Can You Grow From a “No”?

My teacher in rabbinical school, Rabbi Eddie Feinstein of Temple Valley Beth Sholom in Los Angeles, taught me the most important lesson I ever learned about giving a sermon. No matter what you say, no matter what the topic, every sermon should be able to be summarized in a single sentence. Dress it up all you want, doll up the message with bells and whistles, jokes and rabbinic wisdom, but at the end of the day, the measure of every sermon comes down to a single moment. And that moment is the moment when one Jew turns to the other after services and says: “So, what did the Rabbi talk about this morning?” And, Rabbi Feinstein taught, if a congregant can not summarize what you said in the time it takes one Jew to pass a piece of challah to another, then you failed at your task; your message is too complicated. That is the litmus test for a good sermon. Can the message be stated in the time it takes to pass a piece of challah from one person to another? Pass or fail, week in and week out.

So now that I’ve shared with you a rabbinic trade secret, today I am going to make it easy on you, I am going to tell you what I am going to talk about from the get-go; you won’t have to figure it out. Mind you, I have every intention of using up the next 14 minutes, but today I have the message down to a single sentence – maybe even a bumper sticker. Are you ready? Here it is: Can you grow from a ‘no’?

Catchy, alliterative, even a bit poetic. Seemingly simple, but I am sure you will agree, a very difficult question. “Can you grow from a ‘no’?” Think about it. As social animals we are, necessarily, in constant interaction with other human beings. We are in dialogue, in meetings, in discussion with people all the time – in our marriages, our families, our places of business, here in the synagogue. To be human is to be in constant negotiation with other people, and those negotiations will either end in “yeses” or in “no’s.” And because we have needs, because we know what we think we want, because we are vain and have egos, we want those exchanges to end with a “yes.” We want our cravings to be met, our opinions proven true and our positions affirmed. A “yes” brings satisfaction. Our will has prevailed, our efforts have paid off, our selves have been validated. A “yes” means we were right.

“No’s” are less fun. “No’s” signal defeat. When someone tells us “no,” we feel a little piece of us die. We are bruised and we are hurt, diminished in the eyes of others and in our own eyes.

But here is the thing. Since our lives are filled with negotiation, we all know that “no’s” await us all; they lurk right around the corner for each of us. So the question isn’t how to avoid them; they are inevitable. The question is, how do we respond to them when they happen? Which leads us back to my original question: “Can you grow from a ‘no’?”

When reading the story of Abraham, you can’t help but face the question squarely. We read this morning of Abraham’s great negotiating skills in a protracted and detailed and ultimately successful bargaining session between Abraham and Ephron the Hittite over a piece of real estate, a burial place for Sarah. Abraham secured the property, having negotiated successfully with his Hittite neighbor.

But the truth of the matter is, that what made Abraham Abraham was not this successful negotiation, but the unsuccessful one we heard about last week. Just a few chapters ago, Abraham and God engage in a head-to-head match over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham desperately tries to save the cities about to be destroyed. Would they be spared for 50 righteous people, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten? We know how the story ends. God, holding all the cards, walks out of the negotiations, telling Abraham, in effect, “No.” Abraham loses, and the wicked cities are destroyed.

But Abraham does something very important with that “no.” Abraham grows. Given the unevenness of negotiating with the Creator of the Universe, it is not surprising that Abraham saved his breath when it came to the subsequent command to bind his son on the altar. But from that moment on, Abraham finds his voice. He negotiates successfully for the burial site, he sets into motion a series of events to find his son Isaac a wife. Tradition tells us that Abraham is called Ha-Ivri, from the Hebrew word la’avor, to cross over, because Abraham had the courage of conviction to stand on one side of the world while the whole world stood on the other. Abraham’s defining moment, his most famous negotiation, was a failure, it ended with a “no.” But it was that “no” that made Abraham…Abraham. From that “no” he grew into who he would be and earned the inestimable esteem by which he would be remembered.

There are many books on the importance of Yes. My sister-in-law is a professor of law in a field called alternative dispute resolution. The textbooks in the field are all about getting to yes. In fact that is the name of one of them: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Even the books that seem to acknowledge the possibility of a “no” are really about yes. For example, there is one called The Power of a Positive No: How to say No and Still Get to Yes. What all these books have in common is the shared belief that the desired end point of any exchange is a “yes.”

But with all due respect to my sister-in-law and her distinguished colleagues, I am not sure that it is altogether advisable or healthy to aspire to live in a world of yeses and soon-to-be yeses.

Think about it for a second. Think of the most formative and transformative moments of your life. Many of them of course were “yeses”: a marriage proposal, a job offer, a child coming into this world. But I know that I am who I am, not by the “yeses” but by the “nos” that have come my way. A “no” makes us stronger, a “no” forces us to reconsider how committed we are to something, a “no” can sometimes lead us to recommit to a principle, and sometimes to reject it. Ask any athlete and she will tell you that she learned far more from defeat than from winning. Ask any scholar about the process of getting an academic degree. It is filled with no’s. No’s from advisors, from publishers, from grant committees. But those “no’s,” those rejections, for those who are willing to grow, result in revision, refinement, retrenchment, resubmission and often times, later down the line… a “yes.”

My favorite stories are stories of famous people who are who they are because they heard a “no” along the way. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the dominant voice of modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, was passed over in 1935 to be Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. Just imagine how different American Jewry would be if he had gotten that job. Our own Rabbi Milton Steinberg of blessed memory was turned down when he applied to be the Rabbi of Ansche Chesed on the West Side. I recently read that probably the most famous painting of the twentieth century, Jackson Pollock’s 1A, went unsold and unnoticed for a full year. If you want to be inspired, read JK Rowling’s Harvard commencement speech on her life before Harry Potter. We are who we are not because someone said “yes” to us, but because someone told us what we couldn’t be, and we became far more than they, or for that matter we ourselves, thought we were capable of becoming. The world is full of people who have heard the word “no.” The question in my mind is how many of them have leveraged that “no” – to grow.

I just picked up Wendy Mogel’s newest book, The Blessing of a B-Minus. Her first book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, explains that life’s bumps and bruises are part of how young children learn to pick themselves up and move on. This new book, The Blessing of a B-minus, has a similar theme but this time for parents of teenagers. Not only, she claims, is grade inflation or helicopter parenting unhealthy for all the obvious reasons. But if a child grows up without ever being allowed to feel the brunt of a B-minus, in other words, a “no,” then he or she will grow up as an entitled and arrogant and ultimately helpless young adult who sees the world as their personal ATM. There is a corrosive and ultimately debilitating narcissism to a person or society that is incapable of hearing a “no.” It is worth remembering that of the Ten Commandments over half are “thou shalt nots.” And of the 613 Rabbinic commandments, 365 are negative and 248 positive. The relationships that matter most, between God and humanity, or between two human beings, must be capable of surviving a “no.” In fact, it is a precondition to any relationship of meaning.

This past week, I flew to Chicago for a day to eulogize the president of my former synagogue in Chicago, Mayer Freed. He was a mensch, a visionary, a mentor and a friend. But for all the love we shared, he and I often disagreed. And he said “no” to me an awful lot – maybe, in retrospect, more than he said “yes.” But he taught me that if you say “no” to someone out of principle, and you state your “no” with integrity and in a way that acknowledges the dignity of the other, the relationship can both endure and become stronger. As Gandhi once wrote, “A ‘no’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.” Because Mayer Freed was able to say “no” to me with integrity, I learned how to hear a “no.” Not as an attempt to diminish or undercut me, but to build me up, to help me become who I could be and, unexpectedly, as an important gesture of respect.

“No” is not a dirty word; we need to bring it back into vogue. It is the word that sets boundaries. It makes us who we are. It is the word that makes relationships worthwhile. It is a gift that comes in an unexpected package. We must learn to give a “no” with conviction and with compassion. More importantly we need to hear “no’s” with courage and fortitude, for embedded within each “no” is the seed from which we will grow into the people we hope to become.