How do you respond in the face of someone else’s anger? The story of het ha’egel has a beautiful example in it of a leader (Moshe) defending the people in the face of God’s fury. God finds out that Bnei Yisrael make and pray to an idol and gets really, really angry. Moshe notices God’s anger and stops God from acting on it in the heat of the moment.
Together we thought about how we tend to see people respond when someone gets angry.
- One person gets angry and yells at someone, and then that person gets angry and yells back, and then just everyone is angry.
- When I get angry, I scream, and then my brother doesn’t like it and also gets angry and then hits me.
- My mom reminds me to take breaks when I’m getting really frustrated with my homework.
- One character in a book I read was glaring at another one trying to get her to also be upset, but she just smiled back at him and eventually he walked away.
Focusing on the responses that helped to de-escalate the anger, we came up with a list of ways we could help ourselves or someone else calm down when we notice that some emotions are getting too big:
- Run away – give them some space.
- Suggest to them to close their eyes, imagine their happy place, and count to ten while taking big, deep breaths.
- Get an adult to help.
- Give them a hug if they want or try to make them laugh.
- Take a break – do something fun and distracting
By the very end of the story, God’s anger has mostly dissipated and God wants to reestablish a gentler, caring relationship with Moshe and Bnei Yisrael. God describes Godself in the following way: “compassionate and considerate, slow to anger, and excessive in kindness and truth, who keeps kindness for thousands of generations, forgives badness and mistakes, and who makes things clean” (Exodus 34:6-7).
- We ended our conversations this week by brainstorming ways we can enact this kind of godliness in at Makom Community and at home:
- We can be holy by remembering God.
- We can be helpful by looking for ways to pick someone up who falls down.
- We can be kind and helpful by standing up for someone who’s getting hurt.
- We can be forgiving of someone who makes a mistake that hurts us.
We also can do our best to respond to anger with kindness and compassion. So this week I’d like to conclude with a challenge for us all to be a little more like the gentle, caring God described at the end of this story: Try to notice when you and the people around you are starting to have emotions that are just too big, and see if you can respond to those big, angry feelings with kindness.