Why Can One Bad Event Sometimes Color Our Entire Life?

Why Can One Bad Event Sometimes Color Our Entire Life?

A person comes home from a wedding and says, “It was terrible.” What was terrible? The food? Actually, it was excellent. The music? Good. He met friends he had not seen in years. The bride and groom were happy. So what happened? In the parking lot someone spoke to him in a hurtful way. Three minutes out of four hours succeeded in taking over the memory of the entire evening.

A child comes home from school and says, “Everyone is against me.” When asked, it turns out that two children laughed at him, but three others sat with him during recess and one friend even defended him. A woman says to her husband, “You never see me,” even though he did quite a lot for her that week, because at one moment that mattered to her especially he failed to notice. A husband says, “Nothing in this house works,” because that evening two children fought and the third failed an exam.

The most interesting thing is that when we say these sentences, we genuinely feel that they are true.

Not, “Something bad happened.”

Everything is bad.

Not, “One person hurt me.”

Everyone is against me.

Not, “I failed in this area.”

I am a failure.

Sometimes the mind takes one point and turns it into the entire map.

During Sukkot we perform a very unusual action. We stand holding the four species and wave them in different directions.

The Mishnah says regarding Hallel: “And where would they wave? At the beginning and end of ‘Give thanks to the Lord,’ and at ‘Please, Lord, save us’” (Mishnah, Sukkah 3:9). The Gemara asks how the waving is done and cites Rabbi Yochanan: “One moves them outward and inward for the One to whom the four directions belong, and raises and lowers them for the One to whom heaven and earth belong” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 37b).

Already there is an enormous image here.

East does not belong to Him more than west.

Above does not belong to Him more than below.

There is no direction about which a person can say: God does not reach there.

But the Gemara adds another explanation: “One moves them outward and inward in order to restrain harmful winds, and raises and lowers them in order to restrain harmful dews” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 37b).

The same movement holds two ideas.

On one hand, every direction belongs to God.

On the other hand, from every direction there can also come a wind we do not want.

And now it begins to look very much like life.

Maimonides codifies the order of the waving and emphasizes the outward movement, the return, the raising, and the lowering as part of taking the lulav and reciting Hallel (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 7:9-10). This is not a random movement of the hand. The body itself draws a space.

The commentators add a deeper layer.

Rashi explains Rabbi Yochanan’s words: “For the One to whom the four directions belong, we perform this mitzvah for His sake” (Rashi, Sukkah 37b). The waving is therefore not merely geographical pointing. Through the act, the person declares that the entire space belongs to the Master of the universe.

The Meiri explains that the waving is done “to awaken awareness that everything belongs to Him, blessed be He,” connecting the outward and inward movements to the four directions and the raising and lowering to heaven and earth (Beit HaBechirah, Meiri, Sukkah 37b). A person stands at one point, but consciousness is required to expand to the entire space.

The author of Sefer HaChinuch, in explaining the mitzvah of the four species, writes that a person is deeply influenced by actions, and therefore specifically at the time of joy we were commanded to take things that gladden the heart so that the joy will be directed toward the service of God rather than become empty celebration (Sefer HaChinuch, mitzvah 324). Once again Sukkot does not leave a person with an abstract idea. The hand, the eye, the body, and direction itself become part of inner education.

We can also add Maimonides’ words about joy on the festival: “The joy with which a person rejoices in performing a mitzvah and in the love of God who commanded it is a great service” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 8:15). A person does not merely perform a mitzvah in space. The inner world is also called upon to enter it.

From this foundation we can ask a question about life: what happens when we stop seeing all the directions and look only toward the direction from which the harmful wind came?

Here psychology identifies a very familiar mechanism.

Roy Baumeister and his colleagues reviewed a broad range of research under the title “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” and showed that in many domains negative events tend to affect people more powerfully than comparable positive events. Psychological research often discusses, in various contexts, a negativity bias, the tendency of negative information to capture attention and exert an especially strong influence on judgment and memory.

There is an evolutionary logic to this. If an early human saw ten beautiful trees and one snake, it was very useful for the brain to care more about the snake than the trees.

The problem is that the mechanism that helped us identify danger can also distort an entire picture.

Nine people compliment us after a lecture and one person makes a hurtful remark. Who do we think about on the way home?

Not the nine.

The tenth person.

We receive twenty warm responses to something we published and one contemptuous comment. We read that one again and again.

We have two good weeks with a spouse, and then one evening brings a difficult fight. By one in the morning the mind is already writing a new history: “It is always like this with us.”

Not always.

Now.

But the pain of now colors the memory of yesterday and the forecast for tomorrow.

Cognitive psychology also recognizes a pattern called overgeneralization. A person takes a specific event and draws a broad conclusion from it: I failed an exam, therefore I am stupid; one relationship ended, therefore none of my relationships will succeed; one child is going through a difficult period, therefore I failed as a parent.

Notice the transition.

From an event to an identity.

From a moment to a life.

From one direction to the entire map.

Here the four species offer us a powerful image.

The harmful wind may come from the west.

Halachah does not ask us to deny it.

We wave in that direction too.

But then we turn to another direction.

And another.

And another.

And upward.

And downward.

The problem is not that we see what is bad. The problem begins when what is bad becomes the only direction we see.

This distinction is critical because sometimes, when people speak about “positive thinking,” someone who is suffering feels that they are being asked to lie.

The child really is struggling.

The business really did lose money.

The doctor really did deliver difficult news.

The friend really did betray us.

The spouse really did say something that should not have been said.

There is no need to paint it pink.

The Torah does not ask us to call a harmful wind a good wind.

The Gemara itself calls them “harmful winds.”

But it does not say that this is the only direction.

That is an enormous difference.

A person can go through a very difficult year and say, “This was a difficult year.”

That is one sentence.

The same person can say, “My life has been destroyed.”

That is an entirely different sentence.

Perhaps the year was difficult, but was everything truly destroyed?

Did the children disappear?

Did every friend leave?

Was there not even one moment of kindness?

Was nothing built?

Did we learn nothing?

Is there no area of life that is still standing?

These questions do not erase pain.

They restore boundaries to it.

And boundaries are often the first thing pain takes from us.

Pain says: always.

Pain says: everyone.

Pain says: nothing.

Pain says: from now on it will all be this way.

But most human reality is more complicated.

A child receives a report card with eight subjects. In seven the child is succeeding and in one the child is failing. What is the first thing the family discusses?

The failure.

Sometimes the entire dinner becomes a discussion of one grade.

The child does not hear only, “We need to work on mathematics.” The child may hear: everything you accomplished in the other seven subjects disappeared the moment we saw the 55.

Perhaps the 55 does need attention.

But it must not be allowed to erase the other seven grades.

The same is true in marriage. A couple can live together for twenty years, raise children, endure crises, build a home, and perform thousands of small acts of loyalty. Then a severe argument comes. At its peak, one spouse says, “You never cared about me.”

Is that true?

Probably not.

But in that moment it feels true.

And the word “never” turns one moment into the judge of twenty years.

How much damage might be avoided if we replaced the sentence “You never care about me” with the more precise sentence, “In this moment I feel that you did not see me.”

The pain remains.

But truth returns.

This has enormous significance in our relationship with ourselves as well.

A person falls again into a habit they are trying to change. The first sentence that arises is: “I am incapable of changing.”

But is that a fact?

Perhaps the person succeeded for three weeks and fell on one day.

Why should that one day have the authority to erase twenty-one days?

A person lost their temper with the children. Responsibility is required. An apology is required. It is worth examining what happened. But there is a difference between saying, “I just did something wrong,” and saying, “I am a terrible father.”

The first sentence makes repentance and repair possible.

The second turns an act into an identity.

And when a person turns a mistake into an identity, change actually becomes harder.

If I did something bad, I can repair it.

If I am the bad thing, what exactly is left to repair?

Perhaps there is another depth to the waving.

The person stands in the middle.

There is east.

There is west.

There is north.

There is south.

There is above.

There is below.

But no single direction is the whole reality.

Our lives also have many “directions”: family, health, faith, livelihood, friendship, community, body, past, future, successes, disappointments.

One direction may currently be extremely stormy.

But it must not be allowed to take over the entire compass.

A person whose business failed says, “I failed in life.” Perhaps a business failed. That hurts, and it can be very difficult, but the business is not the whole person.

A woman going through a crisis with one child may feel that her entire motherhood is on trial. But there are other children, other years, and thousands of moments of giving and love.

A person whose health has been damaged may feel that everything they had is gone. Full space must be given to grief over what has changed, but it is dangerous to conclude too quickly that all meaning in life depended only on the ability that was lost.

There is another insight here.

Sometimes we do to other people exactly what pain does to us.

We freeze a person inside the worst moment of their life.

Someone said a terrible sentence to us ten years ago, and ever since, everything that person does is filtered through that sentence.

A child made a serious mistake at sixteen, and at thirty the family still tells the story as though this person were still the same teenager.

An employee failed in one project, and ever since, the manager never gives that employee a genuine opportunity.

We take one point in a biography and turn it into the title of the entire book.

But human beings are larger than their worst moments.

Not because those moments are unimportant.

But because they are moments, not the whole story.

We can take a very simple exercise from this into life. Whenever a sentence rises within us containing words such as “always,” “never,” “everyone,” or “nothing,” it is worth stopping and asking: is this a fact, or has pain just expanded one event to fill the entire reality?

“This child never listens.” Really never?

“My husband never thinks about me.” Really?

“Nothing I do succeeds.” Nothing?

“Everyone is talking about me.” Everyone?

“I ruined everything.” Everything?

Sometimes changing one word gives a person the world back.

Instead of “everything,” say “this thing.”

Instead of “always,” say “recently.”

Instead of “I am a failure,” say “I failed here.”

Instead of “my life is bad,” say “I am going through a very difficult period right now.”

This is not wordplay.

It restores proportion to reality.

And proportion is not the enemy of pain.

It is what prevents pain from becoming a dictator.

Perhaps this is one of the great insights of Sukkot. We hold the four species and move them in every direction, as though the body itself were telling the soul: do not let one direction become the whole world.

Yes, there is a harmful wind.

Look at it.

Do not deny it.

If necessary, protect yourself from it.

But after you have looked there, remember that there is another direction.

And another.

And another.

There is above.

There is below.

And there is the Master of the universe to whom all the directions belong.

Sometimes a person does not need someone to convince them that everything is good.

They know very well that not everything is good.

They need someone to remind them of another sentence:

Not everything is bad either.

That can be the difference between a person who experienced pain and a person whose pain took over the entire story of life.

Perhaps that is why we do not wave the lulav in only one direction.

Because life is never located only in the direction from which the harmful wind blew.