TBT: Re-Revisiting The Mitzvah of Rebuke for the Therapy Generation
For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re revisiting this piece I posted a year ago, right before Tisha B’Av, on the mitzvah of rebuke. I argued that one of the consequences of living in therapy culture is that we must be more confrontational and engage in more rebuke, since the Torah commands us to do so when we’re angry, and we now have the emotional technology to do so constructively. “True rebuke is necessary for the purpose of generating love, safety, and trust, of disengaging us from the hostility and distrust that produce alienation and violence…In a culture of processing groups, conflict aversion is not piety and not even always chastened caution: It’s reckless abandonment and sometimes it’s even mean. ”
We’re TBT’ing, because it’s still a live issue, and especially in this moment, when the Jewish community is rightly immersed in intense and urgent debate about Israel, it is all the more important not to back away from hashing out those conflicts, even as we must pursue the most constructive ways to do so. However, I appreciate several responses I got critiquing my failure to explore the significance of power to this question. Several respondents pointed out that when the person whom I feel violated me is someone who has power over me, it can be extremely difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to perform rebuke; conflict-aversion may be self-protection. Part of what makes processing groups and group therapy work is the external creation of a safe space, including the removal of the power dynamics that obtain in general. Even if we have been trained how to speak critically and non-violently, that training is not so helpful if we don’t have control over the context. These critiques are correct and I am grateful for them. I also wonder whether power dynamics are actually much more prevalent in hurtful interactions than perhaps I considered a year ago.
Here is the article again. I invite and welcome responses, especially on the question of power.