Letting go of Resentment

Holding ill-will against someone else is a CHOICE maintained because it gives the resenter something. My belief is that it always gives less, however, than it takes.

Resentment of Hamas, for example, may give Israelis certain payoffs - a feeling of unity, or a holier than thou feeling, or whatever. But it won't help in actaully dealing with the reality of Hamas.

Now letting go of ill will is not the same as condoning inexcusable behaviour. In other words Hamas terrorism can be condemned, without resenting the people who perpetrate it.

I know this is radical stuff, and a tall order for human beings, but it is possible. And in fact, without ill will one is far more effective and efficient, even in dealing with people like Hamas. The available options can be pursued without demonizing them, which is just an easy way for us to feel like angels without doing to many maasim tovim of our own.

I think Hamas are human beings - only a human being could overide the life instinct and blow themselves up. True, a distorted ideology guides them, and they hurt and maim an damage and kill, but so do IDF artillery shells. We share a common humanity with them.

It is exactly because Hamas don't get a chance to confront Jews as living breathing human beings that they can do what they do. They blow up ideas in their heads, constructs, caricatures of Jews. Were they to encounter their living, breathing victims in a different context, where fear and haterd did not colour everything, they would not be able to murder them.

Are Jews fundamentally more moral than the Palestinians, fundamentally better ? I don't believe so, we make mistakes, they make mistakes, we are blind, they are blind, we want the best for ourselves, they want the best for themselves.

I served in Gaza at the height of the Intifada, and more than one innocent person was killed by my unit, and at least one baby blinded. Does that make us irrideemably bad ? No, we were human beings in an impossible situation doing the best we could with what we had. Did we objectively hurt people ? yes. Did we really, at the bottom of our beings want to hurt people ? No, fear, peer pressure and dehumanization created the circumstances and our blindness. Will the Palestinians - say the parents of people who were killed or crippled - gain anything by resenting us - No. Making a religion of resentment is to end up crippled, bent, bitter, twisted and disempowered.

A person who has been raped can resent all men into the grave, and pay the price of having poor relationships and poor self esteem. A person who has been molested as a child can hold resentments against the molestor. But resentment blocks healing, healing being the ability to approach life freshly without the burden of the past. And without that freshness, we condem ourselves to suffering. We can choose to let go of ill will towards a person or group, without condoning their behaviour. We can decide what steps we need to take in order to maintain our integrity and authority - and do ALL THIS WITHOUT RESENTING THE OTHER. In fact, it is my belief that while we are resenting the other, we cannot effectively maintain our own integrity. This too is true for the individual and the society.

Is Israel effectively dealing with the challenges which prod her to grow, to change, to evolve ? I would say not - fear and resentment are paralysing the collective. Should Israel be condemned for this ? No, Israel should be held with love and compassion, and recognised as the wonderful, dynamic entity it is at core. And Israelis will discover they have the option to forgive, and the option to live beyond resentment and a reactive identity based on "not-being-the -other."

Even the holocaust has not properly being dealt with because it was never properly mourned and finished with. We rushed straight form the pain to the solutions (like the State of Israel) without allowing ourselves some time to simply feel the enormity of the loss, the powerlessness, the humiliation, the fear, the anger. We jumped right over the experience into "never again" without ever dealing with "the heart of darkness." And because we have not dealt with us it haunts us still, conditioning our responses in ways which are often totally inappropriate for contemporary challenges.

By resenting the Germans - and who has better reason to resent than us - we play an active role in perpetuating our own pain and our own ongoing victimisation - the fear of anti-Semitism is often a self fulfilling prophecy.

To forgive without remembering is meaningless - for then what are we forgiving. But to remember without forgiving is not to give others the opportunity to change, to become different. If Germans feeel no matter what they do - reperations, good ties with Israel, the banning of Neo-Nazi literature, a refusal to publicly condem Israel etc etc - never remove the stain from them, then why bother. In other words, we don't have to forgive, but if we don't, we will end up becoming the primary victims of our own refusal to let go of the ill will. And by the way not forgiving does not bring back the dead and nor does it necessarily honour them.

Jews are not victims. They are strong powerful people who constantly create their own destiny. Letting go of resentment facilitates the process of taking responsiblity in a radical way, for the things that we create, and our responses to the things that happen to us. Holding on to ill will because "you did such and such to me" or "they did such and such to us" turns the resenter into a victim, someone who is powerless to resist.

The resentment the Sepharadim have, for example, towards the shananigans of labour during the 1950's is grounded in very real complaints. Yet has resenting labour empowered the sepharedim, or maintained their oppression? Resentment does not create the opposite of what it resents, rather the resenter becomes THE SAME as the thing resented. Iran, for example , is a country run on resentment, resentment of the west, resentment of Jews and Judaism and the empowerment of Jews which Israel represents. Does Iran look like a happy contented creative country ? Not on your life.

Everything good in Israel has emerged - I believe - from the desire to build - and not from the desire to resent the left/right/Arabs/Jews /Palestinians/Israeli's /dossim/frayer yiddin etc etc