Stewarding Our Jewish Trauma
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that once again this week, I cried in public. This past Monday night, I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of Harvard affiliates, to grieve the losses of October 7th. To recognize our ongoing anguish with song, prayer, and words of solace and dedication. Weeping together after a massacre unfortunately is a scene known all too well to Jews throughout the generations. We carry these moments in our bones – in our very DNA – in our literary works, liturgical dirges, and storytelling traditions.
Over the last year, the word “trauma” has arisen again and again. We are traumatized by the loss of precious life in Israel, Lebanon, and Gaza. For many, this grief is deeply personal as many have lost loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. We experience secondary trauma, at one remove but deep in our hearts, with constant notifications from news and whatsapp groups bringing video of the terror into our homes 24 hours a day. Traumatic images have even been weaponized by terrorist groups as a form of psychological torment for Jews around the world. All of this can feel overwhelming and disorienting.
There is a part of our brain, the amygdala, that becomes activated by fear and cannot appreciate time and space. It knows no logic or reason. It isn’t sure what time it is, it doesn’t even know what year it is, what era we and our communities are in.
Words matter. Following a call by an anti-Israel student group for “an escalation on campus,” our community awoke this past Tuesday, October 8th 2024 to see a video of someone pouring red paint over the John Harvard Statue in the Yard and the smashing of windows of University Hall. Both are mere feet from where we sit tonight. To that deep, secret, powerful part of our psyche, the amygdala, the sound and image of the breaking glass repeating over and over on Instagram conjured terrifying images from the past. One student told me that the video evoked in her imagination, Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass” on November 9, 1938 when Nazis systematically vandalized Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes as a precursor to the horror that came next.
Intergenerational trauma flows forward into our generation. We are aware of it at times, but more often, it creeps into our unconscious experience. We are on edge. We don’t know who to trust. We want it to stop. We want to do anything to make it stop. We carry this reality in many ways and as psychologist Bessel van der Kolk observes, “The body keeps the score.”
This is not a sermon about Israel, Gaza, or War. I am here tonight to talk about trauma.
It is incumbent on us Jews this year to learn about trauma and how it affects our Jewish hearts and minds. What methods do we have to mitigate the slings and arrows of our inherited trauma? How can we protect our hearts here and now, when the world and campus often feels like it is aflame? How can we stay human and approach ourselves and the traumatized hearts walking through campus with compassion? It’s a huge task, but as we enter our second year of post October 7 reality, we can and must approach our psyche differently.
Campus rabbis often find themselves a type of spiritual care “jack-of-all-trades,” but this year I have found a new role: a Trauma Steward. I was introduced to a helpful concept called “Trauma Stewardship” first described by the trauma worker and community activist Laura van Dernoot Lipsky who witnessed a wide variety of human suffering in womens’ shelters and correctional facilities. She found herself carrying it home at the end of the day and becoming numb, depersonalized, and distressed. Her book on the topics asks challenging questions: “How do we live and function alongside the reality of past and present suffering?”
We cannot evade or minimize the past. The writer Toni Morrison wrote in her masterwork “Beloved” that there were brutal stories of cultural hardship that must be “passed down” and others that should be “passed on.”
My dear friend, social worker Jo Kent Katz created a set of resources four years ago investigating the common, yet problematic, responses of Jews of Eastern European heritage to this inherited trauma. Many of us Jews are carrying so very much. We move quickly, think quickly, deflect with humor, demand the truth, stay on the move, jump at perceived threats, defend ourselves, focus on mistakes, and judge each other. We assume the worst, distrust, and have a need for control. It almost sounds like the list of sins (al cheits) we recited a few minutes ago.
Many of these responses run along the extremes of thought and behavior: Katz noted that many of us isolate - especially at times of stress, some people completely disavowing Jewish identity or alternatively isolating within their own community. When we feel alienated as the “Other,” we can harshly judge other Jews for “being too Jewish” or conversely, insist on Jewish superiority and refuse to assess people and institutions fairly. These reactions all fall into idealization or devaluation, a mental no-man’s-land where nuance and complexity are erased.
Many of us come from families where we have hidden ourselves to survive. My own family members changed their names and modified their appearance to pass a perceived norm of non-Jewish acceptability. Sometimes they did so simply to survive. Of course my family changed Davimus to Davis upon immigration to pass in America. I’ll tell you a secret, my legal name is not ‘Getzel Davis’, but ‘George Davis’ because my mother wanted to make sure that one day I would be able to get on a train out of 1930s Germany. She thought that the name ‘George Miller Davis’ might save my life. How did she explain this to me? She told me it would be “a good name for a writer,” but she and I both know the truth. When I first became aware of this history, I thought about legally changing my name to reject my family’s trauma history and embrace a future free from those scars. I am a bit ashamed to admit I never did it because deep down, I don’t know that she was wrong about the possibility of that future. I am my mother’s son.
The poet Natasha Tretheway once wrote:
Ask yourself what's in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and
contend with what it means, the folk saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother's body
in the ground but in the chest, or—like you —
you carry her corpse on your back.
Thinking about our emotional inheritance as Jews, my friend Jo Katz writes, “Originally, these behaviors were brilliantly adaptive responses; acute, refined, definitive attempts at securing the survival of our people. But taken out of their original context, patterns Jewish people once relied on for survival can now work against us, degrading our sense of worth and desirability, undermining our sense of agency and connection, dispossessing our sense of belonging, and uprooting our trust in anyone we perceive as “Other.”
Jewish trauma often informs our political affiliations. Some of us are convinced that the answers to Jewish safety lie in building political alliances with other minority groups and abolishing systems of power like the police and nation-states. Others are convinced that what we need is more police, bigger walls, and more powerful friends. The ferocity in how this gets debated in our community and the difficulty of these camps in speaking with each other is a clear indicator that antisemitism has once again gained traction in our nation and our world. This is a harsh, painful reality, but one we must face together.
I first needed to know more about the inheritance of trauma because I wanted to better understand my family of origin. What are the subtle ways that this can play out? Why were my parents on pins and needles during travel days? Why the superstition about accepting compliments, “What a beautiful baby, puh puh puh.” We’ve all heard that sort of thing. Why did women in my family straighten and dye their hair to feel beautiful?
The past year has brought more direct hardships for our students at Harvard. I have counseled students whose mezuzahs have been ripped off their doorposts in the dorms, who have experienced cyberbullying at the hands of fellow Harvard students, and have had to walk to class through vicious anti-Israel chants echoing through the Yard. Just this week we have called the police three times in response to threatening hate mail, posters that seemed to target the Jewish community, and two car break ins in our parking lot. These incidents compound the broken windows and red paint in Harvard yard.
Many students are numb, shut down, and now feel distanced from their Judaism and from the Jewish community because of the ongoing war. Some have mentioned to me that they are too afraid of violence or alienated to sit here with you right now on Yom Kippur.
In times of trauma, folks have four major reactions: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Many of us are familiar with fight and flight. Our first response to adversity is to fight it. If we can't, we often learn to flee. If we can’t fight or flee, we learn to freeze: we feel stuck in place with a sense of dread, stiff, heavy, and cold with a loud slow heartbeat in our ears. When that fails us too, which happens for too many folks undergoing abuse, we ‘fawn’ trying to appease our attackers with over-agreement, and codependency.
Now to be clear, there is nothing wrong with these trauma responses. These are the ways that our people have survived as an oppressed minority for thousands of years. Right-wing or left, observant or secular, each of us in the Harvard Jewish community protect ourselves by deploying these strategies. How we respond has a great deal to do with what we inherited, from our parents, from our grandparents, or and sometimes unnamed ancestors in our past. Whether we freeze or we fight, whether we run to the Jewish community or away from it, each of us in our own way are surviving the best as we can.
As Jewish trauma steward, I have consulted dozens of therapists on the question of lasting consequences. What gives us the best chance to not develop PTSD or leave our time here with lasting trauma? The first is community. You are not alone. You don’t have to feel alone. Seek out your families, friends, Hillel, or other places where you can navigate this challenging time. Attend the vigil, the service, or the meeting. Come to Shabbat dinner or cook your own.
Second: Take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, enjoy the changing foliage, make love, drink enough water (maybe not today), get therapy, or a massage. These are not normal times and this has gone on too long to “white-knuckle” your way through.
Third: Find opportunities to fight or resist in a constructive way. There is strong psychological research that traumatized people experience better long-term outcomes if they can look back on events and know that they had agency. Know that you did something, said something, wrote something, quit something, organized something, or joined something. When you look back on your time here you will be proud of yourself. You will remember the ways you connected with others and supported yourself. In some ways, it doesn’t matter if you are successful, your experience of autonomy limits the emotional scars from this awful time and makes it less likely that you will pass the intergenerational trauma down to and be your descendants.
There is wisdom in discerning the right response to meet the moment. I am not criticizing our ancestors, our families, and even ourselves for needing to flee, freeze or fawn. Fear and anxiety are realities that we all face. The more we can embrace our sense of ourselves as people who act, choose, and decide things, the healthier we will be. Think of it as emotional personal protective equipment, or PPE, that we all became intimately familiar with during the pandemic. We can mindfully approach a traumatizing time with an extra measure of emotional protection.
The three strategies again: seeking community, valuing self care, and finding the opportunities where you can act with agency.
So where does this leave us this Yom Kippur eve?
Every year, I emphasize that Yom Kippur is a powerful spiritual ritual to offer a chance to start again. It’s an open window in time that allows the possibility for things to be different. Just because we have inherited something or developed a habit over the past year, doesn’t mean it forecloses the actions and beliefs of the year to come. Teshuvah, or self transformation, does not erase the past, but instead it gives us the imagination as well as the autonomy to be different in the new year.
The Jewish wisdom text, the Talmud, in Yoma 86b, teaches that when one does teshuvah, and bravely takes an honest look at the places where we missed the mark, our misdeeds are actually turned into merits. Bringing openness and clarity to our difficult emotions and acts decreases the shame we feel about them. Our hardest moments can become our greatest teachers, if we let them. Our family secrets and awkward neuroses can be transformed into part of a longer story, of people who struggled but persevered. We can feel a new sense of lightness, humor, and possibility. As Jewish trauma stewards, we can find new stories to “pass on” to our descendents that will strengthen and uplift.
May this year 5785 be so much better. Psalm 147 reminds us that the same force that created a covenant with our ancestors, “heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.” Oh, G-d, may it be so for this congregation, and for the world at large. May peace come to Israel and the Middle East. May Harvard again become a safe place to be Jewish. But my real prayer for us all tonight, is regardless of what happens outside our individual control, may each and every one of us learn over the course of the year how to better steward our own traumas and those of the people we love.
Shabbat Shalom Shanah Tovah,
