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Very interesting post by Rabbi Arthur Segal. (Talmud Discourse: A Wasted Friendship )
As a psychiatrist one of the important points I see in Jewish ethics is the emphasis on living in peace, quickly settling our differences and not letting the sun go down on our wrath. Very good advice. As Arthur pointed out, long term "feuding" can kill you. And that was not an apocryphal story; it happens every day.
I was engaged to a girl in college whose father ran a small coal hauling business and lived on some land in the country. He had a nice field on some "bottom land" below his house by a creek that he had allowed to lay fallow for years. Then one year when union strikes disrupted his business he decided to farm it again and raise some money selling corn.
As farmers often do, he decided to take out a crop loan secured by the land for his seed and the cost of renovating his equipment. Of course, he had to have the field resurveyed. Then the trouble began.
It seems his neighbor, whom he did not like very much, had fenced in his field many years before and accidentally built the fence 10 feet over on his neighbor's land. He made a mistaken measurement.
So our new farmer demanded he tear down the fence and stop planting crops on that strip. No results there so the lawyers were called in. That is where my friend's dad found out about the legal principle of estoppel. You do not have a legally enforceable claim if you tacitly allow someone to encroach on your land for years and say nothing. The case was not a slam dunk.
Counter arguments were filed and the lawsuit dragged on and on. The two men yelled at each other across the fence and saluted each other with extended middle fingers whenever they met on the road.
That summer my girlfriend got a sad call from her mother. Her father's diabetes had worsened step by step during the whole feud to the point he could not control it even with adding insulin. And he died in his early 60s from a stroke. About 6 months later, the neighbor died of a heart attack. Chronic anger will kill you.
BTW, it took the widows a couple of days to work out a compromise after the second husband died. They tore down the fence, hired a man to work the fields and split the profits according to their percentage of the acreage.
Tom
Tom Shafer MD (3661)
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