A few years ago an article in the New York Times caught my eye. It was about Abraham Lincoln and this remarkable practice he had. When Lincoln would get angry and wanted to tell someone off, he would often draft a letter—Harry Potter fans might call it howler—really letting the person have it. But then–and this is the remarkable part—he wouldn’t send the letter. He’d stick it in an envelope and mark it “unsigned, unsent” and put it in a drawer. And that was it. Anger episode over. Now back to the Civil War.
The article shared that it wasn’t just Lincoln who did this. Many famous leaders from history evidently did: Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Mark Twain. But as Maria Konnikova, who wrote the article, observed, this practice feels downright quaint in the age of social media. People routinely publish angry tweets and posts, they make huffy emotional video rants, and they even fire off longer form pieces in the heat of fear and anger. And yes, it gets a lot of clicks—and it’s precisely the kind of stuff that makes the Internet often feel like a toxic ocean of dreck.
This is the third episode in our miniseries devoted to responding to antisemitism more mindfully. In our first episode we talked about the phenomenon of intergenerational Jewish trauma, how even historical experiences of Jew hatred that we ourselves didn’t experience can still cause us to feel strong negative emotions when we sense antisemitism in our own lives. Last week we talked about the experience of being triggered by antisemitism. This week, I want to explore that idea of triggering a little more, and specifically the question of how we can create some space and time between stimulus and response—space and time in which we can, perhaps, not be triggered, and instead choose a wiser, less reactive response.
This feels like a counter cultural idea today—as counter cultural as Abe Lincoln’s top hat or Mark Twain’s obsessive cigar habit. Because the world we live in is all about collapsing the zone between stimulus and response. It thrives on clickbait, finding those tantalizing pieces of content that prompt us to react unthinkingly and buy stuff: that cold beer on a hot day, that burger that will sate your hunger, that car that will compensate for all your perceived midlife inadequacies. Our economy and our media thrive on immediate gratification. Thinking and reflection just get in the way of all that.
But it’s not just the business economy that works that way. The political and cultural economies do too. And it feels like there’s a whole industry out there that just thrives on getting us to feel angry and emotional—to feel triggered–and then to pick a side. It’s like something is trying to get us to react—with a statement or a slogan or a meme, or even just a strong feeling. And if that’s true for anything, it’s especially true when it comes to Jews and Israel and antisemitism.
It could just be me—I’m a rabbi, and the algorithms know that—but I feel like I’m constantly bombarded with messages that are trying to play to my basest fears as a Jew: our people are always threatened, our security is always a hair’s breadth from slipping away, it’s 1938 all over again. And while there may be–okay, there are–really good reasons to be worried and vigilant, my point is that the way this whole media ecosystem seems to work is by ginning up my reactivity meter, by trying to close that gap between stimulus and response, to make me (us) constantly on edge.
That brings up a really important idea: the need to stay vigilant without becoming hyper-vigilant. We’ll talk more about that in an upcoming episode, because it really deserves its own treatment, and it might be the most important teaching in this whole miniseries. But for today, I’d like to focus on this equally important and universal dimension of Jewish mindfulness practice, which is creating more space between stimulus and response. Because if you don’t want to be triggered, then you have to put some space and time between your button being pressed and the result that comes out of you.
That space and time is what we might call a bechira point, or a choice point. We actually talked about this a bit last summer, in Season 2, episode 23. The essence of the bechira point is what the great Jewish psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl described as that space between stimulus and response in which we have the freedom to make a choice. And while practicing it isn’t easy, it is remarkably simple.
If you can, close your eyes. If you can’t, just try to soften your gaze a bit.
Take a good deep breath. Try counting to four on the inhale through the nose. Hold the breath for a beat. And then try counting to four on the exhale through the mouth.
Do that again.
And one more time.
And now, bring to mind a triggering experience you might have had recently in a media environment, let’s say, about antisemitism. Maybe you saw a post that set you off, or you heard something on the radio that made you want to just yank the console out of the car. Try to notice what emotions were present for you, what sensations you felt in your body.
Through your noticing, try to create a little separation between you and your emotions.
As you continue breathing, feel into the reality that you can actually be more in control than you might think.
And now, from a slightly calmer place, ask yourself, “If I were to see something like that again, how would I want to show up? Would I want to be reactive, fearful, angry? Could I perhaps do nothing right then—and that would be okay. Could I give myself the space and time to choose a wiser, more mindful, more strategic response?” That choice is yours. That power is yours. And by disrupting the cycle of reactivity, you’re actually taking that power back. How does that feel?
This practice is so basic–but it is so important, for our response to antisemitism, and for our response to so many other difficult things in the world. It’s kind of the essence of the whole thing. So this week, try to practice it and see how it goes.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.