Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA. We continue with the concept of not just living life with Vitur, always giving in. Sometimes you have to assert yourself, express your feelings and being vulnerable to say, I've been hurt.
Rav Wolbe, in his pamphlet on marriage for grooms, says that it's not a good idea to just go through the house this way. His words to the boy are- It’s not a good idea to run the house, constantly giving in to your wife's will. Why not? Because she wants to see a man that has an opinion.
She asks, “What do you want?” And he says, “Whatever you want, honey. Whatever you want….whatever you want.”
No, that's not the way it's supposed to be. If you have an opinion about something, or something's bothering you, you should say how you feel, or how you like it to be.
A young man once came to Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach and said that he and his wife were constantly arguing. He felt they should get divorced. Rav Shlomo Zalman said that it's normal for couples to disagree about things and even to argue. The young man countered,
“But what about when the Rav eulogized his late wife?”
He was referring to an unbelievable event that happened at the funeral of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach's wife.
The Rav said that although the custom is for the living to beg forgiveness from the departed, he had nothing for which to apologize. That means he lived through 60 or 70 years of marriage and felt that they never got into an argument.
So this young man was saying, Obviously that's the way marriage is supposed to be, and obviously something's wrong with my marriage. Rav Zalman said, “Of course we had disagreements. That's normal. Two people see things differently, so they have conflicting ideas about what to do. We disagreed about issues, but it was never personal.”
I once heard from Rav Wolbe, “Every marriage must have disagreements- but over a cup of tea.”
And this is an important point. The Ramban writes on a pasuk in Vayikra (19,17), “לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א אֶת־אָחִ֖יךָ בִּלְבָבֶ֑ךָ הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙
Don't hate your brothers in your heart. Rather rebuke them.” The Ramban learns that simply, the pasuk is not talking about rebuking them when it comes to sin, as if the man ate unkosher. No. He says Rebuke them means that if someone did something that insulted you or hurt you, the wrong thing is to keep it inside. That's not the Torah way. If someone insulted you, be vulnerable and say, Why'd you do that? You hurt me. You're supposed to share that. That is the correct thing to do. Bereshit Raba on Parashat Veyera says, “Love that does not have any
Rebuke, is not real love. Any peace that does not have rebuke is not peace.” To have love and peace, you have to have communication. It has to be like that. It's impossible to have a marriage that doesn't have conflict. That's not marriage. Rav Wolbe points out in Aleh Shor (volume one, page 258), that a household that has not yet revealed their differences is not Shalom Bayit. They have not come to anything. Rav Wolbe says, what is the definition of Shalom bayit? Shalom means a peace treaty. You have a peace treaty when there are differences. New York and New Jersey don't have a peace treaty. You have to have a clarity of the differences, open communication, and the sharing of feelings. It says in Michtav M’Eliyahu (vol 5, page 107), “If somebody holds back what's upsetting him at the beginning and he continues to be Machpid, in the end, when the last straw breaks the camel's back, it's going to reopen all the wounds from the beginning.”
It’s customary in the Yeshiva world that for the first year of marriage, the man learns at home at night. It’s called Shana Rishona/The first year. Sometimes the young lady will tell the man, “No, no, go out. It's okay. It's okay.”
Rav Wolbe once told a young man, “Do you know what's going to happen? In 20 years, she's going to come back and say to you, ‘You never cared about me. You left the house the first year,’ because it wasn't sincere, it wasn't real, it wasn't talked about.”
One has to be careful with that.
Shabbat shalom
