How can I have peace when the people around me don’t act right?

Rabbi Landau teaches that “if you can’t live with everyone, you can’t live with anyone.” Not because everyone is easy, but because if your peace depends on other people acting right, you’re never going to have peace.

It feels much easier to change others: to wait for them to understand, apologize or improve. But then you are investing your energy in something that doesn’t belong to you, their behavior, while the one thing that does belong to you, your own heart, is left unattended. You are not here to fix every person you meet, he says. You are here to fix the only person you actually control: yourself.

King Solomon said, “Mikol mishmar netzor libecha ki mimenu totzos chayim,” above all, guard your heart, because life flows from it. As Rabbi Landau explains, “Life doesn’t flow from them. It flows from how your heart receives it.”

Also answered in this teaching

Why is it so tempting to try to change other people?

Rabbi Landau notes that it simply feels easier to change others than to work on yourself. But their behavior doesn’t belong to you, and your own heart does.

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

If your peace depends on others acting right, you will never have peace.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that if your anger depends on how someone else behaves, you have handed another person the key to your inner world, and you sit waiting for him to give it back.

Underlying need or longing

A person longs for peace. Rabbi Landau teaches that it is found in the one place that truly belongs to you, your own heart.

Deepest human truth

Life flows out from the heart. The world outside is raw material; how your heart receives it shapes what you live.

More questions from this teaching

• What does “guard your heart, for life flows from it” mean?
• Why do I keep facing the same problem with different people?