“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

-James A. Baldwin

In 1991, Rabbi Michael Weisser was the cantor and spiritual leader of the South Street Temple, in Lincoln, Nebraska. One morning, just after moving into a new house, the phone rang. A voice on the other end of the line spat the words “Jew boy” and told Weisser he would be sorry he had moved in. Anti-Semitic pamphlets followed, and an unsigned card reading, “The KKK is watching you, scum.”

He located his phone number, and began to call him weekly, at first leaving messages like: “Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?” “Larry, why do you love the Nazis so much? They’d have killed you first because you’re disabled.”

Finally, Trapp answered his phone in person. Rabbi Weisser spoke kind words. “I heard you’re disabled. I thought you might need a ride to the grocery store.”

One night Rabbi Weisser’s phone rang. It was Trapp, pleading, “I want to get out of what I’m doing and I don’t know how. ”

Rabbi Weisser and his wife drove to Mr. Trapp’s apartment that very night. They talked for hours, becoming friends in the process. They even took Trapp into their home as his health deteriorated further, and cared for him. Trapp renounced the Klan, began to make amends to those he had threatened and remarkably,  converted to Judaism in Rabbi Weisser’s synagogue. The former Klan leader died in Rabbi Weisser’s home within the year. The rabbi spoke at his funeral.

This remarkable story underscores James Baldwin’s contention that hate masks pain. None of us is born to hate. But all of us suffer pain in our lives. If we can deal with it cleanly and clearly, we can  learn and grow from it. When we look around for others to blame for our pain, we stay stuck in a cycle of hatred, denial, and more pain. Racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, mysogyny, homophobia, and so on are rooted in pain, inadequacy, and fear. Allowing ourselves to feel the pain and work through it paves a path to freedom. Suppressing our pain only makes it worse when we finally feel it, and can cause great damage along the way.

What is your life’s pain teaching you today? How can you grow, not shrink, from it?

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James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an African American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions.

Joe Laur is a father, husband, naturalist, executive, consultant, and a lowly rabbinic student. He can be reached at joe.laur@godsdog.net.