Once upon a time there was a very bitter man who lived alone on the far side of his town. His neighbors knew how bitter he was, the children in the town knew it. People would go out of their way to avoid his house and his sour attitude. He knew how bitter he was, too. He liked being bitter and he liked being alone.

He was so bitter that he did not even want to share his tiny old house with his shadow. So he closed the curtains and the drapes and shut out all the light. Not even the sun or the moon could cast a shadow in his house. But even a bitter man needs to eat, and to do that, he had to leave his house. So he waited until the darkest time of night to creep out and pick a mushy mango from the tree by his house.

One night, as he crept out to grab a mango he heard his door slam with a loud bang. He called out “Who’s there?” and began banging on his door.

From inside he heard a voice say, “your shadow.” The man could not believe it and demanded proof. The voice began to reveal secrets. Secrets that only the man knew, about how he slept in his lumpy bed, the face he made when he bit into a mango, and other things that made the stern man blush. The shadow was telling the truth. After a few moments, in his most polite voice, the man asked, “Can I come in?”
The voice said “yes,” but on one condition: that the man agree to share his life with his shadow. At first he refused, but as the cold crept into his bones, he began to reconsider. Maybe it won’t be so bad, thought the man. Maybe it was finally time to share his house. So he agreed.

The door opened with a creak and the man saw his long shadow stretch across the floor. To honor his word, the man then opened his curtains to let in all the light he could. And with that, his bitterness melted away. Soon, people learned about his new outlook and stopped avoiding his house. They would even see him on his porch and say hello. He would give them a wave and if people looked closely enough, they would see his shadow waving, too.

It was not good for the man or his neighbors when he let it consume him – in another version of the story, before he changes, he falls and nobody stops to help him because they were so used to looking away. What does the bitterness in our lives mean for us?

It is impossible to avoid bitterness for our whole lives. Even if we were to live a life of complete contentment, those around us might not be so fortunate. In reality, bitterness will enter our lives at some point. Even if we could keep all bitterness out of our lives, that might not be a good thing. There is a Chinese idea known as chi ku, eating bitterness. Scott Tong of NPR’s Here and Now explains that “To eat bitterness, it is kind of a description of a life that is resilient. What you’ve gone through, you’ve eaten bitterness.” He says this without sadness, instead presenting it as a simple fact, if not with some admiration.

Some of us have had hard lives and for some who have tasted bitterness, it is a badge of honor. They view the bitterness they experienced as something to be proud to have survived. At times this is admirable – someone who came through the worst of situations and does not let it make them bitter. Still, there are some who expect everyone to be able to demonstrate the same resilience with the bitterness in their lives.

Not everyone is born with privileges and advantages; even then, difficulties arise and often our lives are made difficult. Despite living in an age of unprecedented technologies and possibilities, sometimes life is hard and bitter. That can have a profound effect, making some people bitter. We all probably know someone like this; someone who has taken the troubles in their life and found ways to hang on to them, to dwell on them, maybe to pass them along to their family or anyone they meet.

For both responses, bitterness can define us, leaving us with tenacity, also in positive or negative ways. In her book, Grit, author Angela Duckworth explores these possible outcomes. She cites a Hungarian proverb shared by the eminent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (cheeks-sent-me-high), who saw it on a sign while in grade school: “The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet.” He said that he always struggled with that idea, believing that “Even when the learning is hard, it is not bitter when you feel that it is worth having, that you can master it, that practicing what you learned will express who you are and help you achieve what you desire.” We do not have to be proud of our bitterness nor do we have to admire it in others. But we absolutely cannot let it linger within us and hold us back. It does not have to define us. Whether we profit or grow from it is up to us.

Judaism has no shortage of bitterness and no shortage of responses to it. First there is Cain, who toiled in the fields and saw that his brother was the one who won God’s favor. Cain’s bitterness drove him to murder. Job, on the other hand, endured all manner of misfortune, essentially on a dare, and yet refused to curse God or become bitter. But life does not have to be so catastrophic to engender bitterness. Even characters who might have had much to be happy about or proud of became bitter. Jacob’s life was not without hardship, but he raised a large family, amassed great wealth, and had a great deal of wisdom and power. When he summed up his life for Pharoah, though, he lamented, “Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my ancestors during their sojourns.” That he lamented living too short and having had a life of pain is the first example of that old joke about the person complaining about the food by saying “the food is terrible here…and such small portions.”

We are never asked to pretend that bitterness does not exist or that our lives are always easy and light. Judaism and Jewish history are full of bitter moments, hardships, and tragedy. And while we may be prone to pessimism and even bitterness, this is not how we are supposed to go through life. Tomorrow, our Haftarah tells the story of Hannah, who struggled with infertility. We read: וְהִ֖יא מָ֣רַת נָ֑פֶשׁ וַתִּתְפַּלֵּ֥ל עַל־יְהֹוָ֖ה וּבָכֹ֥ה תִבְכֶּֽה
“In the bitterness of her soul, she prayed to god, weeping, sobbing.” The bitterness that Hannah felt in her very soul did not stop her, though. She acted by promising to dedicate a son to God’s service. Her dedication and genuineness was rewarded. While Divine intervention may not be an option for us, the story offers two other responses, one helpful and one hurtful. The helpful response came from her husband Elkanah, who tried to comfort her and assured her that he loved her completely, even if she could not give him a child. It is this sort of support that the Tanakh holds up for us, even if it did not help Hannah. The other response is from Elkanah’s other wife, Peninah, who teased and tortured Hannah over her infertility. This is an all too real reminder that people suffering bitterness are also often assaulted by reminders of it in the world, and by cruel people. This only reinforces our duty to provide comfort and love.

It is the wrong holiday, I know, but Pesach has the best demonstration of bitterness and how we might handle it. At the seder, we eat maror, bitter herbs. We do this to remind ourselves of the bitterness of slavery. By tasting bitterness for just a moment, we keep from settling back into it, or wallowing in it. Instead, we remind ourselves of it and feel it just long enough to understand. Rabbi Menachem Creditor says of maror: “‘Don’t just talk about suffering — remember it, taste it, own it.’ Our story is not abstract. It’s visceral. It burns, and we are not supposed to avoid that.” When we taste the bitter herbs, we feel it come up our throats and into our faces. We gag, we cough, we cry. There are several ways to approach that. One is to take the tiniest of bites, grit our teeth and wait for the flames to rise up our faces. We do this every year but it never gets any easier. Chafing against the bitterness never makes it easier to take. The other way is to swallow the chunk of horseradish and lean into it. We let it burn and hurt us. Maybe then we can open up to our reactions, and begin to respond better…or maybe we aer just masochists. Where we go from there is up to us. Our last approach is the one suggested next in the haggadah: we mix it with charoset. Maybe we even bury it so deep in the sweet mixture that we cannot taste it – or feel it, anymore. It is the sweetening of bitterness that does the most for us.

Shortly after the Exodus, the Israelites came to a place called Marah, bitterness, named that for the bitter waters there. Moses throws a piece of wood into the water, and the water becomes sweet. According to some readings, the wood was bitter, too. The Sages tell us that this reminds us that sweetness comes not from only sweet things happening to us, but because we choose to experience sweetness, and focus on the blessings in our lives.

Whether it is our life experience or the symbolism of a seder, we are in control of how we respond to bitterness. Just like in the seder, it burns, but we do not have to let it linger. We are commanded to eat bitter herbs to remind ourselves of the bitterness of slavery, we are not supposed to remain bitter. The same is true for any of the injuries we have sustained. Instead, the bitterness we have tasted or do taste on occasion can make us sensitive to other people’s struggles, or more accepting of our own.

We can also lean into bitterness. We can take that bite, knowing that it will sting, but there is something we can get out of it. Being reminded of the bitterness, of slavery, of struggle, of disappointment is a way to learn or understand, without it being a constant in our lives. Again looking to Passover, we remind ourselves that there is still bitterness, even if we are free. We pour off a bit of our wine, honoring the pain of the plagues, rather than ignoring it OR falling into depression and woe that all is not perfect. It is much easier to learn lessons by tapping into a feeling, rather than trying to make sense of a hard situation while we are in it. Maybe feeling and tasting bitterness can help us arrive at something good.

Or we can sweeten it, filling our lives with things and people that make life easier to take. People who care for us or comfort us. Things that we enjoy or that remind us of what we love. Remember, we are only supposed to get a taste of the bitter herbs. We are not supposed to torture ourselves with it.

Dara Horn’s book, “In the Image,” is about people who have tasted bitterness, struggling with difficult families, disabilities, the challenges of immigration, persecution, and death. In reflecting on these hard realities, one of the characters explains: “It is often said that we are shaped by our experiences, but I do not–don’t–believe that’s true. Because we don’t choose our experiences, yes? I think we are not shaped by our experiences, but by what we do choose–by the way we react to our experiences.” When we encounter bitterness, and inevitably, we will, this is the choice we have to make. Even if we have eaten bitterness, it does not have to linger like acid.

Bitterness is unavoidable in our lives, which is not entirely bad. Somewhere in between suffering and survival we can find strength and even meaning. As we start our teshuva, we taste things, this is when we start thinking about the bitterness and how we respond to it. At the end of our services, we will have apples and honey, to remind us to have a sweet new year. Perhaps this is as important as ever if we have been tasting bitterness.
In the old mahzor there was a reading, “Look back, look back on bitter suffering, look back on noble endurance. Behold our faith in Truth, our heroic trust in God. Look back and wonder: What is this people? What is the meaning of its life?…I have called you in righteousness, and taken you by the hand and kept you; I have made you a covenant people, a light to the nations: to bring the captives out of prison, and those who sit in darkness from their dungeons.” It is our duty to bring sweetness to the embittered. To bring hope and light and love.

There is a tradition for the second night of Rosh Hashanah, to eat a new fruit or a fruit that you have not tasted in a long time. That way, you can literally taste the newness of the year. But we should not limit ourselves to only tasting new fruit once a year. Indeed, we may encounter many fruits, bitter and sweet alike. All of them offer us a chance to grow and learn. In fact, in the Talmud, Rabbi Abbun said: “In the next world, a person will be judged for all the fine fruit that he saw but did not eat.” Not all fruit is sweet, but Rabbi Abbun in the Talmud does not demand that, simply that we continue to experience new things.

In this year, may we take control of how we react to our experiences. May we choose healthy and productive paths, rather than those of pain, resentment, and stagnation. May we inspire others with our struggles and our triumphs. May we help others who are burdened and celebrate with those who have reasons for joy. And, may we taste sweet with the bitter.