Since when does your pain give you license to hurt someone else?

T

he phone call from Tamar came on Erev Yom Kippur.

It wasn’t a surprise. A part of me had been anticipating this call for months. Dreading it, really.

Tamar began with some light chitchat. “How are the kids? What are your Yom Tov plans?” After a minute or two of polite conversation, she concluded with the standard, “I wanted to wish you a gemar chasimah tovah, and I hope that you’re mochel me in case I did anything wrong to you.”

In case she did anything wrong to me?

I was silent for a moment, flabbergasted at the phrasing. It had taken me weeks of work just to overcome my early emotions about what she’d done; I hadn’t wanted to carry a grudge against another person. But Tamar had hurt me, painfully.

Tamar and I work together. Several months before, we’d needed to draft a complicated report to present at a meeting with one of our more important clients. While the client technically belonged to Tamar’s department, I’d been asked to step in and work on the report to help with the extra work this meeting generated.

Several days before the big meeting, I sent the report to Tamar; it was her responsibility to sign off on it. She didn’t respond. After some gentle nudging, she finally wrote back that she was too busy to review it, and I should go ahead with it without her approval.

I put my heart into presenting the report to the clients, and they were impressed. The other feedback from my coworkers was positive, too. But Tamar picked up on a small, almost unnoticeable but slightly embarrassing error I’d made somewhere at the end of the report. The client hadn’t even noticed.

After the meeting, Tamar had turned to me and loudly pointed it out in front of the team. “This is unacceptable,” she’d snapped, looking around as though to gain everyone else’s acquiescence. “It’s careless and embarrassing and it makes the entire report worthless and unprofessional.”

I was stunned. I had worked so hard on the report, and she hadn’t even bothered to review it beforehand. She had focused exclusively on a minor mistake rather than acknowledging the great work I’d done. Instead, she tore it apart while I stood there, feeling hot tears threatening to spill from my eyes.

Tamar’s actions were acutely painful. The public humiliation was devastating; my coworkers wouldn’t look me in the eye for days after the incident.