Jealousy and the Jews — What does the Torah teach

The Book of Proverbs equivocates little on one of the most universally experienced, painful, gripping emotions the human species can feel: “Jealousy in the heart makes the bones rot.”

Or the blood boil, or the fingernails grind into the palms, or the stomach clench. Hearts sink and foreheads furrow when jealousy sinks its sharp teeth into the brain and holds on like a pit bull.

It’s a problem that contemporary mental health professionals say manifests itself in everything from rash violence to chronic depression. But what does Judaism teach us about a confusing modern issue like jealousy?

Everything, say Jewish scholars.

Jewish writings demonstrate that “jealousy is at the root of all human conflict,” says Rabbi Alan Lew of Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco.

The Torah, he adds, offers many rich insights into the negative potential of jealousy — and into how that feeling can be used to spur personal growth.

In fact, the first morality tale encountered in the Bible after the Garden of Eden is the story of Cain and Abel, brothers who compete for “the attention and approval of their parent — God,” says Lew.

God clearly favors Abel. So driven by jealousy, Cain kills his brother and is forced into a lonely exile filled with guilt and shame.

The bitter experience of being jealous, a term defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as “resentful or painfully desirous of another person’s advantages,” has poisoned many lives since Cain and Abel, says Lew.

Anyone who has ignored the Tenth Commandment and “coveted thy neighbor’s house” — or new BMW, or attentive spouse, or great job, or beautiful body, or copious bank account — knows how that can feel like a vise gripping one’s soul.

According to Lew, the story of Cain and Abel (which is replicated in the biblical tales of Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel and David and Saul, among others) not only illustrates jealousy in its most virulent form but also provides clues about how to deal with the emotion positively.

Cain and Abel both make offerings to God. Abel gives the “firstlings of his flock” while Cain gives only “fruit of the soil” — or, as Lew would say, “some shlumpedink crops.”

Lew and other Jewish scholars say God distinguishes between the two gifts because one brother gave his best while the other did not. God didn’t favor Abel randomly but as a result of Abel’s offering the best of his lot to God.

The modern message is this: Look into your own heart and give your greatest gifts, the cream of your own crop, to the world, Lew says.

“Stop thinking about the other person. Look at yourself. The implication in the story is that jealousy is a way of masking our own shortcomings. Rather than looking at ourselves and [seeing] the deficiency of our effort, we get mad at somebody else,” the rabbi says.

“If you experience failure, or someone is elevated over you, don’t waste time being angry. If you sit with it and look at it, you can control it,” he adds, repeating God’s admonition to Cain before he goes to kill his brother: “Sin crouches at the door…yet you may rule over it.”

But Lew acknowledges that most people, like Cain, have a tough time letting go of jealousy.

He and many rabbinic scholars are even reinterpreting the biblical term for jealousy, kinah, to express the emotion more vividly. “I think kinah means an uncontrollable emotion that possesses you, almost demonically,” Lew says.

Clinical social worker David Reinstein agrees with that description. Reinstein, branch director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Belmont, sees clients who are often “chronically jealous,” convinced that “what somebody else has is always greater than what I have.”

Living with constant envy of others breeds anger and rage, he says. People with no useful way to express that anger turn it back on themselves.

“We call that depression” — the condition that most often leads people to seek therapy at JFCS, he says.

Feelings of intense jealousy and envy, he notes, often mark the first free-fall in a downward spiral toward anger, a sense of helplessness and, finally, clinical depression.

Therapists point to a wide distribution of jealous feelings, ranging from normal to pathological. According to Reinstein, jealousy at the healthier end of the continuum can be an important opportunity to clarify one’s own goals.

“It can be a real cue about how to direct yourself. It guides you toward a clearer sense of what you want,” he says.

Why do some people respond to jealousy with renewed ambition, others with destructive behavior? East Bay marriage and family counselor Estelle Frankel says people who are irrationally jealous and consumed with envy are people “with a hole inside.”

She posits that “when other people having things makes you feel so much pain, you weren’t loved enough, your self-esteem wasn’t nurtured.”

The only answer, she says, is to “turn to that part of yourself that feels deprived and feed and nurture it.”

The therapist, who teaches at Lehrhaus Judaica and lectures on the crossover between psychology and Judaism, says the story of Saul offers an extreme example of what happens when jealousy isn’t checked.

Saul’s jealousy of David’s power, leadership abilities and popularity “drive him mad, lead him to extreme paranoia. He murders an entire city in response to his jealousy,” Frankel says.

In contrast to the mostly violent outcome of male jealousy in the Torah, however, Frankel refers to Leah and Rachel, two sisters who competed for the love of Jacob but never came to blows.

“What I see in the [biblical] feminine role model is an ability to tolerate and contain these painful feelings. They had to share their love of Jacob, an emotionally impossible thing to ask sisters to do, but they do it.”

Chassidic Rabbi Yosef Levin of Chabad of the Greater South Bay agrees the story of Leah and Rachel is a window into the usefulness of healthy envy: Rachel envies her sister’s fertility.

She sees it as a sign from God that Leah, blessed with children, is a more righteous person, explains Levin. Hoping to emulate Leah, her sister strives to become a better person.

Levin gives advice not unlike the guidance Reinstein and other mental health professionals give clients: Use jealousy to push toward your highest self.

The rabbi states in religious terms what might be considered the most basic axiom of modern psychology — accept yourself.

“If I believe in Divine Providence, that God gives us what we deserve, if I look at another person and what they have, then I’m not recognizing that what I have is from God. God wants me to serve him in my own way, with whatever he has given me, by being a decent human being.

“If I have less, what I do is the best with what I have,” Levin says.