why minor feuds become big ones between intimates
Yesterday, Ethan Bronner Jerusalem Bureau chief of the NY Times spoke of the latest Israeli-US row as a couples' spat. "The relationship between Israel and the US is as close as an old married couple," he is quoted as saying, "where even minor transgressions and misunderstandings carry with them enormous feelings and everything gets blown out of proportion." You looked at her with those eyes, you flirted with her/him. Read: you don't care about me.
In other words, even minor offenses between intimates will potentially light the tinderbox. Freud called this the narcissism of the minor difference. The most minor differences between people who are essentially similar and close are felt disproportionately. Sects within the same religion who are close theologically and in every way, yet differ from each other in the tiniest manner will often erupt into intense rivalry - even war. For that matter, psychoanalytic institutes are famous for breaking away from each other over minor differences in approach. A brother or a sister slighted is a war in the making.
Close relationships will contain great love, but equal amounts of tension. There is a fuse of violence beneath the marriage bed that can be ignited at any moment. Husbands and wives will go to war with each other over trivialities that represent something larger. The Talmud refers to something called k'hut hasayra -- The righteous people who are presumed closer to Gd are judged by literally by a hairsbreadth - very strictly.
The problem is though these transgressions between intimates seem minor, they don't feel minor. In fact, they are enormously painful. Recently, I attended the bar mitzvah of a close friend's son. The rabbi had been practically a member of my friend's family for years and had known my friend and his son extremely well. In the synagogue the rabbi spoke of my friend and his son. It was warm, but the speech that could charitably be described as short shrift if not withholding. He described my friend as someone who was "good" and "nice" and someone who gets along with people. Even from an outsider's point of view, it looked as though he was being damned with faint praise.
For my friend this underscored and magnified previous slights and faux pas "committed" by the rabbi. My friend struggled with himself. He is a mature man and realized that he is dealing with a triviality, but he felt hurt and angry.
He thought about confronting the rabbi or at least "letting him know" what was on his mind. In situations like these, one party might try to hold a mirror to the other to show what "you are really doing to me." The other side may apologize perfunctorily (as Netanyahu did) but deep down feels the transgression has been blown out of proportion and what's more is because all that has gone down between them they feel they should be granted a little bit more compassion, leeway, understanding.
In this case of the latest US-Israel contretemps, the argument goes, that America, Israel's closest ally, has come to the understanding that Israel's policy of building houses in sensitive areas is a negative symbol that carries such extraordinary weight it thwarts any chance for peace with the Arab world.
For their part the Israelis are at best, disconnected from this idea that house-building within their own capitol is detrimental to regional peace. They see themselves as damned if you do, damned if you don't and therefore they might as well do what they can do even if it doesn't give other people good feelings.
The brouhaha of course is deeply embarrassing to this country because it reveals the fact that the US has no real strategy in making peace other than the conviction of no-settlement building. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to make peace between people who may at times be ambivalent about making peace in the first place. For some groups peace carries much greater risks than the low level of attrition that they are used to. This is how most people conduct their lives: they nurse feuds on a low flame with occasional outbursts of great love or hate. The live on what I call, an emotional austerity budget supplemented by what the French refer to as le petit bonheurs the little pleasures of life - a croissant, a Starbucks latte, with nothing more intense than modest dreams of a better life and if you are American, then throw in the obligatory battles against addictions of one sort or another.
And yet, and yet, marriages and friendships, partnerships do fall apart. And that is not trivial even if it is the way of the world. For example, friends of mine, husband and wife who get along well, are in a pitch battle now. The cause: She wanted to know if he wanted to stay married to her in the next world - in the afterlife.
He confessed that although she had been a wonderful wife in this world, if he had a second go-round, he might want to live with a different woman. I could see why that would upset her, though she's probably hiding from the same feelings.
He probably knew that even though his comment was innocuous it carried with it, the message of annihilation. We are all natural born killers and if we do not actually kill, we do at times seem to psychologically kill others off as we oscillate between feeling worthless, scared, selfish, fragile and murderous.
The late analyst Spotnitz said, the only thing that stops from tearing each other apart is that we have gotten some love, enough of it, so that we don't kill. One of the things that will stop a woman from taking her friend's spouse is that she has received enough love. If she didn't get that love early on and in sufficient quantities, then her greed, whether sexual, political, financial, will kill us all.
