Rant #3: Meribah
by The Old Maid
Question : Why did the Children of Israel wander in the wilderness for forty
years?
Answer : Because even in those days a man wouldn't ask for directions.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but when I first heard this joke I didn't get it.
That's probably because it was taken out of context and was mean-spirited, which
are two things I try to avoid. To my mind everyone simply knew that Moses
reached the Promised Land in 51 months, so why the man-bashing? Oh, right,
because it's supposed to be funny.
Then again I once found the source story equally incomprehensible. The
Israelites were banished for life for "murmuring"? Wasn't that a little extreme
for mere complaining? Doesn't everybody complain?
Verbal poison is everywhere. Listen to the radio. Turn on the television.
Somewhere there's a forum for every last category of Things That Should Not Be
Said. There's "true courtroom." Talk shows. Talk shows resulting in post-filming
violence. "Fear the Celebrity ; Marry the Millionaire ; Surviving Big Brother."
When did manipulation and humiliation become Family Entertainment? Even elevator
music has become explicit. Judith Martin attributes this crassness to the
inflation of expectations combined with a deterioration in language. Thus a
gentleman who might have begged a lady to pity his lovesick heart is now more
likely to be a male telling a female what he expects her to do with what. The
only medium that hasn't fallen from grace is the Internet, probably because it
never had a pedestal to fall from.
People didn't always converse this way. Once upon a time speakers paused to ask
themselves three questions : Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? These
screens didn't halt every inappropriate comment or change private thoughts, but
they served to elevate social behavior as a whole. Also, previously people had
more respect for themselves. It takes self-respect to challenge verbal
trespassers. But nowadays few people dare to throw the one-two punch of "I don't
need to know that" and "You don't need to know that."
Why did things change? My guess is that as people became more selfish and
gratification-oriented, they decided they'd outgrown the Three Questions rule.
Specifically, they discarded the question Is It Necessary. (All other rules fell
by domino effect.) Speakers now define "necessary" to mean "it's necessary to
say this or I won't get what I want." Verbal poison is so prevalent that writers
can build their careers on the subject. There's "The Gentle Art of Verbal
Self-Defense" series by Suzette Haden Elgin. Then there's Richard Warshak's
"Divorce Poison," which examines the things parents say to turn their children
against noncustodial relatives and how to stop them. Do such books work? I
suppose they do, as I've read several of them and found no glaring flaws in
their logic. However the only time that I, personally, have known a book to stop
a bully in his tracks was when the bully was whacked on the nose with one.
I grew up in a household where verbal felonies were a sport, a hobby, and an art
form. As with all sports, there's always that one kid who is chosen last because
he can't keep up. At the time I couldn't have known what a blessing that was.
All I knew was that I didn't want to play if I had to be the ball. So one Good
Friday I left. Someone referred me to a Catholic charity that matched clean
low-income tenants to clean low-income housing, which was all I could afford
alone. (Big step, too, for someone who was brought up to avoid Catholics. I
never did find out why.) As they say, the rest is history. And with freedom came
a change in my understanding of the Story of Forty Years. I realized what
Heinlein meant when he wrote that the most important freedom is to be free in
your mind. The Israelites weren't banished for complaining -- even Moses and the
Nevim complained -- but rather because their verbal sewage was runoff from a
deeper, poorly capped mental and emotional toxic waste dump. They couldn't leave
Egypt in their minds. It was easier to take Egypt with them.
So then I pondered why the people didn't get a second chance in five years, or
maybe ten. I changed. Joshua, Caleb, and Rahab changed. Why did everyone else
get sentenced to life? Call it the Orwellian struggle between the Boxer and the
Squealer in all of us. I wanted to believe the best about people. Still do. I
did not want to believe that people could have enough poison in their hearts to
last a lifetime. A little older now, I can testify that yes, there are people
who will nurture their real or imagined grievances ; who will cherish them, keep
hatred alive for years, for decades, waiting for one last opportunity to share
it with anyone who will listen.
Seen in that light, the Forty Years' Exile finally made sense. The children of
the Children grew up free to become (in Cahill's phrase) a band of rugged desert
nomads that the soft city-dwellers of Canaan did not want to mess with. But try
to imagine the generation gap. The freeborn nation felt no nostalgia for the
certainties of slavery and no comprehension of why anyone would feel nostalgic
for slavery. They must have wondered why their parents cared more about living
in the past than about going to the Promised Land with them. Meanwhile, the
bitter parents almost certainly cried, "You're waiting for us to die so you can
get on with your real lives!" Clearly this was false. The children didn't know
they were supposed to feel deprived. They were home. Unfortunately parental
paranoia would have negated any attempts by their children to prove good
intentions. Even Moses and his family snapped, locked in the same cage with the
inmates. First Miriam made racist remarks about Moses' wife to turn the people
against him and to angle for his job. Then Moses lost his own chance at the
Promised Land when he struck the Meribah rock, a physical stand-in for the two
million Hebrews he really wanted to spank. You don't have to emit toxic fumes
yourself to be sickened by breathing them.
Verbal poison can destroy your life. It destroys your judgment. It can destroy
your family, your friends (if any), and then spread in concentric circles out to
who knows where. How many Africans died in slavery because of the lie that God
cursed Ham? (Nobody cursed Ham. And the prophecy against Canaan was fulfilled
when the Canaanites became extinct.) Or the lie that Paul returned Philemon's
slave Useful to his master? (No, Paul freed Useful and gave him a job, which is
why Paul said, "Give Useful my old office.") And as for the lies the Axis Powers
told during World War 2, it would be easier to list the things about which they
told the truth. (*sound of crickets chirping*)
Life and death are in the power of the tongue. Do we recognize just how much
power? Sometimes I have my doubts. There are reasons and laws against breaking
the Fifth Commandment, or the Sixth, but how can we protect ourselves from those
who break the Ninth?
I guess there are lessons to be learned here. If someone is determined to be a
jerk, sometimes there's not much you can do to stop him. All you can do is
decide how you will respond. When someone hands you a poison seed, it is with
the expectation that you will plant it. Don't. Don't plant it in yourself or
pass it along to another person. Let it die. It's not as though there's a
shortage of them. The reason religion teaches us to forgive is because grudges,
bashing, gaslighting, and gossip water the poison seed. It turns us into what we
hate. A mature adult doesn't look at people in terms of cut-and-dried,
black-and-white. There are good qualities and bad qualities in everyone. Maybe
we should use our gifts to bring out the good gifts in someone else. Even
chronic complainers have some good qualities. Like dedication. A talent for
persuasion. Stamina.
Then again, I'd pay big money for a works-on-people remote with a Mute button.
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