The Noda
BeYehuda takes a close look at the words of the mishnah. It doesn’t say “don’t
appease your friend when he is angry.” It actually says “don’t appease your friend
in his time of anger.” This is significant, because it sends out a note
of caution. If you think about it, there’s no need to warn people not to try to
calm someone down when they’re in a rage. You can get your head bitten off—or worse!
What we learn here is that we should be alert to those times when it would be
quite normal for someone to be angry—but they don’t appear to be. Perhaps they
are so totally in control of themselves that they have conquered their anger
or, more likely, they are smouldering like a volcano waiting to erupt. If they
are like that, just leave them alone. Wait until the time for exploding in fury
has passed and then calm them down. This is definitely a subtle approach
to our mishnah, but I wonder if it’s of any practical value. Calming a person
down when the time he ought to have been angry has passed is like waiting till
the rainstorm that never came is no longer coming and only then putting up your
umbrella.
At whom is the
anger aimed?
The mishnah doesn’t
say who the angry person you shouldn’t try to placate is angry with. Does it
matter? That depends who you are. Both the commentary ascribed to Rashi and R’
Yitzchak Magriso in the Me’am Lo’ez say yes, we are talking here about a
guy who is trying to calm down someone who is angry with him. If you are
the person that caused the anger in the first place, any premature attempt to
restore peace might go unnoticed in the red mist of rage or, if noticed, may make
things even worse. The Sforno disagrees: this mishnah assumes that the person who
is in a rage is angry with someone else—his mother-in-law, perhaps—or maybe he is
angry because somebody else got maftir. We know this because if it’s you who has
upset the angry person and it’s your fault—let’s say you drove into the back of
his brand new car—you have a duty to apologize, to seek forgiveness and to put
things right. So this mishnah must apply in a different scenario, for example
where someone else rammed his brand new car. Since there’s no halachic
imperative to smooth his ruffled feathers, you need a mishnah in Avot to fill
the gap.
Why is the
angry man angry?
This question
is really important. You can do more harm by pacifying him than by letting him
rant and rage. Rabbi Avraham Azulai makes this point in his Ahavah BeTa’anugim
and it’s such an obvious point that it’s surprising that many commentators have
not taken it up themselves. So why is the person angry? Listen to him. If he is
angry because he hasn’t got a sword, don’t let him have one. Giving him a sword
may shut him up, and even make him happy, but do you know what he is planning
to do with it? We sometimes encounter a
rather sad variant of this on Purim, when someone who is very drunk gets angry
because he has been refused yet another drink. Giving it to him may silence his
shouting and assuage his anger on at least a temporary basis. But, against
that, there is the question of what damage he might do to himself and others if
he is given his way.
Disgrace and
degradation
Anyone who
remembers being a small child, or who has ever taken a child to any public
place, will know how firmly anything that is strikingly unusual will attract
and rivet the child’s attention. It can be anything, because the world is full
of fascinating sights. Anyone who is unusually tall, short, thin, fat, covered
in tattoos or who doesn’t have the standard number of arms and legs becomes the
centre of a child’s attention. They won’t stop staring and you have to pull
them away. That’s why, from an early age, our kids receive the familiar
parental mantra of “It’s rude to stare”. This doesn’t usually make much of a difference,
because children soon learn to do what we grown-ups do, and exchange a
full-frontal stare for a series of stealthy, sideways glances when we try to pretend
we’re not really looking. But for most of us, we don’t appreciate how important
this is until we are the people who are being stared at.
Rabbi Shimon
ben Elazar does not say that one should never look, or see, when somebody else
is in a state of degradation. These reactions are difficult to avoid in any
society that is populated by humans who possess normal human curiosity,
feelings and reflexes. Nor does he teach that one should go to great lengths to
avoid such sights. What he does say is that one should not try to see;
it is wrong to make the effort, to
go out of one’s way to see what it looks like when a person is degraded and
humiliated.
The principle
that we should take care to spare the feelings of others in their moment of
shame is not something that was suddenly invented by Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar:
it is fundamental to the Written Torah itself. Thus we learn how two of Noah’s
sons took pains not to look on his nakedness when he lay drunk in his tent,
walking backwards towards him when they covered him up, while the third son –
who did not – was cursed.
If the Torah
has already taught this principle, why should our Tanna feel any compunction to
repeat it? I can offer a possible answer, that he is conveying a more subtle
message than “don’t look!” What he is actually saying is “don’t just look!”
In other words, don’t just stand and stare, like a curious spectator. No! Act
upon what you see, do something about it; try to relieve the distress or at
least offer moral support and comfort. This idea focuses on how we understand
the word lir’ot in our mishnah, which has a parallel in Tehillim, in a
verse that has been incorporated into Birkat HaMazon: na’ar ha’iti,
gam zokanti, velo ra’iti Tzadik ne’ezav vezaro mevakesh lachem (“I was
young once and now I’m old, and I’ve not seen a righteous man abandoned and his
children begging for bread”. This verse has
upset many people, especially among those who, having survived the horrors and starvation
of the Second World War, either refuse to say it at all or won’t say it out
loud. But Rabbi Yehudah HaChasid says it doesn’t mean what they think it does
at all. What it means is really “I’ve not seen a righteous man abandoned and
his children begging for bread and then stood by without doing anything
about it.” Whatever one feels about the validity of this interpretation,
which has been enthusiastically endorsed by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks a.h,, it
cannot be denied that offering some form of help or assistance is a bigger,
better gesture towards self-improvement than merely staring or indeed averting
one’s gaze.
The case
against paparazzi
Twenty-first
century Western culture is fed on a constant diet of news. With
constantly-updated coverage of events across the world, the traditional mass
media and the social media provide their own accounts of political, military,
economic, environmental and other developments on a scale unparalleled in
history. Because of its ever-changing nature, news is popular with the public –
never more so than when it is about people whose names and faces are familiar
to them. Once a person has featured in the media to a sufficient extent, he or
she obtains the status of a “celebrity,” effectively a person who is well known
on account of being well known.
Once a person
is well known, media intrusion into his or her private life is a frequent and
often much resented occurrence. This intrusion is often inflicted by paparazzi,
opportunistic photographers who seize the moment at which a celebrity may be
taken unawares and then sell their photographs to those who distribute the
images across the media in an attempt to attract or retain the attention of
their public. Photographs of celebrities at times when they are behaving inappropriately,
whether in public or in private, or at times of stress or grief, are likely to
fetch the highest prices; despite the enactment of secular laws to prevent the
invasion of personal privacy and the unlawful commercial exploitation of
another’s image, this practice continues largely
unabated. Often it causes much distress to the celebrity victim, as well as to
his or her family and friends.
This Mishnah
has a message for these paparazzi: don’t do it! The embarrassment and
humiliation of another human being can inflict untold pain and damage – and the
pain of other people knowing can be far worse than the suffering which is so
apparently newsworthy in the first place. The facts that the general public
regards the suffering of others as a form of entertainment, and that the public
exposure of private pain generates lucrative profit, are not justifications.
Rather, they underline the sad truth that what these people are doing is a
reflection of their own lack of sensitivity towards fellow human beings.
Our mishnah teaches us to cultivate that sensitivity if we can, and to show that everyone should show sensitivity when dealing with the grieving, the afflicted, the angry and the vulnerable—and even with the honorary officers of Beit Knesset Hanassi!
