I was rereading You Shall Be Holy on Shabbos and found this on page 312:
I know, for example, that on days when I am consumed by anger against someone, I rarely get worthwhile work done. Every time I begin something, the angry thoughts intrude and distract me.
I was jarred by these sentiments because I never experience them. I’m guessing that it has been more than a decade since I’ve been so angry that it has interfered with my work.
Why is this? Am I a bigger mentch that Telushkin? Of course not. But I have something that he does not — a blog. When I am angry, I blog. In fact, I do my best writing when emotional.
Even when angry, I strictly limit my public attacks to public figures in their public performances. If I write out my anger about private figures, I rarely use identifying details. Either way, I always give my enemies unlimited space to respond (within the basic boundaries of non-libelous discourse).
From my reading of Telushkin’s books and my experience with the man, I get the feeling he’s so obsessed with being a model of goodness and holiness that he bottles up a tremendous amount of anger and frustration and does not follow the Torah’s commandment to not hate thy fellow in your heart.
When it can be productive, it is best when angry at someone to tell the person (in as non-threatening a way as possible) what’s bothering you. If that doesn’t work, in some cases, you should go public, particularly if it is in the realm of ideas and values and public figures such as the Mordecai Gafni affair.
I know that in my case, Telushkin and his buddies Saul Berman and Stephen Marmer went off on me half-cocked without ever bothering to talk to me. After they distributed their hateful letter, they refused to answer my interview requests.
After they were proved to have been horribly publicly wrong, after it was shown that they deliberately acted badly against a mountain of evidence while lying about having thoroughly investigated the charges against Gafni, Telushkin, Berman, Marmer and co. made only the most circumspect and general apologies and not to the two people they principally attacked in this case (Vicki Polin and me).
I get mad too. I got mad at Telushkin for his letter. But I went to him about it and to Berman and Marmer etc (via email and phone). And when they wouldn’t talk to me, I made my case on this blog and moved on with my life.
If you talk to anybody who knows me well, they’ll tell you that I don’t get obsessed with feuds. I’m almost never incapacitated by anger. Not because I’m so righteous, but because I follow the simple rules above.
I have constructed my life so that I make an independent living and am free to state my views in almost any matter and am willing to lose friends over it because I have sufficient psychic resources to go it alone with unpopular views, for instance pushing the Aron Tendler story forward for 18 months before L.A.’s Orthodox establishment finally, belatedly, when they had no other alternative, did something about it (with Rabbi Avraham Union at the Rabbinical Council of California protesting that his crew had zero tolerance for sexual predators).
I predict that if the day comes when Telushkin grows the balls to pick up the phone to talk courteously to people he hates, his incapacitating hatreds will disappear.
