Self-restraint

Self-restraint is the central moral principle in Michel Sommo’s letter to Boaz Brandstetter, where strength is measured not by the capacity to strike but by the ability to govern that capacity. Sommo presents disciplined conduct as both a Jewish religious obligation and a practical answer to humiliation and adversity. His argument is severe, personal, and finally compassionate: Boaz must learn not to make other people suffer, even as Sommo insists that he himself has learned to endure suffering without answering it with violence.

Meaning and moral standard

Sommo defines strength as self-command. Physical power, in his account, has little moral value by itself; its proper test is whether its possessor can master anger and other base impulses. He contrasts that discipline with the ease of using force, arguing that breaking something or striking someone requires no special strength. What matters is continuing along a chosen, morally straight course while life imposes setbacks. Self-restraint is therefore active rather than merely passive: it entails controlling one’s response, learning from adversity, and improving one’s conduct.

The principle also supplies Sommo’s interpretation of Jewish identity. He presents self-mastery as the core of the Torah and connects it to enduring hardship, accepting what he calls fate’s just decrees, and returning to an ancient moral path. This religious framing makes restraint more than a technique for avoiding punishment. It is a standard by which a person’s character and belonging are judged. Sommo’s rebuke of Boaz is consequently not limited to a workplace dispute; he treats the young man’s violence as a failure of moral discipline and of the obligations he associates with being Jewish.

The confrontation with violence

The immediate occasion for the letter is Boaz’s attack on Abram Abudarham, the older man who had employed him. Sommo describes the incident as a disproportionate response to a slight: after Abudarham kicked Boaz for insolence, Boaz struck back with a crate. Sommo emphasizes that Abudarham had taken Boaz on despite his police records, and that Inspector Almaliah had helped close a further case. The episode thus becomes, in Sommo’s telling, a betrayal of a benefactor and of several people who had tried to help Boaz—not simply a quarrel between two men.

Sommo also traces the violence to Boaz’s sense of exceptional status. He accuses him of imagining himself a prince, entitled to act above ordinary rules, and sets that imagined nobility against the humility demanded by self-restraint. Boaz’s physical size and strength, which might seem to confirm his exceptionalism, instead increase his responsibility to control himself. Sommo’s moral distinction is pointed: genuine strength consists in mastering one’s impulses, while using force against another person displays no comparable discipline.

Endurance and the refusal to inflict suffering

Sommo turns the reprimand into a personal example. He recalls suffering in Algeria as a Jew and later in Paris, where he says he was treated as an Arab by Jews and as a pied-noir by the French. He also refers to continuing difficulties in Israel tied to his beliefs, appearance, and origins. These experiences are not presented as proof that suffering is harmless; rather, they support his claim that receiving hardship does not justify passing it on. He says that even a kick from a kind person such as Abudarham would, by comparison, be something he could accept. His account makes endurance the practice through which restraint is tested.

That ethic becomes most explicit in Sommo’s opposition between suffering endured and suffering caused. He argues that receiving many sufferings is preferable to causing even one. To make this a claim about conduct rather than an abstract ideal, he points Boaz toward people who could judge his character: Boaz’s mother, Abudarham, and Janine Fuchs, who had known Sommo in Paris. Sommo acknowledges that he may have moral failings of his own, but maintains that deliberately causing suffering is not among them. In contrast, he accuses Boaz of beginning to follow his biological father’s path of arrogance, cruelty, and harm to others.

Humiliation, money, and compassion

Sommo’s own restraint is also measured by his account of accepting money from Boaz’s father. He acknowledges the humiliation involved, but presents acceptance as an alternative to killing the man and as an attempt to help Boaz return to a better course. The act does not erase Sommo’s sense of injury; it demonstrates, in his interpretation, that pride need not dictate retaliation. He makes the overcoming of humiliation itself a source of honor. Self-restraint here governs not only a physical response but also the choice to accept compromised assistance for another person’s sake.

The letter’s severity remains in tension with its purpose. Sommo condemns Boaz, recalls the harm done to his mother, and warns him against becoming like his father, yet he also says that he is praying for Boaz and feels fondness for him. He briefly writes that Boaz may go to Hell, then apologizes for the words and replaces the curse with a prayer that the opposite will happen. This reversal gives the ethic of restraint a formal demonstration: even in anger, Sommo recognizes and corrects his own excess. His appeal is not that Boaz feel no anger or never suffer, but that he refuse to turn either into permission to harm someone else.