Tears of Angels: Part Seven: The Hoffman Process: Marc Gafni
Dedicated to the Hoffman Process:
Anger or Intimacy?
Now if you were Isaac, you might be pretty mad at Abraham for creating such complexity and even pain in your life. And it’s true that we are part of a generation with an enormous amount of anger against parents who we feel somehow or another misplaced our lives. Sometimes that anger is justified. Just as often, however, it is exaggerated and even misplaced. Anger and love are inextricably bound up.
One of the Hebrew words for anger, chemah, is actually derived from the same root as chom, the Hebrew word denoting warmth and love. The idea is simple: love and anger both come from the energy of intimacy — shared identity with the subject of your love or the object of your anger. You are just as intimate with a person with whom you are enraged as your are with a person you love. It is simply a negative re-channeling of the same vital erotic force. Anger and love appear to share all the same qualities of Eros.
Intense desire, to hurt or to help, is interconnected with the other, the fullness of presence and the experience of being on the inside. Without a doubt, one of the reasons people get angry is that it is often the only place that they get an erotic charge. But there is one essential distinction: love is a perception.
As the song goes, “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.”
Anger blocks perception: “He was blinded by his rage.” It is no mistake that this root word of chom means “warm” in Hebrew. It is a fire word and fire is the ideal image for passions. On the one hand, fire is that which we see by, that which warms our food, our houses. Yet it can also burn.
As a result, love is creative, warm, caring and in the end erotic. Anger is fiery and destructive. How could it not be when you can’t see where you are going?! Anger is alienating, and after the first rush it is deadening and non-erotic. Letting go of most forms of anger is essential for loving. Even the holy anger which fuels protest must be transmuted to love at some point. If not, it gets poisoned by hatred of the enemy and generates the same kinds of evil it sought to overthrow.
It would probably not be much of an exaggeration to say that ninety percent of anger is rooted in anger at our parents, disguised, sublimated and re-expressed in a thousand different ways. Letting go of the anger at our parents that blocks our perception is essential to becoming a lover.
