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22 Sivan 5765 - June 29, 2005 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family

Common Thread
by Rosally Saltsman

I had the displeasure of witnessing a meeting between my landlord, their previous tenant, both sides' lawyers and a court-appointed appraiser. I had to witness it because it was taking place in my apartment. Having no choice and having finished straightening up, reading the paper and saying Tehillim, I observed the proceedings from my perch on the living room couch. It was sort of like watching a play, a drama unfolding, conflict, spicy dialogue, angst, recriminations.

Then something interesting happened. One of the lawyers said to the other, "I've been a lawyer a lot longer than you have," to prove his superior legal acumen. The other lawyer, out of curiosity, asked when he had received his license. They exchanged license numbers. They had received them at the same time. A chuckle broke the tension; they had something in common, they were on opposing sides but they had entered the brotherhood of lawyers together. Aspersions faded into casual banter about what yeshivahs their children were attending and banal conversation replaced open hostilities while the appraiser finished his appraising.

What causes bad feeling among people, not limited to those on opposite sides of a courtroom, is the feeling that there is nothing connecting us to the people with whom we come into conflict. However, our feelings change immediately if we realize that the person with whom we are in conflict is our neighbor or the friend of a friend. Any connection, no matter how tenuous, changes our perspective about our confrere in even an unpleasant situation and makes us more disposed to act charitable, even friendly towards them.

We all seek commonality, understanding, connection. We feel more secure being in the same boat, from the same town, with the same points of reference, speaking the same figurative language. Finding the common thread was one of the tools espoused as a means of winning friends and influencing people by the guru of getting along with others, Dale Carnegie. But long before him, the Torah espoused the Golden Rule — to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself. As the dictum intimates, a good way to love another person is to see him as yourself. The more we can do that, the more we realize how similar we are, the easier it is to love them because the more they are like ourselves.

So, when in conflict, we need to head for the higher ground of common ground and we won't run around on the shores of unfamiliar territory on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. When we authenticate membership in the club we both belong to whether we're lawyers, teachers, mothers, Rabbis, Jews or simply human beings, we can always go on to find more to agree on.

Don't you agree?

 

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