Missing the Message

Virtually all of us, somewhere in our lives, have to deal with those who can be charitably described as being difficult.  And for most, it’s practically a cradle to grave experience.

Be it a close relative, teacher, co-worker, roommate or simply the guy that sits next to you in shul, the one who thinks that Hashem is deaf; we are constantly challenged, if not assaulted, by people whose behavior runs decidedly south of the norm.

So how do we react?

Some of us (ME) don’t do well with this sort of thing.  We tend towards a somewhat less than tolerant view of our fellow man if he is thought to be other than normal as defined by us.  Whereas the more egalitarian disposed amongst us see little more than the quirks and idiosyncrasies that are nuts and bolts of what might benignly be thought of as eccentric behavior, we get fixated on the sundry abnormalities that confront us to the exclusion of all other considerations.

We are admonished to go with the flow of the yissurim that we encounter in the course of our lives as opposed to kicking back at it, and yet that’s exactly what we do with the emotional yissurim that come our way as a by-product of our relationships with people perceived to be difficult.

In EmunahSpeak: The Stick we spoke about the moshal that compares the way we react to the events in our lives, be they big or small, to a dog barking at a stick being wielded against it.

We asked there: why is it that we (who should know better) are constantly angry at the stick?

And we answered that: Unlike the dog, we never see Anyone holding it.  If we did, we would no doubt do a lot better than a dog in zeroing in on the cause of our discomfort.  The “sticks” in our lives are physically detached from the One that wields them, and as a consequence thereof, we all too often fail to fill in the spiritual blanks in our field of visual understanding.  And so we lash out at the stick, be it a spouse, a neighbor, a flat tire, a boss or a migraine, missing the essential point of the encounter in the process.

So if we're reacting to everything that comes our way as opposed to discerning its underlying message, what then is the difference between the challenges presented by the difficult ones amongst us and the everyday stuff that gets in our face?

Those things to which we react adversely in the every day give and take of our existence are more or less speed bumps on an otherwise fairly smooth road. Not so vis á vis those that challenge us by their very existence. Speed bumps are not the exception.  They’re the default position, and we react accordingly by being in permanent anticipation mode.  Rather than wait for a shoe to drop, we act as if it already did.

Dr. Dovid Lieberman directs our focus where it should be when he tells us that it is our responsibility to perceive the wider reality which is that Hashem is speaking to us through every person and situation.  While this is certainly true for all people as was pointed out above, as far as the difficult ones are concerned, Hashem never stops talking.

The truth, says Dr. Lieberman, is that such relationships are a very common area in which people often miss the message by focusing on the messenger instead because they don't understand that difficult people are not in our lives to add to our woes, but to help us.

Rather than get aggravated by the people who don’t act normally, we should be reflecting on what lesson can learned from such encounters or relationships by asking:

Nu?  So what does Hashem want from me now?