Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. Yesterday, the esteemed Dr. Katzenstein continued on the topic of social comparisons. One of the important points he brought out was that you don't even know what you're comparing yourself to. You're comparing yourself to an unrealistic lifestyle that someone else is portraying, that's not even true. They’re not giving you the complete story. They’re only showing you the clips that look good. Going back to a Jewish source for this, the Baalei Musar make the following diyuk:
When the Torah talks about Lo Tachmod/ you shouldn't covet, it says,
לֹ֥א תַחְמֹ֖ד בֵּ֣ית רֵעֶ֑ךָ {ס} לֹֽא־תַחְמֹ֞ד אֵ֣שֶׁת רֵעֶ֗ךָ וְעַבְדּ֤וֹ וַאֲמָתוֹ֙ וְשׁוֹר֣וֹ וַחֲמֹר֔וֹ וְכֹ֖ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר לְרֵעֶֽךָ
Don’t covet your friend's house, his wife, his male servant, his female servant… and it ends off with the words, “and everything your friends has.”
Those last few words, “and everything he has,” seem redundant. Why itemize the list- his house, his wife, his servants, and then add “and everything?” Why not just say, Don’t covet everything he has.” What's the reason for it for this? They explain that if a person is jealous of his friend's house, for examples because his friend has a beautiful house with a beautiful garden, a nice car, and a brand new kitchen and he says, “Why don't I have that? It's coming to me. This is not fair. Where is the justice?” The Torah says, ‘Calm down. You're right. But look at the other side of the coin. You can't just say you want his house and his car, and keep everything else of yours, your good health, your good Middot, your
good family….If you want to switch, it has to be a complete switch. Switch everything. Take everything that he has for everything that you have.’
And nobody wants the everything he has.”
There is a famous story of a man that came to a rabbi complaining about his difficult life. In one version of the story, the rabbi went out to all the people waiting for a blessing and said, “I have a way for everyone to get rid of their problems.”
He gave everyone a bag (or suitcase), and said, “Okay, everyone put all your problems in a bag and put your name on it.”
Once they did that, the rabbi told everyone put all the bags on the floor. Everyone put their bags on the floor. Then the rabbi said, “Okay, everyone can now go grab any bag that you want.”
And everyone instinctively went running to take back their own bag, for two reasons:
Firstly because you know that your bag is perfectly set up for you, and secondly, because you have no idea what's in the other person's bag.
As we state at the beginning of each l of these lessons, this is a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health awareness, so I'll use mental health as an example We have no idea what a person’s mental health status is. We don't know what people are suffering with. They can look great on the outside, and yet be suffering with depression, anxiety, personality disorders… or who knows what. No one should know from these things, but often, you don't see it on the outside. A Rabbi from Ezer Le Nefesh, a wonderful organization that helps pay for students' therapy, said in a parlor meeting at the home of Mr. Eddie Mizrahi, that, “Mental illness is the cancer of the soul. You don't see it on the outside. Nobody knows about it. It's internal. It's quiet.”
So if you want someone else's lot, you have to take the whole package, and you don't want to know what's in his package.
This, like everything, really boils down to our mindset. All emotions start in our cognition. We spoke about this a while back when we discussed Cognitive Behavior Therapy, CBT. There are ten basic cognitive distortions that cause negative thinking. Cognitive distortions are negative filters that impact how you see yourself and others. When your thoughts are distorted, your emotions are as well. These different thought patterns are in our minds and one of them is called a mental filter. A mental filter means that I only filter through certain things. I only see the good that he has, and I don't see the bad. Or the opposite, I only see my bad, I don't see my good. That's a problem.
One of the antidotes to social comparisons is וְכֹ֖ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר לְרֵעֶֽךָ Everything he has. What's the whole picture? We don't know the whole picture. Therefore, ultimately we’d all choose to take back our own bags. In Yiddish, a bag is called a pekel (maybe from the same root as the word package or pack). As the saying goes, “Everybody has their pekel/everyone has their package.”
Have a wonderful day.