Somebody Else

Chassidic master Rabbi Dovid of Lelov was walking down the street when all of a sudden a woman jumped on him and began to beat him and scream at him. After a while she noticed that the rabbi was not the man she thought he was: her husband, who had left her to her fate and abandoned her many years ago. She burst into tears out of shame and remorse.

Rabbi Dovid got back to his feet and consoled her, saying that she had not beaten him but her eloped husband.

Doesn't this happen to us all the time? We get angry -- at a stranger, at a friend, at a loved one -- only to later discover that we were never truly angry at them, but at the person we thought they were...