Recently, together with two other teachers, I’ve been studying the Rule of the Zen Peacemaker Order, which I took on almost 30 years ago, and specifically the commitments towards reshaping society and building cultures of care and connection. In that process, it hits me again and again how grievance doesn’t serve. Anger may at least galvanize us into taking action (though the harm can exceed the benefit), but grievance, especially the kind that gets carried on from one generation to another? No.

Grievance as complaint over harm or distress is part of any democratic, caring culture. I want to face my cultural history full-on, including genocide perpetuated against Native Americans, enslavement of African-American, and the oppression, discrimination, and expulsions against both. I’m glad that the Zen Peacemakers conducts retreats to bear witness to these historic evils (the Native American is coming up in July, and the one in Alabama takes place usually in April). I also want us to reckon with how certain of our systems continue to perpetuate poverty and inequality.

How do I transform such systems? With responsibility, consistency, firmness, and clarity of purpose. Grievance? Not so much.

Grievance has played a big-time role in my Jewish life. From the Never forget injunctions that relate to acts of persecution of Jews, culminating with the Holocaust, to the verses of certain liturgies that again and again evoke threats that would have succeeded if not for Jehovah’s intervention on behalf of his people—all these have been mother’s milk to me.

As I wrote a number of times, I wasn’t raised on Dr. Seuss or Mother Goose, I was raised on stories of the Holocaust and how my mother and her family overcame it and lived (most of them, at least). It’s a story of heroism, selflessness, and sacrifice that inspired me my entire life. And it’s also a story of grievance.

Jews are proud of what they’ve achieved in different countries, even as refugees, with determination, hard work, and the injunction that each generation, standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, must aim for more and higher, usually through education. My mother went ballistic when I took time off from college. I had betrayed her, the family, the nation.

But in the middle of all that success, there’s always the shadow of the past. And the present, too, because antisemitism continues to this day.

Remembrance is one thing; grievance is another, because grievance implies: You owe us. You persecuted us, you oppressed, enslaved, and killed us, so don’t ever judge us. Don’t talk to us about what’s just or unjust, moral or indefensible. Life fucked us over; you fucked us over. And even when it’s not said openly, what’s implied is that this people—whoever they are—are a special case that may fall outside certain norms of behavior.

Many examples of this come to mind. The present war is one such example, where people drew analogies between the events of October 7, 2024, including murder, rape, maiming, and kidnapping of civilian men, women and children, and those of past pogroms or even the Holocaust. Old grievances are promoted in both religious and political domains, and epithets of antisemite are often thrown around with little merit, depending on what political side you’re on.

Of course, people worry about their own children fighting in the war, but broader than that is the self-righteousness that comes from grievance, from the age-old voice that says: Who are you to judge? You owe us—through history, through the years, through millions of people who died—so don’t dare to criticize us.

But the clothes of grievance are worn by many people. At first the wardrobe was used mainly by members of minority groups; now we see American white people aggrieved by Affirmative Action rules, or white South Afrikaners aggrieved by a black government in South Africa. Grievance was once the evocation of injury and distress experienced by one person due to the actions of another, or of the harm caused by one group towards another—actions that caused grief and must be addressed. It took courage to bring them to the forefront of public consciousness, as modeled so movingly by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement.

But grievance has made new friends: self-righteousness and pity, commiseration, and often, apathy and passivity, e.g., why should I fight when the world is against me? Or, in the case of the Middle East, why should I trust anyone when the world has been against us from Day 1? When it becomes like this, grievance becomes a lumbering, weighty burden, no idealism and no joy.

In the middle of World War II, Albert Camus wrote: “Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this.”