fbpx

Gaining Clarity: Mastering Emotional Wisdom

[additional-authors]
March 11, 2015

Human development and moral life depends on our ability to pause, reflect, and gain clarity of our affective and cognitive selves. A recent study showed that when confronted with clear choices of right and wrong, people who take time to think about the issue rather than make a quick, rash decision are five times more likely to pick the right thing. By pausing to reflect, we provide ourselves with moral clarity.

Indeed, the biggest challenge people face in life is control over emotions; we are not in control of all that life brings us. However, we are in control of our reactions. How can we break from the negative emotions of fear, anger, resentment, jealousy, and hate to actualize ourselves in joy, positivity, hope, and love?

Before we can make any choice about our inner world, we must first be self-aware. My teacher Ron Heifetz, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote, “Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.” The first step to proactive leadership, and living, is owning your emotional awareness and control, learning to hold emotion rather than being held by it. Each moment is an opportunity to learn. The second challenge is to know what to do with our current emotional state. For example, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik taught that negative emotions – once noticed and controlled – can become stimuli for good:

Of course, love is a great and noble emotion, fostering the social spirit and elevating man, but not always is the loving person capable of meeting the challenge of harsh realities. In certain situations, a disjunctive emotion, such as anger or indignation may become the motivating force for noble and valuable action” (A Theory of Emotions, 183).

The third challenge is to understand how emotions become interconnected. I may, for example, suppress feelings of anger, but how will that affect my resentment or sadness? I may release my jealousy, but how will that affect my yearning? Rabbi Larry Kushner wrote about the relationship between love and humility:

The opposite of love is not hate but self-love. Indeed, the paradox of loving seems to be that you get bigger from making yourself smaller. Love cannot be acquired but only given. The love you give is the love you have. And the more people you love, the more love you have (God Was In This Place, 52).

Oftentimes, we find ourselves stuck on cruise control, not seeing beyond the surface. At certain moments, we may simply accept conversations on an external level and end up doing harm. Consider Maimonides’ example: “Accepting hospitality from someone who does not have enough for himself verges on stealing. Yet the recipient thinks that he has done nothing wrong, saying, ‘Didn’t I take only what he offered me?’” (Hilchot Teshuvah 4:4).

There are certainly times when we are caught in disputes during moments of emotional passion. It is during these instances that we lose the bigger perspective.  A Hasidic parable: Rav Chaim of Volozhin was approached about a land dispute. He told the rivals that the land didn’t belong to either of them and ultimately they both would belong to it. Judaism is constantly demanding that we embrace more complex emotions that embrace a larger picture. At the end of every Jewish wedding, at the pinnacle of utmost joy, the groom breaks a glass to remind everyone present that material possessions break and are ultimately valueless; every human story, even the most joyous, includes trauma and loss.

There are times that our emotional awareness and responses have great impact on others. Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama, teaches how important it is to be emotionally scrupulous at the bed of the dying:

I advise everyone to do their best to work out attachment and grief with the dying person before death comes: Cry together, express your love, and say goodbye, but try to finish with this process before the actual moment of death arrives. If possible, it is best if friends and relatives do not show excessive grief at the moment of death, because the consciousness of the dying person is at that moment exceptionally vulnerable. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that your crying and tears around a person’s bedside are experienced like thunder and hail.

For the sake of our own health, our precious relationships, and our success during our all-too-short lives, we must learn and embrace our emotional lives, through writing, or therapy, or prayer, and only then can we must master emotional cultivation that helps us actualize our moral and spiritual values.

 

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the Executive Director of the Valley Beit Midrash, the Founder & President of Uri L’Tzedek, the Founder and CEO of The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute and the author of seven books on Jewish ethics.  Newsweek named Rav Shmuly one of the top 50 rabbis in America.”

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

Difficult Choices

Jews have always believed in the importance of higher education. Today, with the rise in antisemitism across many college campuses, Jewish high school seniors are facing difficult choices.

All Aboard the Lifeboat

These are excruciating times for Israel, and for the Jewish people.  It is so tempting to succumb to despair. That is why we must keep our eyes open and revel in any blessing we can find.  

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.