In this week's parsha, Shelach, God tells Moses to send out a leader from each tribe to spy the land which God intends to bring the people into. When the spies come back after forty days, they confirm that the land is fertile with fruit and flowing with milk and honey, but ten of the twelve spies report that the people in the land are too strong, numerous, and huge to be conquered. Their report terrifies the people of Israel, who cry out that they should return to Egypt. Only Joshua and Caleb report that the land will surely be conquered with God's help and protection.

In God's fury against the people for their lack of faith, God intends to annihilate them all with a plague. But Moses argues that God will lose face with the Egyptians and other nations when they learn that God killed the people - they will think that God was weak and unable to fulfill on the promise to bring the people into the land. This argument gets God to pause. Then Moses throws God's own words back into God's face, calling out God's self-proclaimed attributes of mercy and compassion "'YHVH, slow to anger (erech apayim), abundant in kindness (rav chesed), forgiver of iniquity and willful sin, and who cleanses."

As a result of Moses' intervention, only the ten spies are killed, and the rest of the people are punished with the decree that they will wander in the wilderness for the next 40 years (one year for each of the 40 days the spied looked over the land), until this generation dies out. Only this generation's children will be allowed to finally enter the land.

Slow to anger, forgiveness, kindness, compassion - all of these divine attributes are ones we can cultivate and nurture in ourselves with the help of savlanut - patience. Patience allows us to slow our reactions - to reflect on a situation so that we can cool our initial emotional upset and choose our response thoughtfully in a way that reflects our deeper values.  When we react to an intense or upsetting event with immediacy from a place of anger, we are likely to cause more harm than good. If God reacted spontaneously without pause, God would have wiped out the entire nation and that would be the end of the story. We wouldn't be here as Jews, studying this Torah or Jewish yoga. But Moses succeeded in slowing God's response by calling upon God's patience, by reminding God to be slow to anger, exactly at that moment when God most needed a reminder and would otherwise have been destructive. 

Too bad Moses wasn't around in my kitchen on Saturday morning when my middle son and I started world war three. What started as a familiar conversation/disagreement about studying and schoolwork responsibilities, quickly escalated into a full-blown shouting match, culminating in too many unpleasant and angry words to recount, including him telling me that he hates me and wishes I wasn't his mother, and my retorting (stupidly and immaturely) that I am no longer his mother, so he shouldn't expect me to do anything for him anymore. Not a proud moment. The gloomy mood and silence that persisted between us throughout the day weighed heavily over not only the two of us, but upon my husband and the other kids as well. An otherwise potentially beautiful day was ruined by an inability to control our anger and our lack of savlanut with each other. If I had been able to walk away in that moment, separate myself from the situation, breathe, reflect, pray and remind myself of my commitment to my son's well-being, I could have acted with more erech apayim and rav chesed toward my son. Of course, that's no guarantee that my son would have acted any differently, but I am only in control of my own responses.

To understand and transform anger, we must learn the practice of compassionate listening and using loving speech. Listening with compassion can help the other person to suffer less. Yet, even if you have the best intentions, you cannot listen deeply unless you train yourself in the art of compassionate listening. If you can sit down quietly and listen compassionately to that person, you can relieve a lot of his suffering. 

Anger is not only a mental reality because the physical and the mental are linked to each other and we cannot separate them. Anger makes you tense your muscles, but when you know how to smile, you begin to relax and your anger will decrease.

When you get angry, go back to yourself, and take very good care of your anger.  And when someone makes you suffer, go back and take care of your suffering, your anger.  Do not say or do anything. Whatever you say or do in a state of anger may cause more damage in your relationship.

Embrace your anger with a lot of tenderness. Your anger in not your enemy, your anger is your baby.

If you see elements of garbage in you, like fear, despair, and hatred, don't panic. As a good organic gardener, a good practitioner, you can face this: "I recognize that there is garbage in me. I am going to transform this garbage into nourishing compost that can make love reappear."

Developing discipline, mastery and control over our emotions and thoughts is the purpose and intention of the yoga practice. In the second yoga sutra, Patanjali teaches "Yogas Citta Vrtti Nirodah" - the practice of yoga is the restraining and mastery over the mind's reactions. Because I have not perfected self-control over my reactions, and desire to develop patience and skill in the areas of slowing to anger and acting from abundant kindness, I return to my yoga practice again and again.

In the Torah Solutions column in the July/Augest issue, teachings of the nobel-prize winning Buddhist monk, Thichnathanh, were inadvertently misattributed.