Shame on Me
Last week I got humiliated in a public forum. It wasn’t anything horrific, and definitely could’ve been a lot worse. But when you get embarrassed publicly, it really stings.
You see, I am part of a group texting chat consisting of 42 people. I made a request to someone on the chat, and that person replied in a way that made me look like both inflexible and foolish. At that point, not wanting to create a scene, I replied to him off-line. Respectfully I explained my position, but he never took the time to respond. I felt uncomfortable attending a group meeting later that day because I knew he would be there.
On that same day, I got a call from our insurance company. They said that a claim we made was rejected and that we would have to pay $3,000 out of pocket. That also stung, obviously, but in a different way.
Then a thought occurred to me: we had also recently received a tax refund from the IRS, which made me feel very happy.
Come to think of it, the tax refund and the insurance payment were around the same amount of money. So it was pretty much a wash. But apparently, from a spiritual perspective, I was meant to experience both the joy of a tax refund windfall, as well as the sting of a rejected insurance payment. Independently.
So I am sure that the sting I felt from being publicly humiliated was probably offset by some of the other happier exchanges that I had experienced with other people.
When bad things happen to us, especially at the hands of another person, it is a divine test to see how we will react to that person. Will we allow the negativity to accelerate, or will we swallow our pride and let it go? I need to remember that nothing happens randomly. What happens to us is out of our control. It is our reaction to those things that matters.
I then thought of our patriarch Abraham. What would he have done? How did he deal with difficult people? Well, as it happens, that same morning I was called to the Torah for an aliyah in a local synagogue. (I have an interesting made-up custom of "reading into" the aliyahs that I receive. I feel that there’s always a divine message being spoken to me as I listen to the Torah reading for my Aliyah.)
That morning‘s Torah portion discussed Abraham dealing with a very difficult personality, a man named Ephron. When Abraham was in a low place after his beloved wife Sarah had passed away, Ephron took advantage of his vulnerable state and took him to the cleaners when he sold him the Cave of Machpelah.
Abraham would have been justified to let Ephron have a piece of his mind. However, he passed his test by staying calm and patient and became a true role model for forgiveness and humility.
Granted, it is very difficult to remember this in the heat of the moment, but often when G-d sends us challenges, He also sends reminders and divine messages our way. Sometimes those reminders come in the form of an aliyah to the Torah, and sometimes in the form of a tax refund.
In the words of the iconic Dr. Seuss in his very first published book: "Marco, keep your eyelids up/and see what you can see." It's on us to keep our eyes up, to connect the dots, to stay mindful of our role models in the Torah, and to remember that everything - the good, the bad, the ugly - has a message.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Koval
