Immune from Hurt Feelings

Rabbi Melanie Aron

November 1, 2003

Rabbi Jack Riemer concludes all his talks in the weeks before the High Holidays with the following -- if I have hurt or offended you in the past year, by anything I have said or done --

Then you are just too sensitive.

The issue may not really be sensitivity. Some people are more prone to hurt feelings. Sometimes this is because of the way they view the world, because of a kind of egotism.

Let me explain.

Last night we talked about Noah sending a raven and then a dove out of the ark. The text hints that the raven was reluctant to leave the ark. Unlike most birds that will fly away the moment a window or door is opened, this raven has to be dispatched, forcefully sent out from the ark. And once it is outside, it doesn't fly away, but continues to fly back and forth, circling near the Ark.

Last night I mentioned one explanation that is given for this strange behavior. The raven was reluctant to travel any distance away because his mate was still inside. He was well aware that they were the last two ravens in the world and that if anything happened to him, it would be the end of his species. He didn't want to put the needs of the community above the welfare of his own family.

Rashi offers a different explanation, one which at first glance seems very strange. Rashi says that the raven was afraid to leave his mate, because he was afraid that Noah would take her for his own.

That's a very strange comment, the kind of thing that might make you wonder about Rashi's being a French wine maker by profession.

In fact, this is such a strange comment, that a related story has been preserved about a student at the well known Ohr Sameach Yeshivah in Jerusalem, a very Orthodox Yeshivah, who was studying this section of the Torah. He was asked by his teacher, the esteemed Rabbi Wolfson, how things were going.

Fine, the student said, except for one thing. There was this one comment by Rashi that we studied which was really ridiculous.

Now that was actually a rather brave things to say, as Rashi was perhaps the greatest medieval commentator in Jewish tradition, and it is not the style in the Yeshivah world, to call anything written by previous generations ridiculous, let alone something from the master commentator himself.

But Rabbi Wolfson was a kind man and he didn't scold his student, who it seems was a baal teshuvah, someone who had more recently adopted Orthodoxy. Instead he explained: Aggadah, the story section of our tradition, is not like the Halachah, the legal tradition. The Midrash, the stories are not meant to be taken literally. Rashi wasn't talking about ravens, Rashi was talking about people.

What was the raven's problem? He believed that the world revolved around him. When he was told to do something, he understood its meaning as it related to him and only to him. Trying to figure out why Noah wanted him out of the ark, he didn't think about the needs of the community, the small band now resting in the ark on Mt. Ararat. He could think only of himself, and thus came up with an explanation of Noah's order, that related to his own concerns solely.

The raven was like some people who if they see two friends talking together across the street, are sure they are talking about him or her. If a clerk in the supermarket is curt, they are sure that it's about them. They don't consider the possibility that the clerk just had a fight with his boss, or just learned that she would not be getting a raise.

Viewing the world as rotating around us can make life very painful. We then interpret every action as a referendum on ourselves.

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Conservative movement paraphrases one of the famous passages in Pirke Avot in the following way:

Until age 20 one is totally preoccupied with what others think of him or her.

From 20-40 when one's ego is more developed, one's attitude is: I don't care what they think about me. I don't care what they say. I am my own person. I will do what I want to do, say what I want to say, look as I want to look, and they'll either like it or they won't.

But Rabbi Schorsch says, the real wisdom comes sometimes when we are over 40 when we realize that most of the time people don't care about the clothes we wear or the car we drive or the things we own, that we are not at the center of everyone else's consciousness.

We may not agree with Rabbi Schorsch on the ages of the stages but many of us have experienced our teenage years as a time when we did worry a lot about what others thought of us. If we had a pimple we were sure everyone noticed it, if we came to the dance in blue and everyone was wearing black, we felt like there was a neon light flashing above our heads. As we mature and become less centered on ourselves, we become less self conscious and also less likely to have our feelings hurt by every informal interactions.

Rabbi Schorsch concluded his Pirke Avot parallel as follows; If we can take the focus off ourselves and be less concerned about what others say, then we can become more interested in improving our world."