bitter water

Moses has a difficult relationship with the Israelites. He led them out of slavery; he brought them G-d’s law. And they didn’t just complain that they should have stayed in Egypt—when Moses went to the Mount they lost faith and turned from G-d. When he returned, Moses arranged for them to be slaughtered, all except his brother Aaron and their families.

Before the slaughter, before the golden calf, when the Israelites had been in the desert for three days, they came upon a well, at Marah. When they tasted the water, they cried out that it was bitter, and berated Moses. G-d told Moses that there was a wood which, when he threw it into the well, would make the water sweet.

But the Rebbe of Kotzk, in commentary on this passage, suggests an interesting reading.
“It was not the water,” he writes, “but the people that were bitter.”

I sympathize with the Israelites too often: I hear not what someone is saying directly but a version tainted by my own feeling.
The Israelites were dehydrated and angry and when Moses offered salvation, both physical and spiritual, they would not accept it, they did not have faith in Moses or in G-d. The Israelites were so focused on their own suffering that they had an I-It relationship with Moses and with G-d.
Martin Burber, the Jewish theologian, explored how we relate to the world around us, and how those relations can be a parallel to our relationship to G-d. He wrote of two types of relationships, an I-It relationship and an I-You relationship. I-It relationships are dictated by goal-directed verbs—I want, I need, I sense, I feel, I think. In an I-It relationship, the It is simply an object (whether it is a living or a dead thing or being). I-You relationships are a set of relations, a way of perceiving, a relation based on reciprocity. The You in I-You relationships is a whole being, defined by itself, rather than in relation to the world around. The I-You relationship is the one we strive to have with G-d.

Almost six months ago I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and clinical depression. In some ways it was a relief—it was suddenly not my fault, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It wasn’t my fault.

And for a while, that helped, relinquishing that responsibility. Looking back, though, I can see that I was wallowing. Not in the way you wallow after a break-up, with chocolate ice cream and An Affair to Remember. I wallowed in the way you wallow when getting out of bed is a monumental task, when the prospect of talking to another human being seems impossible, where each minute crawls by at the speed of molasses, and you simply accept that this is how life is.

I quit my job, candidly telling the family who ran the café where I worked that I was incapable of being a person and I needed some time. They nodded, eyes full of concern.

Some days I slept or watched bad daytime TV, incapable of anything more than eating cereal in my pajamas. Some days I was bursting with nervous energy. I spent hours feverishly working on graduate school applications and studying for the GREs. At the end of every day, I dreaded going to sleep, desperately afraid of the moments where I would have to be alone with myself.

The point is this—my depression and anxiety, I carried them with me all the time. Even when the medication helped me get out of bed, helped me call my friends, the sadness, the paralyzing anxiety, they hung over me like a veil I could not lift and no one else could see through.
Depression is a selfish disorder.
I am sad.
I am broken.
I, I, I.
It is as if the veil of depression transforms everyone around me into an object; they are there only to produce sympathy or comfort or love to give to me. Through the veil, I am capable only of I-It relationships, so like the Israelites complaining in the desert. Through the veil, I am incapable of loving my friends, of listening to their hurts and joys, of extending a hand to those in need. The view through the veil of depression is a bitter one.

My depression is not my fault.
I did not choose this veil.
But now that I see it, now that I know it is there, tainting every interaction, I can choose to push it back. I can choose to have faith. I can choose to have I-You relationships. I can choose to have faith that Moses will show me to the well, and G-d will provide the water.

I can choose sweetness.