Complaining
Sep 6th, 2010 | By admin | Category: 2007-8, Archivesby Rabbi Yisrael Rutman
“Don’t whine at me! I said ‘No’ and that’s it!” said the mother to her little girl tearfully pulling at her skirt for
more chocolate.
Now, that’s real parenting. As a wise mother once told me, every time a parent says “No” to something the child demands but shouldn’t have, it’s like giving another vitamin, and one should feel no guilt about it. A large part of the parent’s job is to teach that the world is a place where the answer to our desires is, and often should be: “No.” A person who grows up on a steady diet of such “No”s will be spared the painful diet of unrealistic expectations that plague so many adults throughout their lives.
Complaining in its myriad forms—whining, grumbling, muttering, murmuring, bellyaching, making faces—all come naturally to us. No school will every offer a course in complaining. It’s about as necessary as a course in breathing or talking too much on the phone.
We tend to fall apart at the slightest discomfort. For us, it’s already a form of stoicism not to complain or go lie down at the first sign of a headache. I remember once reading a parody of a candidate for president who promised to “to fight fearlessly and tirelessly, to work day and night for the betterment of all the people…except when I have a headache.”
But we have to grow out of it. As a teacher of mine once said to me, when I complained about a certain assignment, “It’s against the law to complain.” It helps to think of it that way, as an ironclad law, that you would no more think of violating than speeding through a red light.
Indeed, Judaism views it as not only an undesirable habit, but a dangerous one, as well. The generation of the Flood was destroyed, among other things, because of robbery. The Torah says that the world in Noah’s time was full of robbery. The Midrash tells us that everyone was engaged in it. But how could that be? Surely there were at least as many, probably far more, victims than perpetrators? Why did they have to perish in the Flood?
The Midrash explains that the world at that time was indeed made up of two types of people: those who robbed—and the victims who complained about it.
Of course, they had every right to try to get their money back. But their complaining went far beyond filling out a form at the local police station. They called the police incessantly demanding that they catch the culprits, they wrote letters to the editor, yapped about it on the morning call-in show, whined to their friends, moaned in the streets, and fretted in the hallways. They never let up. The robbers took people’s money; the victims robbed everyone around them of peace and quiet. They may have been guilty of other crimes, as well, but their infernal complaining was an item on the charge sheet.
People have a low threshold of tolerance for others’ complaints. If you’re sick, it’s not advisable to share your suffering with the whole world. You can confide in your immediate family, maybe one or two close friends. But beyond that, don’t talk about it. People do not want to hear your problems. It may sound harsh, unfeeling; but it’s realistic. The sick person cannot afford to alienate her friends by dwelling on her problems. On the contrary, limiting discussion of it forces her to get her mind off her own problems at least some of the time, which can only be a healthy thing.
Not complaining is good for you. For those of us who got plenty of “No” vitamins in childhood, the complaining habit is not so strong. For the rest of us, it’s a challenge. It helps to remind ourselves that by denying ourselves the indulgence of complaining, we make ourselves stronger, more attractive to others, and better able to enjoy life. Complaining causes us to focus on what’s wrong with our life; by cutting down our complaint quotient, we can focus more on what’s right with our life. And usually, if we’re honest about it, there’s a lot more that’s right than we care to admit: Most of us (certainly those reading this article) are not the targets of genocide, have access to clean drinking water, and a life expectancy somewhere over 70 years.
“Why should a living man complain?” says the verse in Job. The Talmud interprets it to mean that if a man is alive, he should not complain. Life itself is so great a gift that the very fact of being alive should overshadow suffering and banish all complaints.
It’s a very old lesson, but well worth learning.
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