The Anger of Lovingkindness

I'd already told Beth that I could make her Tuesday morning class, on living the lessons of Torah of Lovingkindness, when I walked in on her in the copy room.  If I hadn't already told her, if I'd just kept that to myself and planned to show up, then upon seeing the topic of the sheet she was copying there in the copy room before class began, I would have finished up my own office business and quietly bolted from the building as fast as I could go.  

The topic was Anger.Two sharply divergent insights have come out of that class for me.  The predominant theme we kept circling back to was, when and how is anger useful?  The answer is, not much and for not long.  At an animal level, anger sends a clear message of "back off".  There's a famous account of a fawn driving off a pack of wolves, rearing up on its hindlegs with its little forefeet boxing.  The wolves decided that this kind of crazy wasn't worth dealing with.  Then X-- spoke of a great teacher telling a victim of violence that they weren't yet ready to forgive... and I remembered the Linns' work _Don't Forgive too Soon_, on how all forgiveness is a miniature grief process, and it has to be worked through.  I found myself wondering, astonishing idea-- what if it is not just that anger is part of the grief process, what if *all* anger signals a need to process?  Anger comes when there is a break between the world as it is and as we think it should be.  What if, a human level, the first job of anger is to say "Step back, I need to process this"?  Anger is useful, extremely useful, as a signal to one's self from one's self.  Counselors and relationship guides have written about this topic endlessly: the individual walking through the world slamming things and shouting but completely unaware of their anger, even vociferously denying their anger.  These are people who have reached a point where they are acting in anger without feeling it; they are not getting the signal. They are deadly.  Caregiver's rage, of course, comes because there is no way to step back, no room to process, an unfathomable need to grieve and no way to work though it-- the pot is kept at a perpetual simmer and the slightest bump in heat will boil it over every time. But that is almost beside this point of anger as a signal, a spectacular signal to one's self to stop everything and pay attention to how you are feeling.  The Chinese invented synthetic explosives, and what they used it for was fireworks.  If healthy anger is a firework, the mistake comes when the explosion is pointed at somebody.

The second insight relates to Torah, and how we read it... especially so close to the deluge of Noach.  We speak a lot of the Divine being angry; we don't speak of the Divine being hurt.  Isn't that odd?  When we speak of anger amongst ourselves, it is with a clear understanding that anger and a sense of injury go hand in hand.  What if we were to read Divine anger, as as expression of Divine injury?  What if the Almighty on Sinai telling Moses of the sin of the Golden Calf is telling us of how hurt the Almighty is?  If we were to take it for granted that any damage to creation is an agony to the Creator-- if we were to truly take that to heart, to assume it at all times, we bring ourselves to a place where we read the Creator threatening violence as an expression of the Creator in extremis.  How does that change how we read? If these words in the text are meant to be a fireworks show, to last through generations... 
And of course it is all more complicated than that... but nonetheless there is a strange and deep reconciliation to realize that, yes, a loving deity who wishes to be loved and even more that people should love one another, is going to be an angry deity.

Eat. Rage. Love.

Eat. Pray. Love.

My lament that I need three of me-- for my family's physical needs, for my family's emotional needs, and for my own needs-- sounds a lot like eat, pray, love.

Only: Eat, Love, Pray.

The Sim Shalom siddur reads, in the Shabbat prayer for peace, that we are brought into being "To praise, to labor, and to love."

Pray, Eat, Love.

But I don't get beyond Eat.  Everything I've got to give is going into the physical needs, and falling short.

Not Eat, Pray, Love.

Just Cook, Clean, Clothe.

And I know the great spiritual answer on this one. 
I know the examples of the Benedictine and Zen Buddhist monks in making the physical labor the primary expression of all else. 
I know, "I slept and dreamt that life was joy, I woke and saw that life is work, I worked and found that work is joy."

What I have instead is this bottomless toxic resentful rage...

And I think it is because the spiritual practices that elevate labor, labor side by side.  Not necessarily doing the same tasks at the same time, but nevertheless, side by side.

I feel no one by my side.