I love Shakespeare, especially the tragedies. So this August I took a ride to Lenox, MA to Shakespeare & Co and saw their production of Othello.? It was fabulous. For those who might not have familiarity with the play, it takes place in Venice sometime in the 15-1600's when that city had great maritime power and found itself clashing with the Ottoman Turkish empire for control of the Mediterranean Sea. Othello is a successful general who has beaten back the enemies of the Venetians, but he is not Venetian himself. Othello is called a Moor -- from the Greek word for black. His home is northern Africa. He has fallen in love with the fair Desdemona, fair in the sense of beauty as well as skin color, and she with him. Over the protests of her father they marry. On this level the play confronts the intersections between race and sexuality. In the meantime, Othello has chosen Cassio as his lieutenant over Iago, his advisor, and Iago vows revenge, adding a layer of power to the racial and sexual themes. The explosions occur when the fuel, jealousy, is poured over this volatile mix. We soon learn that Iago has another reason for hating Othello: he believes that Othello has slept with his wife. "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/ Hath leap'd into my seat; the thought whereof/ Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards;/ And nothing can or shall content my soul/ Till I am even'd with him, wife for wife,/Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor/ At least into a jealousy so strong That judgment cannot cure." Othello (2.1.315-22)

Iago plays upon Othello's love for Desdemona to convince the general that she is having an affair with Cassio. O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/ It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on; Othello (3.3.189-91) Trifles light as air/ Are to the jealous confirmations strong/ As proofs of holy writ. Othello (3.3.360-2) Othello, in a rage, kills Desdemona, who dies protesting her innocence. When Iago's plot unravels and his own wife exposes him, Othello kills himself. Very dramatic, in the style of ancient Greek tragedies.

When I saw it this summer the play Othello challenged me, as never before, with a puzzle of how Othello, a successful, powerful, attractive man whose wife so clearly loved him, could have been so susceptible to Iago's manipulation by jealousy. How could such a strong character fall to such jealousy? How could it become the controlling factor in his psyche? Othello does not see himself becoming prey to jealousy. "Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw / The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt; / For she had eyes, and chose me" (3.3.187-189) "No, Iago; / I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; / And on the proof, there is no more but this,-- / Away at once with love or jealousy!" (3.3.189-192) Nor does Desdemona: "my noble Moor / Is true of mind and made of no such baseness / As jealous creatures are," (3.2.26-29). So what happened?

I have come to see that jealousy is not a moral failing or a sign of character weakness, as Othello suggests, but a powerful human emotion. Who among us has not experienced the power of jealousy? It can undo even the sturdiest of us. What is jealousy? "Jealousy is an emotion experienced when a person is threatened by the loss of an important relation with another person" (Parrot, 2001, p. 313, as in wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jealousy). "Jealousy is a reaction to a perceived threat--real or imagined--to a valued relationship or to its quality. A nationwide survey of marriage counselors indicates that jealousy is a problem in one third of all couples coming for marital therapy." (Romantic Jealousy by A.M. Pines and C.F. Bowes in www.psychologytoday.com) What role does jealousy and its need for control play in domestic violence? Jealousy unleashes a flood of other emotions, attitudes and dispositions: anger, fear, hostility, sadness, bitterness, humiliation, resentment, possessiveness, hyper-vigilence, suspicion, distrust. Sometimes it becomes abusive: mentally, physically, emotionally. Jealousy is a passion which often outlives the feelings for the beloved which gave rise to it in the first place. As the 17th century French author Rochfoucauld remarked, "Jealousy is always born with love; it does not always die with it."

Now some of us, like Othello, might see ourselves as not susceptible to jealousy. Some of our mates might see us as too together to fall victim to it, as Desdemona thought of Othello. I wonder. For jealousy is born in the fear, real or imagined, of losing someone we love, but not just losing him/her, losing him/her to another person. For jealousy presupposes three: us, the beloved, and a third party that the beloved may be interested in. Jealousy often comes with the fear, not only of loss, but of loss with rejection. It brings with it a lessening of self-esteem, embarrassment, shame, humiliation. Such a loss can be devastating, as many of us well know.

What's the difference between feeling envious and feeling jealous? The play Othello contains them both in Iago, who exemplifies the difference between envy and jealousy. Iago envies Cassio his promotion and hates him for it because Iago believes he himself was entitled to the position of lieutenant. We envy someone who has what we do not have but think we should have. Jealousy is something else again.

Whether we ourselves have ever experienced jealousy, or been the object of another person's jealousy, it can feel like a primal, raw emotion. It seems so integral to the human psyche that we even characterize our god or gods as jealous. The Greek gods come to mind. Hera, queen of the gods, married to Zeus, king of the gods, is portrayed in myth as almost a caricature of the jealous wife. The stories abound of Zeus' lovers and the machinations he goes through in order to hide them from Hera's wrath. One example. Zeus fell in lust with a beautiful woman named Io, whom he turned into a lovely white heifer to protect her from his wife. Then he turned himself into a bull. In these Greek stories, there's something almost pathetic about Hera's jealousy. She is a laughing stock. As if jealousy was a sign of weakness. As if the philandering of the husband was the fault of the shrewish wife. As if Greek women were expected to accept their husbands' lovers with equanimity. Which they were. The goddess Aphrodite was married to the lame blacksmith god Hephaestus. Aphrodite had an affair with Ares, the god of war. Hephaestus was jealous. So he fashioned a virtually invisible, unbreakable net, and caught the two of them in it. Aphrodite and Ares were hung on display, to the great amusement of all the other gods. Clearly there was a double standard operating here. As if jealousy was something only males were entitled to feel. Thus Hera and Hephaestus both reflect a social reality of the culture. Nevertheless, their passionate jealousy reflects an emotional reality of humanity.

But it's not only those long ago stories that contain jealous deities. So do Judaism and Christianity. "One of the most well known assertions of monotheism in Judaism is the Shema," found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, named after the first word in the verse, hear. "The Shema begins: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord" (RSV) Reciting the Shema affirms an individual's faith in one God. Since there is only one God, . . . worship of multiple gods constitutes a form of spiritual infidelity against the one God. The one God responds to this infidelity with jealousy. For example, the second of the ten commandments states: "You shall not make for yourselves a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them, or serve them; for I, the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing stedfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." (Exodus 20:4-6, RSV) This prohibition is later repeated in the verse: "...for you shall worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." (Exodus 34:14, RSV) (Point made in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jealousy in religion)

This God brooks no rejection, no loss of human worship. Does this God fear human rejection? Or is God's jealousy, with its implicit threat of punishment, a way to keep humans in the monotheistic line? This doesn't feel like love. It's very interesting to me that the ancient Hebrews associated the human emotion of jealousy with god. At the same time, and brilliantly, this God addresses the human fear of abandonment that lies at the heart of jealousy. This God will never leave humanity unless humanity leaves God first. This God holds humans to God with jealousy and in doing so relieves humans of the fears that bring on their human jealousy.

Fear of loss and rejection; abandonment; shame; not being loved. Jealousy arises from such deep fears which lie buried in our storage units, which is a way to characterize our unconscious. Buried, but continually arising, like dandelions in the spring on the lawn. Why do human beings, even someone like Othello, fear loss of love, abandonment, rejection? Not only because they hurt so much, but also because abandonment, loss and rejection happen to us all the time and when they do, they feel as though they could threaten our very existence. "How can I live without you? What am I supposed to do without you? My life is over." Our jealousy, with its hyper-vigilance and possessiveness might serve, strangely enough, as an attempt to protect ourselves from emotional annihilation. Now jealousy does not do a good job of protection because jealousy will not keep our loved one beside us and in that sense is a maladaptation, but nevertheless it is a recognition that loss, abandonment and rejection happen and can feel like death.

My mother contracted tuberculosis when I was five and spent the next two years in a sanitarium. That was hard enough, but when she came back home, exhausted and needing rest, the other adults in the household, my grandmother and my father, limited the time I had with her. That's where jealousy came in. All I wanted was my mother -- to be near her, to have her read to me and talk to me. And, as a seven year old, I didn't understand why that couldn't happen as much as I wanted it to. How come she could spend time with my grandmother and my father and not me? I became very jealous. Looking back on it now, I see that I wanted to keep my mother near me so that I wouldn't lose her again. And when it seemed like I was losing her anyway, this time to other family members, it was deeply upsetting to me and gave rise to jealousy, at least until my mother regained her strength. It was an excruciating time.

Jealousy, while not a stranger to most of us, is also not a feeling that either the bearer or the recipient enjoys. I have been the object of another person's jealousy and the feeling of being watched all the time, and distrusted, was very confining and made me want to withdraw from that person. Is there another way for us to deal with jealousy rather than to speak out of that place? Is it possible for us to hold a recognition that we feel jealous without acting it out?

Psychologists A.M. Pines and C.F. Bowes note that jealousy can be the shadow of love. They remind us that "Our parents and other adults involved in raising us influence . . . in two ways: the way they express, or don't express, love toward us; and the way they express, or don't express, love toward each other. . ." They point out that sometimes, when, as adults, we love another person, we choose someone who we unconsciously hope can help us resolve childhood hurts and glitches in the area of loving and being loved. The boy or girl, for instance, whose parent did not express love might have grown up longing for a warm, loving person. Yet that boy/girl might choose someone to love who is as emotionally distant as his/her parent. Why? Pines and Bowes suggest it is not because we need to repeat the pain of childhood, but because only a person who resembles our parent can give us what we didn't get from that parent. It's as if we were trying to heal the wounds of the past in the present. And that does not work very well because the past is past and we cannot change what happened in the past. We cannot change who our parents were and how they behaved in the past, much as we might want to. We can only change our response to what happened in the past. Looking at love through this lens allows us to think about the shadow our love casts when it is threatened. To look at the threat or loss we respond to with jealousy and understand it in a new way.

When we feel jealous there's an opportunity to look beyond the jealousy, at what we fear about loss and rejection. What did Othello fear at the thought that his wife was unfaithful? What was so strong about that fear that he could not believe her repeated protestations of love and innocence? Was it the humiliation of it? Othello was a proud man. Was it taken as a confirmation of his "otherness," of the reality that he would never quite belong, despite his accomplishments? Othello was a black man from Africa in a white, prejudiced European world. What did Iago fear at the thought that his wife was unfaithful with Othello, despite her protests of innocence? Was it the perceived blow to his personhood, the humiliation of being bested by someone he feared sexually and at the same time believed inferior to himself? Jealousy is a primal human response to the fear of loss, abandonment and rejection by someone we love, but jealousy itself will not ultimately address or assuage our fears. It does, however, give us an opportunity to look deeply at them.

It does give us an opportunity to look life in the face and acknowledge that the chances are good that there will be loss, there will be rejection, there will be abandonment. And we might dread them. But you know what? We will somehow live through it. How? Through faith -- faith in ourselves, in others, in whatever we might believe about what is greater than us. I say faith because faith is experiential. Unitarian Universalists begin with personal experience as the heart of religious experience. "The living tradition we share draws from many sources" and the first of these is "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life." Our experience colors our faith. How do we remain open to the losses and rejections of life? By remembering our faith, or in other words, by recalling our experiences. How have we gotten through loss and abandonment in the past? How have the people we respect gotten through loss and abandonment? Can we share our stories? Can we share our wisdom? Can we help each other with this by reaching for connections at a time when other important connections in our lives seem about to be altered or severed? If we believe that life is, indeed composed of a network of connection, then the very weaving of connections themselves will help with the losses, abandonments and rejections of life. Jealousy brings us disconnection. Looking at the fears underneath jealousy can bring a chance for new connection.

Othello is a tragedy, not because he had a character flaw that led him to fall into jealousy, nor because Iago was able to manipulate and deceive him. Othello is a tragedy because Othello himself chose to speak and act out of his jealousy rather than take a closer look at it and discover what was there.

Jealousy is human and almost all of us carry a susceptibility to it because a fear of loss and rejection, with its attendant shame and humiliation, lies at the root of jealousy. On one level, the question is how will we deal with jealousy? Will we speak and act from it? Or will we acknowledge its existence, but delve underneath it to find that which we fear? On a deeper level, the question is how will we deal with our experience of life as a bringer of both joy and loss, love and rejection, hope and abandonment? Will we stop with our fear, or will we also remember our strength and courage, and that of others in similar circumstances? Will we remember that however abandoned we feel, we are not alone, that other connections are out there for us? Will we say Yes to life? Will we say No? The opportunity for choosing is always there for us. May it be so.