בס''ד
18 Adar, 5773
February 28th, 2013
Parshat Ki Tissa
Shabbat Parah
Emily Bazelon (who wrote
the book on bullying) was at Sixth & I last night. Last week, this came out.
I was bullied
as a kid. My mother once told me, years into my
adulthood, that she didn’t know how I went to school everyday. Luckily, I was a
big kid, so the encounters were rarely physical.
I am uncomfortable
writing this post, partially because of the intimacy of this subject. But mostly
I’m concerned that to admit that one was bullied is to admit weakness. The way
of things is to pretend that we have always been invincible.
Luckily, I am not the boy
I once was – few of us are. The
blessings of my life after outweighed the curses of life before. I am content.
Still, when I reach
inside I can trace the scars, the places where my soul is rough and abraded.
The injuries are long healed, but some of those limbs will never quite work as
they were intended. That too is the way of things. To a greater or lesser
extent, everyone has these injuries.
And after the profusion
of anti-bullying material of the past year or two, my question is not why do
kids bully, but why do we tolerate bullying? Why isn’t it perfectly unacceptable?
I remember this line in
Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life: “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way
of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.” And though it’s a Christian idea, I believe it’s
true. Our brand of the idea is ol malkhut shamyim – accepting the yoke
of heaven.*
Nature
is brutal. Beautiful, but brutal. One eats, or is eaten. And in nature,
dominance matters.
Not
so in spirituality. What matters in the life of the spirit is strength – the kind
of strength that is filled with love, goodness, and principle.
The
two are, ultimately, mutually exclusive. Dominance requires lessening others.
Strength is not strength unless it extends to others.
But
I see people confuse strength with dominance. Tragically, it is often the
people who have been bullied who confuse the ideas the most, for dominance is
all they have experienced.
We
need a world of strength. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is scared. Only true
spiritual strength lifts us up out of the mire of fear. Strength is worth
choosing.
May
you go from strength to strength.
* The Jewish image is a
bit earthier and more workaday than the Christian one. The idea is that we give
up being creatures of wild nature in order to work in heaven's yoke – towards a
better world.
