Rabbi Elai said: In three matters a person’s true character is ascertained; in his cup, i.e., his behavior when he drinks; in his pocket, i.e., his conduct in his financial dealings with other people; and in his anger. And some say: A person also reveals his real nature in his laughter.

(25) On the third day, when they were in pain, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons, brothers of Dinah, took each his sword, came upon the city unmolested, and slew all the males. (26) They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword, took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went away. (27) The other sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered the town, because their sister had been defiled. (28) They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys, all that was inside the town and outside; (29) all their wealth, all their children, and their wives, all that was in the houses, they took as captives and booty. (30) Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me, making me odious among the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my men are few in number, so that if they unite against me and attack me, I and my house will be destroyed.” (31) But they answered, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?”

(5)Simeon and Levi are a pair;Their weapons are tools of lawlessness.(6)Let not my person be included in their council,Let not my being be counted in their assembly.For when angry they slay a man, And when pleased they maim an ox. (7)Cursed be their anger so fierce,And their wrath so relentless.I will divide them in Jacob,Scatter them in Israel.

(7) GOD spoke to Moses, “Hurry down, for your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have acted basely. (8) They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I enjoined upon them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’” (9) GOD further said to Moses, “I see that this is a stiffnecked people. (10) Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation.” (11) But Moses implored the ETERNAL his God, saying, “Let not Your anger, O ETERNAL One, blaze forth against Your people, whom You delivered from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand. (12) Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.’ Turn from Your blazing anger, and renounce the plan to punish Your people. (13) Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, how You swore to them by Your Self and said to them: I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and I will give to your offspring this whole land of which I spoke, to possess forever.” (14) And GOD renounced the punishment planned for the people. (15) Thereupon Moses turned and went down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, tablets inscribed on both their surfaces: they were inscribed on the one side and on the other. (16) The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, incised upon the tablets. (17) When Joshua heard the sound of the people in its boisterousness, he said to Moses, “There is a cry of war in the camp.” (18) But he answered,
“It is not the sound of the tune of triumph,Or the sound of the tune of defeat;It is the sound of song that I hear!”(19) As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became enraged; and he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

(26) Moses stood up in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for GOD, come here!” And all the men of Levi rallied to him. (27) He said to them, “Thus says the ETERNAL, the God of Israel: Each of you put sword on thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay sibling, neighbor, and kin.” (28) The men of Levi did as Moses had bidden; and some three thousand of the people fell that day.

(7) and GOD spoke to Moses, saying, (8) “You and your brother Aaron take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. Thus you shall produce water for them from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their livestock.” (9) Moses took the rod from before GOD, as he had been commanded. (10) Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation in front of the rock; and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?” (11) And Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod. Out came copious water, and the community and their livestock drank. (12) But GOD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.” (13) Those are the waters of Meribah—meaning that the Israelites quarrelled with GOD—whose sanctity was affirmed through them.

With regard to the incident with Hillel, Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: Anyone who acts haughtily, if he is a Torah scholar, his wisdom departs from him; and if he is a prophet, his prophecy departs from him. The Gemara explains: That if he is a Torah scholar, his wisdom departs from him is learned from Hillel, for the Master said in this baraita: Hillel began to rebuke them with words. Because he acted haughtily, he ended up saying to them: I once heard this halakha, but I have forgotten it, as he was punished for his haughtiness by forgetting the law. That if he is a prophet his prophecy departs from him is learned from Deborah, as it is written: “The villagers ceased, they ceased in Israel, until I, Deborah, arose, I arose a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7). For these words of self-glorification, Deborah was punished with a loss of her prophetic spirit, as it is written later that it was necessary to say to her: “Awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake, utter a song” (Judges 5:12), because her prophecy had left her.

§ Apropos the verse “There the wicked cease from troubling,” the Gemara cites a related statement: Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani said that Rabbi Yonatan said: Anyone who gets angry, all kinds of Gehenna rule over him, because anger causes him to transgress all kinds of severe sins, as it is stated: “Therefore remove vexation from your heart and put away evil from your flesh” (Ecclesiastes 11:10), and the evil mentioned is nothing other than Gehenna, as it is stated: “The Lord has made everything for His own purpose and even the wicked for the day of evil” (Proverbs 16:4), which is interpreted to mean that ultimately the day of the evildoer in Gehenna will arrive.

The Gemara asks: Say that you heard that Rabbi Yehuda rules that one is liable for performing a labor not needed for its own sake in the case of a constructive act; did you hear him deem one liable in the case of a destructive act? Rabbi Avin said: This case, where one rends his garment in anger, is also constructive, because in doing so he assuages his anger. Rending his garment calms him; therefore, it can be said that he derives benefit from the act of rending, and it is consequently a constructive act. The Gemara asks: And is it at all permitted to tear in that manner? Wasn’t it taught in a baraita that Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says in the name of Ḥilfa bar Agra, who said in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Nuri: One who rends his garments in his anger, or who breaks his vessels in his anger, or who scatters his money in his anger, should be like an idol worshipper in your eyes, as that is the craft of the evil inclination. Today it tells him do this, and tomorrow it tells him do that, until eventually, when he no longer controls himself, it tells him worship idols and he goes and worships idols. Rabbi Avin said: What verse alludes to this? “There shall not be a strange god within you, and you shall not bow to a foreign god” (Psalms 81:10). What is the strange god that is within a person’s body? Say that it is the evil inclination. One may not rend his garments in anger, because in doing so he is deriving pleasure from satisfying the evil inclination.

(1)A gentle response allays wrath;A harsh word provokes anger.

(9) David’s young men went and delivered this message to Nabal in the name of David. When they stopped speaking, (10) Nabal answered David’s servants, “Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse? There are many slaves nowadays who run away from their masters. (11) Should I then take my bread and my water, and the meat that I slaughtered for my own shearers, and give them to men who come from I don’t know where?” (12) Thereupon David’s young men retraced their steps; and when they got back, they told him all this. (13) And David said to his men, “Gird on your swords.” Each girded on his sword; David too girded on his sword. About four hundred of them went up after David, while two hundred remained with the baggage. (14) One of [Nabal’s] young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, that David had sent messengers from the wilderness to greet their master, and that he had spurned them. (15) “But those involved had been very friendly to us; we were not harmed, nor did we miss anything all the time that we went about with them while we were in the open. (16) They were a wall about us both by night and by day all the time that we were with them tending the flocks. (17) So consider carefully what you should do, for harm threatens our master and all his household; he is such a nasty fellow that no one can speak to him.” (18) Abigail quickly got together two hundred loaves of bread, two jars of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs of parched corn, one hundred cakes of raisin, and two hundred cakes of pressed figs. She loaded them on donkeys, (19) and she told her young men, “Go on ahead of me, and I’ll follow you”; but she did not tell her husband Nabal. (20) She was riding on the donkey and going down a trail on the hill, when David and his men appeared, coming down toward her; and she met them.— (21) Now David had been saying, “It was all for nothing that I protected that fellow’s possessions in the wilderness, and that nothing he owned is missing. He has paid me back evil for good. (22) May God do thus and more to the enemies of David if, by the light of morning, I leave a single male of his.”— (23) When Abigail saw David, she quickly dismounted from the donkey and threw herself face down before David, bowing to the ground. (24) Prostrate at his feet, she pleaded, “Let the blame be mine, my lord, but let your handmaid speak to you; hear your maid’s plea. (25) Please, my lord, pay no attention to that wretched man—to Nabal. For he is just what his name says: His name means ‘boor’ and he is a boor.
“Your handmaid did not see the young men whom my lord sent.

(4) The straight path: This [involves discovering] the midpoint temperament of each and every trait that man possesses [within his personality.] This refers to the trait which is equidistant from either of the extremes, without being close to either of them.
Therefore, the early Sages instructed a man to evaluate his traits, to calculate them and to direct them along the middle path, so that he will be sound {of body}.
For example: he should not be wrathful, easily angered; nor be like the dead, without feeling, rather he should [adopt] an intermediate course; i.e., he should display anger only when the matter is serious enough to warrant it, in order to prevent the matter from recurring. Similarly, he should not desire anything other than that which the body needs and cannot exist without, as [Proverbs 13:25] states: "The righteous man eats to satisfy his soul."
Also, he shall not labor in his business except to gain what he needs for immediate use, as [Psalms 37:16] states: "A little is good for the righteous man."
He should not be overly stingy nor spread his money about, but he should give charity according to his capacity and lend to the needy as is fitting. He should not be overly elated and laugh [excessively], nor be sad and depressed in spirit. Rather, he should be quietly happy at all times, with a friendly countenance. The same applies with regard to his other traits.
This path is the path of the wise. Every man whose traits are intermediate and equally balanced can be called a "wise man."

(3) There are temperaments with regard to which a man is forbidden to follow the middle path. He should move away from one extreme and adopt the other.
Among these is arrogance. If a man is only humble, he is not following a good path. Rather, he must hold himself lowly and his spirit very unassuming. That is why Numbers 12:3 describes our teacher Moses as "very humble" and not simply "humble". Therefore, our Sages directed: "Hold oneself very, very lowly." Also, they declared: "Whoever is arrogant is as if he denied God's presence, as implied by Deuteronomy 8:14: 'And your heart will be haughty and you will forget God, your Lord.' Furthermore, they said: "Whoever is arrogant should be placed under a ban of ostracism. This applies even if he is only somewhat arrogant."
Anger is also an exceptionally bad quality. It is fitting and proper that one move away from it and adopt the opposite extreme. He should school himself not to become angry even when it is fitting to be angry. If he should wish to arouse fear in his children and household - or within the community, if he is a communal leader - and wishes to be angry at them to motivate them to return to the proper path, he should present an angry front to them to punish them, but he should be inwardly calm. He should be like one who acts out the part of an angry man in his wrath, but is not himself angry.
The early Sages said: Anyone who becomes angry is like one who worships idols. They also said: Whenever one becomes angry, if he is a wise man, his wisdom leaves him; if he is a prophet, his prophecy leaves him. The life of the irate is not true life.
Therefore, they have directed that one distance himself from anger and accustom himself not to feel any reaction, even to things which provoke anger. This is the good path.
This is the way of the righteous: They accept humiliation, but do not humiliate others; they listen when they are shamed, but they do not answer; they do this with love and are joyous in their sufferings. Of them, Judges 5:31 states: "And those who love Him are like the sun when it comes out in its strength."