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he had prepared for them. When they arrived at the festive meal and
the tables were set his wife suddenly got up and overturned all the
tables. One of the guests was very upset by this and wanted to leave.
The sage said to him,“Why should you be angry, the same thing hap-
pened to you a few days ago?” The guest was puzzled by this. The sage
immediately told him, “Have you forgotten that your chicken lifted
itself up with its wings onto the table and overturned it?!”

The sage added by way of explanation,“Both of them – the woman
and the rooster – acted without the enlightenment of intelligence,
so her foolishness – is her atonement!” [Slightly differing versions of
this story are cited in No’am Hamidos (Erech Apayim 52a), in sefer,
Haser Kaas Milibecha and in Alufeinu Mesubalim.]

Our Sages z”l, thus employed the imagination in a similar manner,
though there is a slight difference between the methods: Whereas the
Sages learned how to defuse negative baggage either through faith
that everything that one person does to another is ultimately from the
hand of Hashem, or by disregarding the comments of our harassers
by thinking of them as a dog’s barking or a donkey’s braying, or con-
sidering their actions like those of a wild chicken and they being no
different from a mentally ill person, our question considers employing
imagination against the harasser, imagining striking him, cultivating
hateful thoughts toward him and contemplating doing whatever we
want to him.

Two questions of halachah must be considered:
1. Is a person allowed to strike his colleague in his imagination,
or does the command, “You shall not hate your friend in your heart”
(Vayikra 19:17) apply to this? The same question can be asked of the
prohibitions of taking revenge and bearing a grudge (ibid. passuk 18).
2. Is a son allowed to entertain feelings of anger at his parents in
his imagination, or even to belittle them or think of them as fools, or
does this too violate the mitzvah to honor parents?
Let us begin by considering the first question, regarding the prohi-
bitions of hatred and of taking revenge:
We must first clarify the parameters of the prohibition, “You shall
not hate your brother in your heart.” The Kehillos Yaakov (Arachin,

180 1 Medical-Halachic Responsa of Rav Zilberstein