The Comfort of the Victim’s Chair

Where We Begin There is a question every one of us has run into, in ourselves or in a friend. Why do some people say, loud and clear, that they want to heal? They want to grow. They want to get out of the crisis. Yet year after year they stay in the same place, with the same complaint and the same heaviness. Look closely, and you will see that this is not only weakness. There is something deeper here. There is a temptation. The Victim’s Chair There is such a chair in the world. It is called the victim’s chair. It is a place built out of real pain: a fall, a letdown, a heartbreak. But over time, the pain becomes an address, the place where you live. And once the pain is your address, you can stay there forever. As long as you sit in that chair, no one expects anything of you. There is no responsibility. There is no risk of failing again, because anyway “you already fell,” anyway “you were already hurt,” anyway “you already tried.” It gives you protection. It is comfortable. We need to be honest. That comfort is real. It is not something a person only imagines. You truly feel it, in body and in soul. You do not have to get up. You do not have to try again. You do not have to face, once more, the chance of another disappointment. It is a prison, but a comfortable one. False Rest Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, draws a fine, deep line between two states that look alike from the outside: heavy sadness and bitterness. Both hurt. But a great gap lies between them. Bitterness is a healthy pain. It is the knowledge that something needs to change, and it pushes you forward. Heavy sadness is different. It is a weight. It is a burden. It does not build and it does not move you. It snuffs you out. Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes that heavy sadness comes from the realm of the forces of darkness, and that its whole aim is to freeze a person in place. This is the secret of the victim’s chair. What feels like rest is, at its core, heavy sadness. It is paralysis. It is a “false rest”: a comfort with no life in it, no freedom, and no soul. The person believes he is resting, but he is stuck. He has built himself a warm, safe ark, and he forgets that the ark was never meant to be lived in forever. When Noah came out after the Flood, Hashem did not tell him, “Stay.” He told him: “Go out of the ark.” The ark saved him, but it was not his home. Being rescued is a stage. It is not the purpose. What Matters Is the Deed Hasidic teaching is not only a teaching about feelings. It is a teaching about movement. Rabbi Schneur Zalman said something simple and powerful: “What matters most is the deed.” Not thinking about the deed. Not the feelings around the deed. Not the good intention that has not yet been carried out. The actual deed, truly done. This is what Hasidic teaching demands of us. A person has free choice. Maimonides, the great medieval sage, wrote that free choice is a great foundation and a pillar of the whole Torah. A person is judged by what he chose to do. He is not judged by how deep his pain is, or by how great his heartbreak is. He is judged by what he got up and did. Staying in the victim’s chair is, in the end, giving up on free choice. A person hands his will over to his pain and announces, “My pain will decide for me.” But Hasidic teaching tells us that there is always something you can do, even at the bottom of the pit, even in prison. The Zohar teaches: “There is no place empty of Him.” There is no place without Hashem in it, and no place where you cannot do some inner work. A Final Word The way out of the victim’s chair is not to erase the pain. The pain is real, and it is allowed to be there. But the choice is this: Will I let the pain decide who I am, where I stand, and what my future will be? “Go out of the ark.” Go out of the comfort you built for yourself out of fear. Get up from that chair, even with just one small step. You do not need the strength of a giant. You need the first step of one person, here, now. This is truly serving Hashem. And from it, only from it, comes the right kind of rest.