Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Today we're going to discuss a very powerful emotional feeling, which is the feeling of rejection. Rejection occurs when we seek out a connection and the object of that connection turns us down. It could be a group of friends that are cliquey and leave you out; It could be that you were not invited to a birthday party. It can be you were going out on a date and you were dropped, or maybe your name was suggested to someone for a shidduch and they didn't follow up, or you failed a job interview, or anything like that.
That is the feeling of rejection, which is very real- to the point that when scientists placed people in functional MRI machines and ask them to recall a rejection, they discovered something amazing. The same areas of our brain that become activated when we experience rejection are the ones that are active when we experience physical pain. That's why rejection literally hurts, to the point that taking Tylenol can help with the feeling of rejection. And more than that, people seem to remember rejection more than they remember physical pain. If you go back 30 years, you can remember some instance when you were rejected. That will come back more vividly than the feeling of pain from stubbing your toe. It's hard to remember the pain of stubbing your toe; it's in the past. But that feeling of rejection is very real and has a huge negative impact.
I like to find sources in our Torah for any concept, and the source for this tremendous detriment is actually a Gemara in Masechet Sanhedrin, 99B, where it discusses the end of Parashat Vayislach, that talks about the family of Esav. It’s a unit that doesn’t seem to have much pertinent information. Who really cares about Esav’s wives and children and children's wives and concubines and his family tree?
But in there it tells us that an Alouf/chieftain by the name of Lotan, had a sister whose name was Timna. Timna became a concubine to Elifaz and bore Amalek. What do we learn from that? The Gemara explains that Timna was a princess (as her brother was a prince, an Alouf) and she wanted to convert, so she went to the family of Yaakov to be accepted as a wife (similar to the story of Hagar, who left a house of kings to become a maidservant, and eventual wife to Avraham Avinu). But they didn't accept her. When she wasn't accepted, she went to the family of Esav. Esav’s son Elifaz took her as a concubine, which is not even a whole wife. And she said, “I'd rather be a maid servant to this family than princess in another nation.” So what happened here? If this lady had such wonderful ideas, where did Amalek, who caused so much pain to the Jewish people, come from? The answer is that she felt rejected, and we were held responsible for not sending her away in a more tactful way.
This is an important concept.
Sometimes we have to distance someone, but there's a way to distance them in a non-rejecting way. Stories are told of the Chafetz Chaim, and I heard a a similar story with Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky, where they both had to throw a child out of yeshiva, because he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing and he was a bad influence. So he could no longer be in the dormitory, or no longer be in the yeshiva, but at the same time the rabbis took them into their homes. Maybe they couldn’t remain in the yeshiva, but that didn’t mean the Rabbis couldn’t put them up in their homes, that they could take care of them, or that they didn’t love them.
Those young men went on to maintain their good feeling toward our religion, even though they were thrown out of yeshiva.
What's even more interesting is that Amalek, who was created from rejection, now feeds on the rejected. The pasuk in Devarim 25,18 describes Amalek, and says
וַיְזַנֵּ֤ב בְּךָ֙ כׇּל־הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִ֣ים אַֽחֲרֶ֔יךָ וְאַתָּ֖ה עָיֵ֣ף וְיָגֵ֑עַ וְלֹ֥א יָרֵ֖א אֱלֹהִֽים
He stung all of those…whom Rashi translates as weak ones. Why were they weak? Because they sinned.
There were certain Jewish people that were not allowed into the clouds of glory. They were spit out. That's who Amalek preyed on. And to this day, Amalek preys on the weak, the vulnerable, the people that drop out, (sometimes the word drop-out is not the right word. I once heard the term pushed-out. They were pushed out, they were rejected). And Amalek is there to feed on them and to welcome them. Our job is to look for those rejected souls and welcome them again.
That is our little piece on the pain of rejection.