27:3 - "A stone is heavy"

כֹּבֶד-אֶבֶן וְנֵטֶל הַחוֹל; וְכַעַס אֱוִיל כָּבֵד מִשְּׁנֵיהֶם
"A stone is heavy and sand is weighty, but the anger of an eveel (fool) is heavier than both of them" (27:3)

Questions:

1. What does it mean to say that anger is heavy?
2. Are "heavy stone" and "weighty sand" just two examples of heavy objects, or is Shlomo ha'Melech trying to bring out a unique element with each one?

Idea:

Anger is the pain we feel when we expect reality to conform to our desires and it doesn't. Ordinarily, Mishlei deals with anger in its most blatant form. When we read the word "anger," we picture someone getting angry. You know, red in the face, yelling, nostrils flaring, etc. But I think the anger in this pasuk is of a more subtle nature, and that once we see the idea Shlomo ha'Melech is getting at, we'll see that this anger is much more prevalent in our lives than the other.

The "heavy stone" and "weighty sand" are mashalim for two types of anger. What is the difference between a stone and sand? A stone is intrinsically heavy, and inherently immovable. Sand, on the other hand, is very light in small quantities, but incredibly heavy in large quantities. So too, there are two types of anger. The "heavy stone," which is intrinsically immovable, is a mashal for anger that comes from trying to control things that you can't control (the weather, traffic, the economy, events in the past, etc.). We typically refer to this type of anger as "frustration." The "weighty sand," which is light in small quantities but heavy in large quantities, is a mashal for the anger that comes from trying to control everything in your life - things which, in and of themselves, are controllable, but are overwhelming to the person who tries to control all of them. We typically refer to this type of anger as "stress."

Based on this explanation, it should be clear that the pasuk is not talking about the stereotypical "explosive anger," but the subtler forms of anger. Both frustration and stress are types of anger which "weigh down" on us, and that is exactly how the pasuk describes them.

According to our pasuk, an eveel's anger is heavier than both types of anger. An eveel is a person who can't tolerate the notion that there is an external reality which doesn't give a damn about his desires and doesn't regard him as the cosmically significant being he feels he is. "Yiras Hashem is the beginning of knowledge, but eveelim hate chochmah and mussar" (1:7). Why does the eveel hate chochmah and mussar? Because chochmah and mussar forces him to confront the fact that they his is not the center of the universe and that he won't always get what he wants. For this reason, the eveel is in a constant state of anger. The unrealistic demands he makes of reality cause him to experience life as a steady stream of frustration and stress. Since he lacks yiras Hashem - the realization of the lawfulness that governs the entire universe, including himself - he will constantly be bombarded with reminders of how little control he really has.

At this point it would behoove us to remember that although an eveel is a certain type of person, it is also a certain psychological trend which is present in all of us in varying degrees. As such, this pasuk is about us, just as much as it is about him.

I still feel like the nature of the eveel's anger needs to be clarified. At first I thought the pasuk was saying that his anger is qualitatively different than the stone-anger and sand-anger, but now I'm leaning towards the simpler interpretation - that his anger differs in degree, not in kind. What do you think? Is Shlomo ha'Melech just defining the two types of anger and saying that the eveel experiences them to a greater degree than normal people due to his anti-Yirah personality, or his he saying something more about the nature of the eveel's anger?