When I was a congregational Rabbi, I received many calls from people seeking personal counseling to handle problems with their families or friends. Time after time, someone would tell me of their difficulty in relating to someone else, explaining to me how that other person didn't really like them, never understood them, never gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Once, I counseled a husband who was in the middle of a painful divorce. He told me how cruel and conniving his wife was to him, how she never backed him up, never stood by his side in all the years of their marriage. Two days later, his wife sat in the same chair he had occupied, listing the very same complaints against him. Of course, both spouses insisted that they were always considerate and supportive to the other. The problem was never them, it was always "the other one."
Today's Torah portion sheds some light on this unfortunate and universal human phenomenon. As the Jewish people were wandering through the wilderness on their way to freedom in the Land of Israel, they continued to rebel against God. With each rebellion, they "murmured in the tents, saying, "Because God hated us, He brought us forth out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites, to destroy us." Shocked by the assumption that God hates the Jews, the Rabbis of Midrash Sifre Devarim ask, "Is it possible that God should hate Israel? Is it not said elsewhere [by the prophet Malachi]: 'I have loved you, said the Lord?' " Well, if God doesn't hate the Jews, then what are we to make of their claim that they feel God's hatred?
The sages of the Midrash respond, "Rather, it is they who hate God." As the popular proverb puts it, "Whatever you think of your friend, [you imagine] he thinks of you." Frightened by their newfound freedom, terrified by the responsibility that comes with liberation, the Jews longed for the routine and predictability of slavery. Shaken by their terror and their insecurity, they turn their feelings toward God into hatred. After all, God is the one who got them into this mess in the first place. Then, after a while of hating God, the emotion is so strong that it feels as though it comes from God to begin with.
But the reality is that God doesn't hate the Israelites in their wanderings; they hate God. Yet they are so trapped by their own perspective and their own fear that they project their rage onto the one they hate and then think they are the objects of hatred, rather than its source. What drives someone to take their own feelings of jealousy, anger and rage, and project them onto their original target? All of us carry scars from earlier times in our lives.
Each one of us, however popular we may now be, remembers a time when that popularity constantly eluded us. As a result, we live with a deep-rooted assumption that we really aren't lovable after all. And we filter all our experiences through that unshakeable (and unreasonable) assumption. Even though it is no longer justified, our pervasive insecurity and our need to be loved can poison our present and erect a wall between us and our dearest friends and family.
In the wilderness of Sinai, the fears of the Israelites separated them from their God. The pain of their own insecurity and pettiness forced them to construe God's actions through their own apprehensions. In our own day, that same pattern continues. It can cripple relationships, destroy congregations and separate us from sources of love and healing. Rather than assuming that others think ill of us, isn't it wiser to presume affection until it is clearly denied? Rather than construing someone's actions against a backdrop of rejection and hostility, isn't is smarter to create a context that explains someone's behavior without assuming that they intended to hurt, or that they no longer care?
The world would be a better place if we just learned to read our own behavior for malice and the actions of others for oversight. After all, God does love you.
Shabbat Shalom.