What To Do In the Wake of Humiliation

On Monday I received pretty much the worst insult of my life. Ironically, it was my dry cleaner who said it to me, and he seems to have meant it as a compliment, though that’s confusing, because no part of the statement was even remotely complimentary, and it in fact synthesized almost every insecurity I’ve ever had into one sentence. It would be impressively elegant if it hadn’t caused me great emotional trauma. Anyway, as a result of my horrific moment with the dry cleaner, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the appropriate response is to an insult. Jewish law comes down really heavily against both gossip (i.e. talking about someone behind her back) and embarrassing someone in public. Embarrassing someone in public is, according to the Talmud, akin to murdering him. One should commit adultery, or even throw himself into a fiery pit before he publicly shames his friend. (For an extended and very well documented discussion of this idea, click here). But what happens when you’ve been publicly embarrassed? What happens when the deed has been done and the victim is left shamefaced? Is there something we’re supposed to say, or even allowed to say when we’ve been put through the wringer ourselves? Are we meant to simply turn the other cheek? Halacha doesn’t have a clear stance on this issue. I asked four rabbis about this today, and the only thing they could really come up with is a statement in Maimonides’ Hilchot De’ot (Laws of Bearing Witness) (6:6) that commands you to ask the person who hurt you why they hurt you. In fact, Maimonides says that before Yom Kippur one of the ways we should do teshuva, repentance, is by telling the people who have harmed us what they’ve done so that they have an opportunity to ask repentance. But what about cases where that’s not really applicable? The person who passes you on the street and calls you a jackass, or who is behind you in line at the grocery store and says into his phone that the person in front of him is “a fat cow holding up the line”– it’s hard to imagine that asking that person why they’ve insulted you is going to lead to anything particularly constructive and emotionally sound. Most of the time, lengthening the encounter is not something any of us are anxious to do. So where does that lead us? I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I don’t really know. I can’t imagine that interacting with my disaster of a dry cleaner ever again is something that I’m prepared to do, knowing what he thinks about me. Though given multiple opportunities to apologize, he hasn’t done so, and now I’m left in a strange sort of limbo. Do I get to just resent him and hold it against him forever? Am I obligated to forgive him despite his inability to apologize? Is simply choosing a different place to do laundry an option for me? I think in situations like this–where one is still sensitive to the humiliation, and can no longer feel comfortable around the other party–halacha would seem to direct us to avoid any future conflicts. We have an obligation to ourselves, to respect and protect ourselves. I wish I could find a source that instructed me to kick this guy in the balls, or to make some kind of cruel and equally mortifying comment to him, but the sources recognize that psychological vengeance is almost never as satisfying as we expect it to be, and that it’s most likely to perpetuate the problem. I’m still feeling my way around the issue, and I keep wishing for the crutch of sarcasm, but some days it’s just not a helpful option. It really is too bad—I could totally take this guy.