Oral Law- Shay

“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your

fellow as yourself: I am the LORD”(Leviticus 19.18). In 7th grade I played a joke on

this random guy in my computer science class; I changed his settings so that

everything he clicked did the opposite of what it normally did. I thought that this

was such a clever and funny joke but because of him complaining about me to the

teacher I ended up having lunch detention for a week. I held a grudge against him

for this for over two years and in that time it really escalated; I was a total jerk

and we hated each other’s guts.

When I was 13 years old I went on my first meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. During the retreat we focused on the cultivation of Metta or Loving Kindness. We did exercises in which we imagined our own inner capsule of peace and love spiralling out from within onto our close family and friends, then members of our communities and people that we did not get along with and finally out to every living being in the world. During this retreat I decided to send this boy, who I had my grudge on, some Metta. We never became friends or even talked to each other ever again but this tension that I felt with him ended. Not until now, while reading Leviticus 19, did I realize that this practice is not just a central part of Buddhism but also a mitzvot of Judaism. In the Torah, God is commanding us to mend our grudges and I believe God is telling us this to help us live meaningful lives. In my experience, grudges invade happiness and only make one suffer. As humans we tend to remember the negative aspects in our interactions with one another more than the positive. To live a freeing and jubilant life all negative grudges must be forgiven even if that surrender is difficult.