To my Dear Kallas, עמו”ש

A Guten Erev Rosh Hashana, עמו”ש

If I told you how many times I started and restarted this letter, it would almost be laughable.

It’s such an auspicious time of year, and each time I began, I thought, No, it has to be bigger. Deeper. More spiritual. More significant. It’s Erev Rosh Hashana! This topic isn’t important enough.

So I thought about it some more. And then some more.

And finally, I went back to one of my first ideas. Because perhaps it actually is big enough. It impacts so much of how we interact with people, how we get along with people, how we judge people—and even how we view ourselves and our own sense of importance.

As the seasons change, I watch the children in school who suffer from seasonal allergies. Their eyes are watery, they’re sneezing, their ears are clogged, they’re sluggish, and they just don’t feel good.

I was in a classroom recently and saw a child with all of the above symptoms. I looked at her and was suddenly struck by something so simple. We were in the same city, the same building, the same classroom, literally six feet apart—and experiencing two completely different realities.

When it’s time to go out for recess, most of the girls run outside into the (still Baruch Hashem), fresh air and sunshine. But some girls know that going outside will make them feel miserable. So they stay indoors and make the best of their recess that they can.

Same place. Same weather. Same circumstances. Two completely different realities.

And really, this is true in so many areas of life.

The same food can taste delicious to one person and inedible to another. The same sound can be insignificant to one person and abrasive to another. The same smell can be pleasant to one person and literally dangerous to another.

And the same comment can go right over one person’s head—and deeply hurt someone else.

This past week, I experienced two situations that brought this home to me.

Someone called to apologize for something she had said that, in retrospect, she worried might have hurt me. I honestly couldn’t even remember the comment. I assured her that even if she had said it exactly as she remembered, it wasn’t something I would have been sensitive to.

But she kept apologizing, and I realized that she was looking at it through her lens. If someone had said those words to her, they might have hurt her deeply.

Then I had the opposite experience.

Someone called and told me that I had hurt her.

A number of months ago, she had reached out to me about a very difficult situation that a close relative was going through. She asked me to intervene through a connection I had, which I did, and we spoke several times during the crisis.

She was hurt that afterward, I never followed up to ask how things had turned out.

I apologized profusely. Here was someone who had been hurt by my inaction and inattention, and I truly felt terrible that I had caused her pain.

And yet, I also understood why I hadn’t thought to follow up. Sometimes, when people go through something very difficult, they just want that chapter to close. They don’t necessarily want to revisit it or have people who were involved during the crisis pull them back into it. Sometimes we even associate those people with a painful time and simply want to move forward.

That may be how I would have experienced it.

But that wasn’t how she experienced it.

And that was the lesson for me.

We so naturally assume that other people experience the world the way we do. That what wouldn’t bother me shouldn’t bother you. That  what I would appreciate, you should appreciate. That what I would want at a difficult time,  is what you should want too.

But we can be six feet apart, in the exact same room, and living two very different realities.

Perhaps part of becoming softer, kinder people is learning to seek to understand  someone else’s reality.

It doesn’t mean that we will always understand another person’s reaction. It doesn’t mean that we would react the same way. But we can try to look through someone else’s lens and recognize that there are many ways to experience the very same situation.

And when we understand that, the range of what is “okay” becomes so much wider.

We become less judgmental. More curious. More understanding. Softer with the people around us—with our spouses, our children, our friends, our students—and perhaps even with ourselves.

As we enter Rosh Hashana, asking Hakadosh Baruch Hu to look at us with understanding and rachamim, perhaps we can try to offer a little more of that same understanding and rachamim to one another.

To remember that we don’t always know what something feels like through someone else’s eyes, and be open to that. 

 

Wishing you and your families a Gut Gebentched Year and a K’siva V’chasima Tova!