Rushing off to work, I wrote a quick blurb yesterday about an interesting article I had found while surfing the pages of Ha'aretz. I thought little of it - it seemed pretty straightforward.
I did it, it was done.
Mid-day, at the hospital, I finish making some rounds, and take a break to read my email. There, flashing at me, are words of pain and frustration from a friend - one who was totally shocked by the few paragraphs I had written.
Emails fly back and forth. We argue, we clarify, we solve. But, behind it all, I wonder why the swift and sweeping reaction to what I had viewed as truly innocuous words. You can give people gimmic after gimmic to get them into shul, there's nothing wrong with that. So what?
Oops.
Hochiach tochiach, we are commanded. Rebuke! Thank you. Today I was rebuked. And I probably deserved it.
Not because of what I said, per se, but because of the meaning that could have been in my words. I was free-wheeling, not cautious. I did not think thoroughly through how my words might be read by others.
And maybe my opinion on this subject is a little off-center. Fine. So be it.
But there's another angle to this. To what extent to do we read into others' words, others' actions, so much more meaning than there is on the surface, either because our imagination runs wild or because we are better served by the outcome? To what extent do we see what we are expecting, wanting to see, rather than what is actually there?
Sitting on a friend's couch last night, catching up after a long period of "away," we go through the usual laundry list of ideas - girls, work, school, Judaism. We get to the last, and the conversation heats up. Yes, no comments needed, thank you.
Oh! I heard so much about your friend, so and so, at the Biennial, he says. He stood there on a stage, next to all those other people and davened!
I ask what he means...
I mean, he was there, right in the face of all those old-timers and he shuckled through the entire Amidah.
This friend is excited that someone like him "showed it to the man," that he forced a reckoning amongst old-timers for a new-wave of Jewish action, that he, on the stage, had done what he, on the couch, could only hope to.
But I think about the story, and my friend on the stage, and I chuckle inside to myself. Because I know him well enough to know what he really was doing. He was praying. He wasn't making some grandiose political statement or trying to change a movement of people in that one moment.
No! The Amidah is my space with God, no one can take that from me, he used to tell me. He was being real to himself, being real to his God, not letting others tell him how to be - nothing more, nothing less. He was praying! And the world saw this as the birth of a revolution.
We all do things, in our own individuality, that are interpreted a myriad of ways by others. Sometimes this is intended. Sometimes its not. We cannot be responsible for the way that others choose to read things, choose to see things, choose to feel things, if this is not our intent or real effect.
But we can, I have learned, I learned the hard way, yesterday, be cautious of the words and actions we put out into the world - cautious that, though unintended, they can be seen so differently than their intention, they can cause pain and anger and, worst, hurt - often to the people we love most.
And I certainly don't want that at all.
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