I recently wrote a personal “book review” as part of my outreach efforts for my congregation’s April 24-25 Shabbaton with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. I said:
When I was growing up, my parents’ marriage was fraught, in part because of their polar opposite relationships to fear. My mother was afraid of everything, it seemed, from germs, to alfalfa sprouts, to driving, to falling construction cranes. My father belittled her fearfulness, and from this I learned there was nothing to fear but showing you were afraid.
It wasn’t until I was nearly thirty that I realized these were, on some level, reactions to antisemitism and the Holocaust. My mother’s refusal to make costumes or let me and my siblings go trick-or-treating went beyond her fears of sewing and of poisoned candy. When my parents were children in Buffalo in the 1940s, gentile kids in masks were to be avoided. While my grandparents all came to the U.S. well before the Shoah, my father’s father lost a brother, sister-in-law, and their children who never emigrated from Poland, and for many years my father and his sister shared their bedrooms with a pair of teenage survivors their family took in. None of this was discussed in my family until years later when my aunt, a psychotherapist, told us these stories.
The importance of doing this kind of archaeology was affirmed for me reading Rabbi Tirzah Firestone’s book Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma. In it Rabbi Firestone shares stories from her own family, as well as those of people she knows from her research and her work as a therapist and rabbi. Escape from Nazis, loss of children to suicide bombers or Israeli military accidents, secrets long kept about loved ones left behind, and the “moral injury” of serving in the IDF in the occupied territories—while these stories are not pleasant to hear, they do reveal much about the Jewish people’s individual and collective trauma. And as Rabbi Tirzah says, witnessing the wounds is an important part of healing them.
Wounds into Wisdom also includes stories of hope and offers seven principles for Jewish cultural healing: facing the loss; harnessing the power of pain; finding community; resisting the urge to fear, blame, and dehumanize others; disidentifying from victimhood; redefining chosenness; and taking action. Throughout her work, Rabbi Tirzah draws on the wisdom and strength in Jewish culture and Jewish Renewal.
I feel very fortunate that many in my family have taken these kinds of lessons to heart. This year for Passover, we followed Rabbi Tirzah’s lead in calling our gathering an “Un-Seder.” “Seder” means “order,” and things in the world are not in any semblance of order. We did not want the kind of “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” celebration that Peter Beinart names as so common in Jewish culture in his recent book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
At our gathering in my brother’s backyard in Berkeley, we named three kinds of plagues. The first was a practice we’ve been doing for years–naming contemporary things we all experience as bad, like cancer, covid, racism, and the epidemic of homelessness. This year our list featured authoritarianism in the US, genocide in Palestine, and climate chaos that allowed us to gather outdoors.
The second type of plague we named were those that lead people to support Trump–poverty, disrespect, fear, etc. This felt like an important example of R. Tirzah’s dictum to not dehumanize others.
Finally, we also identified that, just as the Israelites in the Exodus story generated courage and a sense of their collective power through resistance to Pharaoh’s decrees and the plagues God visited upon the Egyptians, we, too have been generating collective power through marches, boycotts, voting, mutual aid, community defense, and a plague of liberal lawyers on their house!
Before “Dayenu,” I read the famous quote from Rabbi Tarfon, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” Instead of singing the traditional verses, I invited people to share what actions, large or small, we’ve been taking to resist our modern day Pharaoh. In response to each person’s sharing, we all said, “Dayenu,” to affirm: What you are doing is enough for you, enough for us.
My brother Ari, in addition to hosting and leading, shared a moving piece he’d written, “Elijah is Sitting Next to Us.” In it he said we were not going to open the door for the prophet Elijah this year, in solidarity with those who are living in fear of opening their doors, and also because we are Elijah, and we are already here.
Many of us agreed our “un-seder” was one of the best seders we’d ever been to. It gave me hope we can yet turn our wounds into wisdom.
I am very much looking forward to learning and celebrating with Rabbi Tirzah at my congregation’s upcoming Shabbaton, April 24 and 25. The sessions will be on zoom as well as in person, so please register here to join if you’re interested.
Also, I’ll be turning 59 in less than a week. Hopefully I’m gaining teensy bits of wisdom on this journey. I’m honored to have been a guest on a recent episode of a wisdom-seeking podcast. The conversation between me and Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu (a brilliant kindred spirit) is about the relationship between Time, Liberation, Creativity, and Beauty.
If you feel moved to honor my birthday milestone, and have a bit of cash to spare, I invite you to contribute to the Community Defense fund of Voces de la Frontera, Wisconsin’s leading grassroots immigrant & workers’ rights organization. If you donate at this link you can help us top off our $80,000 “Raising our VOCES” campaign.