You probably know this story, or a version of it. Maybe it unfolded in your house, maybe next door, or maybe in a home you haven’t entered in years.
It begins in a boardroom: A deadline is named for close of business on Friday, but by the time it travels through supervisors and inboxes and group chats and sighs, it has hardened into something more immediate. Tonight. The deadline is now tonight.
So someone stays late. They call home and rearrange dinner. Children shift their plans. Spouses do their best. Everyone carries a piece of the disruption.
Dinner gets made… sort of. Homework is forgotten then suddenly remembered. Someone raises their voice, someone else goes quiet. And somewhere, a child, carrying the weight of all that unspoken chaos, kicks the innocent cat on her way upstairs.
No one meant any harm. Yet everyone feels it.
From the Cat to the Curse
In Parshat Balak, Bilaam never saw the people he was meant to curse. He viewed them from a distance; abstractly, impersonally. His words came not from relationship, but rather from obligation, from politics, from agenda.
And yet they could have reshaped a people’s destiny.
That is the lingering truth: Sometimes the people who wound us do not even know they did. For them, it was just some random Tuesday.
The Torah tells us that Bilaam’s curse does not land. Not because it was not launched, but because it was intercepted and transformed. Instead of harm, blessing emerges. “Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov…” or “How good are your tents, O Jacob.” The words meant to diminish become words we recite each morning when we enter sacred space.
The Echo of That Tuesday
I have never purposely kicked any actual cats. But I have spoken sharply and immediately regretted it, wishing that I had not. I have heard myself say things with a tone I did not recognize until the regret settled in.
More often than not, the feeling that sparked it did not start with me.
Some of the voices I carry are not mine. Some of the pressure is not grounded in reality. Instead, it is an inheritance from the perfectionism of my youth, from environments where approval was conditional, from the persistent message that says, “You have to get this right or you do not belong.”
The moment was not malicious; It was just a Tuesday. But its echo lingered far longer than it should have.
The Old Tapes and the Torah of Reclamation
We all carry voices that are not ours. Some are passed down like heirlooms from our family, community, or culture. Others we picked up unknowingly in classrooms, offices, or during vulnerable moments.
They say things like:
“You are not enough.”
“You are too much.”
“You should have done more.”
“You’re doing too much.”
These voices become internal scripts. But Jewish tradition does not leave us voiceless in the face of them.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, zt”l. taught that despair is not a sin; it is a lie. He believed the deepest spiritual task is to confront the voice that says we are too far gone. In Sichot HaRan, he wrote, “If you believe you can damage, believe you can repair.”
Dr. Brené Brown echoes this wisdom from a contemporary secular lens. She writes “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” But she reminds us, “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame cannot survive.”
That is the work of recording over the old tapes. Not by erasing the past, but by choosing not to let it dictate the future.
B’tzelem Elokim: You Were Always Enough
The Torah tells us in Bereshis that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of G-d. Which means our value is not conditional: It is essential.
Rav Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, wrote,
“Dignity is not something we earn. It is something we are born with.”
That truth echoes through contemporary scholarship as well. Dr. Donna Hicks, a contemporary leader in dignity studies, defines dignity as the basic longing to be seen, heard, and treated as inherently worthy. She writes that dignity is not something bestowed by others, it is a birthright.
When we internalize this we begin to hear a different kind of voice. One that blesses instead of burdens.
Rav Sacks also taught us that Judaism is not just a tradition of law or ideas. It is a story or, rather, a lived narrative. In Covenant and Conversation, he writes,
“To be a Jew is to tell the story of your people and make it your own.”
This means it includes the difficult parts: The faulty inheritances, the lines we wish we had not memorized. Yet still, we can choose which voices we amplify.
From Inheritance to Intention
The Torah calls itself a morasha, an inheritance. But not all inheritances are sacred. Some are burdens. Some, even, are curses.
Part of growing into ourselves is holding what we have received in both hands and ask, with honesty and care, what do I want to carry forward and what must be transformed?
Interrupting the Chain
We do not always know when we are passing something on. Stress, shame, the quiet fatigue of holding too much for too long, can cause it to spill out. Sometimes it is in the way we speak, or in the way we go silent. One day, it is our voice that comes out too sharp. Our hand that closes too quickly. Our foot that nudges the cat who did not ask to be in the way.
But the Torah offers us another way.
When Bilaam opened his mouth, he intended to curse. But something sacred interrupted the momentum. The transmission paused. Blessing emerged.
That may be the holiest work we can do is to interrupt the chain. To say, “This arrived as pressure, as fear, as shame, but it will leave me as compassion.”
Not because we are perfect, but because we are awake. Because our souls are not defined by what came before but by what we pass forward.
Ma Tovu: A New Kind of Morning
Every morning when we step into synagogue we whisper the words that once teetered on the edge of a curse.
“Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mishkenotecha Yisrael… – How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.”
We do not say them because the dwellings were perfect. We say them because they were seen. Even from afar. Even through a jaded vision.
That is where I am. Working to change my perspective. To look at my family, my community, even my tired self, and see the tents. The efforts. The possibility.
To feel the pressure and not repeat it. To bless anyway. Even on a random Tuesday.
Epilogue: Gentle with Each Other’s Cats
There is Torah in the blinking cursor, in the school project remembered too late, in the house’s clutter and the sigh too loud. It lives in the places where we want to react but still choose to pause. Even once.
If Bilaam’s curse could become a blessing, then maybe our stress can become softness. Maybe the voices we inherited can become gentler as they leave us. Maybe we can choose to bless instead of bruise.
Not because we are holy already. But because we are trying to be.
So, the next time someone spills into your space, bumps into your fatigue, or forgets what you need; remember, they might be carrying a week’s worth of other people’s Tuesdays.
Be gentle with them. Be gentle with yourself. And whatever else you do, be gentle with the cat.
