killing with kindness

This is when you deliberately make someone feel bad by being especially nice to them. Generally it works like this:

Someone does something that you don't like. Let's say they are snooty to you and never greet you in the halls of your child's preschool. You can "kill" them by greeting them loudly and boisterously every day. By name. Extra points if you can actually make them stay and chat. The point is that you are very deliberately making them feel bad. You are not trying to be the better person. In fact you are playing a manipulative and not very nice game. They may have started it but you will win.

I am really good at this. I wave and smile to drivers who honk their horns at me or cut me off. Recently I received an unkind email from an acquaintance accusing me of overwhelming her with requests to meet for coffee. I immediately replied how very sorry I was and how the last thing I possibly wanted to do was overwhelm her and how I just liked and admired her so much and really did just want to nail her down for that coffee. Bang! Killed her.

I am pretty sure that I learned this skill from my Dad. Rabbis have to be good at this. Congregants come down hard on their rabbis. They complain if they don't greet everyone by name after each and every kiddush. They complain about the sermon, the length (too long, too short) of services, the quality of the shiva visit, the boisterousness of the wedding, the music at the Bar Mitzvah party. My dad handled all of these complaints by killing the complainers. Really he was the master. Except of course when he wasn't. Sometimes a congregant, or a cantor, or a board would push too hard and then my dad would push back. Really push back. He would forget the rules of killing with kindness and loose his temper. In Los Angeles he famously punched, literally punched, the president of the congregation and quit with no glance back.

Killing someone with kindness is a stealth operation. The key is that the other person has to have no idea what you are doing. They have to actually think that you are a kinder person then they are. Your kindness is what will show them what a jerk they were being in the first place. It's much more effective than being a jerk back at them. It's also jerkier.

The thing about it is that it's really the opposite of kind. A truly kind person can't do it. A truly kind person can get mad back. They can ignore or explain their position. They can't use kindness to kill. A person who kills with kindness is using kindness as a tool for manipulating people. It really works only if you have mastered the ability to come across as a genuine, caring, and kind individual when really you don't like people very much.

My dad managed to pass on this trait to at least five of his six children. We are intensely engaged in the world around us. We have deep friendships, families of our own, are well respected in our communities. We enjoy being with other people; in fact we thrive on it. All of us struggle with the notion that while we really want to be left alone when we are we are lonely. We are not what we seem. We talk about this only with each other, and the very few who have broken through our barriers and found us to be worth loving despite ourselves.

I wonder sometimes if we are really as bad we give ourselves credit for being? Is it maybe possible that we are not killing others with kindness but that we actually are a bit kind ourselves? My friend Sarah is truly a kind person. Possibly the kindest I have ever met. She is also tired, truly achingly bone tired. Her baby is the adorable and beautiful and a blessing and a miracle but she is the worst kind of baby. The kind who doesn't sleep.

On Saturday Jeff commented to her that he was especially tired these days. A joke. A particularly unfunny one, especially to Sarah. "Are you really tired, I'm sorry.." she replied. I watched the wind deflate from Jeff's sail a bit. As we were leaving she called after Jeff "I really hope you can get some more sleep soon", bang, killed him.

So, perhaps there is hope for the Graubart's after all?