Conventional wisdom says "Don't go to bed angry" and "Don't hold a grudge." "They," whoever "they"are, probably have no idea how important these lessons are. Before we lay our heads down to sleep (barring the times our heads thump down on our desks in the middle of a long afternoon), we recite a prayer: "I hereby forgive anyone who angered or antagonized me or who sinned against me - whether against my body, my property, my honor, or against anything of mine; whether this was done accidentally, willfully, carelessly, or purposely; whether through speech deed thought or notion." The intention of this prayer is to have us take a step back and reflect on our day; to recall those interactions in the past 24 hours that made you angry , that hurt you, that you regret, and to find a way to put them behind you -- not by pretending they didn't happen, but by truly forgiving the people who hurt you. No one ever said this was easy… it's a lot easier to "go to bed angry" and just write-off the offender as someone not worth your time. But as Rabbi Berel Wein would say, "That's not the Jewish way."
So if this is the "Jewish way," how the heck does one do it? How can I honestly forgive someone who hurt me? Maybe I can forgive a guy who cut me off in traffic, since I'll probably never see him again, but someone I'm close to…a brother, a sister? How could I just forgive them when they hurt me so deeply?
Well, guess what?! This week's Torah portion has an idea how to do it (convenient, eh?). This week, the Vice President of ancient Egypt finally reveals to his eleven brothers that he is their brother Joseph - the one they threw in the pit and sold into slavery so many years ago. Now, you would think Joseph would be furious with them, ready to enact a well-calculated revenge. Well, as "luck" would have it (for the purpose of the point I want to make), he never has such intentions. No longer able to hide his identity, Joseph breaks down in a hysterical fit of tears, revealing that he is the brother they abandoned. He pleads with them not to reproach themselves for having sold him. "I needed to be in Egypt," he explains. For he had the ability to lead that nation through an incredible famine and ensure a supply of food for the entire Middle East for those 7 years. "It wasn't you who sent me, but G-d."
Rebbe Nachman says that when you want to forgive somebody, all you have to do is find a single action, one small thing that s/he did that was good. An action that, however small, was not masked by ulterior motives, that was a genuine expression of their true self. Once you find one of these, look for another, and another, until you've arranged these "sparks" as notes along a stave. What you will have then is a beautiful song. The beautiful song of the person's true self.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe sees that this is exactly what Joseph did. Even though his brothers intended him harm, Joseph was able to judge them not on their outer actions and twisted motivations, but on their inner essence. The power of Joseph was on his ability to translate the spiritual reality he experienced (his closeness to G-d) into a real life in the material world.
At the last Shabbat we all had together here, Tom S. shared something right along these lines. When I get angry at someone, I'm telling them that I don't recognize the G-d in them. And when someone gets angry at me, they're saying that I'm not showing them the G-d in me. That spark of G-d, that part of us that is holy, that capacity to act with love and understanding - it's always there. The challenge we face in this material world is to see into this part of our friends even when they're hiding it behind masks of impulsive actions and walls of insensitive remarks. That's the challenge of being souls in bodies. At the same time we are completely immaterial: speaking words, having feelings, thinking thoughts; and completely material: eating food, wearing clothes, growing old. Maybe, just maybe, if we can recognize the tremendous struggle that this dichotomy presents us, we'd see why they (and we) make mistakes in relationships, why they (and we) act without thinking, why they (and we) hurt loved ones. Our souls existing on earth is as easy as our bodies existing in outer space! The only way for our soul to survive is to protect it with a body, but with that body come all the actions that distance us from other souls.
Great, so Joseph could harmonize and find a balance between soul and body, but now he's dead and gone, leaving us with just a wing and a prayer (book). Conventional wisdom comes to the rescue again with, "The hardest step is the first one." I bless us all not to underestimate our power to take one step.