Are Your Sufferings Dear To You?
The Hubris of The Tortured Soul
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“Are your sufferings dear to you?”
This is one of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves, and it appears in the Talmud. When one sage asks it of another who suffers from depression, he responds, “Neither they [the sufferings] nor their reward [are dear to me].”
Only by renouncing his affection for suffering can the sage be raised up from his melancholy. So long as one’s sufferings are dear to them, so long as one’s identity is attached to a story of suffering, so long as the suffering itself is the agitation that produces the pearl to which one clutches with dear life, it will not go away.
But the question can be intoned in all kinds of ways, from gracious to challenging, from sincere to rhetorical.
When I read it as a challenging question I hear it this way: “Do you think you are the only one who suffers? Are you so self-centered as to think your suffering is unrelatable, unique, superior, to the suffering of others?” So long as one thinks one is alone in one’s suffering, so long as one thinks that one’s suffering makes one better than others—better in the sense of beyond comprehension and therefore compassion—one cannot heal. There is a fix we get from the hubris of thinking we are too complicated for others to understand.
Of course, on a case by case basis the hubris may be justified, but that doesn’t make it any less pathological. The voice in our heads that says about others, “You wouldn’t understand,” even when it is correct, is a voice that deems the other inferior.
“Are your sufferings dear to you,” then, is also a question about the questioner’s relation to the questionee: Will you allow me to join you in your suffering?
Levinas says that suffering is meaningless, but becomes morally substantial when it is transformed through compassion. The questioner’s offer of compassion also awakens compassion in the one who previously suffers alone.
And this explains why the text continues, “The prisoner cannot free himself from jail,” referring to the fact that the same sage who heals others cannot heal himself. Suffering is inherently isolating; only compassion transforms isolation into connection.
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