The Power of a Compliment

Abie and Sadie worked for years in the shmata business. Finally, they made it big, very big. To gain a little cultural legitimacy, they donated generously to the local orchestra and were invited to an elegant, black-tie dinner.

Sadie scans the room, searching for an opening. She overhears a group of women discussing Beethoven. This is her moment.

“Beethoven?” she says confidently. “I know him very well. Just the other day, I saw him on the number five bus going to the beach.”

Silence. Embarrassment. Then laughter.

Abie is mortified. In the car, he explodes:
“Couldn’t you sit quietly? You had to talk?”

“What’s wrong?” Sadie protests. “I did see Beethoven on the number five bus!”

“You ignoramus!” Abie cries. “Everybody knows the number five bus doesn’t go to the beach!”

Sadie wasn’t wrong about Beethoven. She misunderstood the route.

Many of us do the same thing with pain. We don’t misunderstand the event. We misunderstand the route it takes inside us.

In Parshat Mishpatim, we read:

“You shall not oppress any widow or orphan. If you oppress him, and he cries out to Me, I will surely hear his cry.”

But the Hebrew is shocking. Literally translated:

“If oppress you will oppress him; if cry he will cry to Me; hear will I hear his cry.”

Every keyword is doubled.

The Torah never writes like this. Not once elsewhere do we find all the central words in a verse repeated for no apparent reason. The same message could have been conveyed with half the words.

Even stranger: the verse is elliptical. It threatens punishment but never states what the punishment will be. The sentence remains open-ended.

Why?

Because the Torah is describing something that does not end.

Rashi explains: The Torah mentions widows and orphans because they are vulnerable, but the principle applies to all.

When you hurt someone who has a secure, nurturing support system, the pain may leave a bruise. It hurts, but it heals.

But when you wound someone who has no safe place to process that hurt, an orphan, a widow, a child without emotional protection, a vulnerable adult, that pain does not fade.

It repeats.

It embeds.

It becomes internal.

The oppression continues long after the oppressor has walked away.

Millennia before neuroscience, the Torah tells us: trauma rewires the brain.

The insult becomes self-talk.
The voice of the critic becomes the voice inside.

At a bar mitzvah, I was dancing with the father, a classmate from school. Suddenly, I noticed he was crying.

He asked me, “Did anything come of me?”

I was stunned. “Look at your life! Your family! Your business! Your community!”

He told me that in school, an authority figure said to him, “You’re wasting your time. Nothing will ever come of you.”

The next year, the man repeated it.

Thirty-five years later, those words still echoed.

“Not a day goes by,” he said, “that I don’t hear it.”

That is the Torah’s double language.

“If you oppress, you will oppress him.”
It does not happen once. It keeps happening.

“If cry he will cry.”  The first cry never ends.

God hears not only the original cry but the lifelong echo.

The sentence has no ending because the trauma has no natural ending.

Modern psychology calls it negative self-talk. The running internal monologue of criticism and self-contempt.

Where did it come from?

Often from a parent, teacher, or authority figure whose words we absorbed deeply. Over time, their voice became ours.

One man I know grew up feeling constantly criticized. Now married to a gentle woman, he still reacts defensively whenever she offers the slightest correction. He believes he is responding to her, but he is responding to a decades-old voice in his own head.

He is imprisoned not by his wife, but by internalized criticism.

The Torah understood this thousands of years ago.

You must challenge the inner critic.

One powerful response is: “You’re partly right.”

Yes, you’re imperfect. Everyone is. But you are not only your flaws. Making room for your strengths disrupts the tyranny of negative self-talk.

The Rebbe would say: “You are not allowed to gossip about yourself either.” Not even inside your own mind.

Negative self-talk feels authentic. Positive self-talk feels fake. But the opposite is true. The negative voice often came from outside and was implanted within. Reclaiming a compassionate inner voice is not inauthentic; it is reclaiming your true self.

That is why every morning in Jewish prayer, we affirm the purity of the soul. Before the world speaks to us, we speak truth to ourselves.

If trauma can be tattooed into the brain, so can love.

Never underestimate a genuine word of affirmation.

A family once visited the Rebbe on Chanukah. He offered the child coins. The child refused. After several attempts, the Rebbe smiled and said, “This is a good sign he is not someone who craves money.”

He reframed what could have been labeled a flaw into a virtue. He protected the child’s self-image.

That is leadership.

Clint Pulver could not sit still in class. He tapped constantly. Teachers disciplined him. The principal told him to sit on his hands.

One teacher, Mr. Jensen, kept him after class. Clint expected punishment.

Instead, Mr. Jensen opened his drawer and handed him drumsticks.

“In my opinion,” he said, “you don’t have a problem. You were created to be a drummer.”

That sentence changed Clint’s life. He became a renowned professional drummer.

A lesser teacher saw disruption.  A wise teacher saw destiny.

There is an angel in the marble of every child.

Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, tells of a woman who survived Auschwitz. On the train to the camps, she scolded her little brother for losing his shoes.

It was the last thing she ever said to him. He did not survive.

She made a vow:  “I will never say anything that could not stand as the last thing I ever say.”

Can we live that way perfectly? No.   But we can live toward it.

We are all canvases of experience.

Scars fade.  

Tattoos remain.

The Torah forbids tattooing the body. But it also warns us not to tattoo the soul with cruelty, with contempt, with words that never stop echoing.

“If you oppress you will oppress him… hear will I hear.”

God hears every cry, including the one we still whisper to ourselves decades later.

And if negativity can be etched so deeply, how much more so kindness.

A single sentence can imprison a person for life.

A single sentence can set an angel free.

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky