When I was in my early twenties, my childhood best friend and I toured Europe for two and a half weeks. Two young, single, good-looking American guys doing what young, single, good-looking American guys do: drinking an occasional beer while touring museums and attending musical performances—at the Vienna Opera House, at the Prague May Festival. Exactly what you have come to expect from your avuncular host here on Soulful Jewish Living.
Then, as now, I wanted to connect with the Jewish community wherever I went. We found Jewish cemeteries, toured old Jewish areas, and accepted the invitations of strangers to join them for Shabbat dinner. Also par for the course.
But there was one particularly Jew-y moment of that trip that I still remember, but not the sweet kind. It was actually pretty jarring. We were taking an overnight train from Prague to Vienna. This was in the days before the Czech Republic was a member of the EU, and we had to show passports when the train entered Austria. So there I was, a Jewish guy on a dark train in the middle night, awakened by a uniformed officer speaking to me in German. Me, a Jew. On a train. A guy in a uniform. Speaking German.
While my family by and large escaped the Shoah, I can still remember the momentary terror that seized me. For a moment, I was triggered—emotionally agitated, seized by some cultural memory that wasn’t even my own, and yet had lodged itself inside me. It took a few minutes for me to get my bearings, calm down, and remind myself that this was not a nightmare Jewish fantasy.
Why am I telling you this story? Because this is the second episode in a miniseries devoted to understanding antisemitism and using Jewish mindfulness tools to respond to it in a healthier way. In our previous episode, I gave a general introduction to the idea of intergenerational Jewish trauma, and I invited you to try to notice where it might show up in your own life—whether or not your family of origin was traumatized as Jews.
This week, I want to take the next step and talk about a word that’s gotten a lot of press in recent years, and that’s central to the story I just told. That word is ‘triggered.’
The dictionary gives me three definitions of “triggered,” and I think it’s worth mentioning each. The first is, “started, set in motion, or released by a specified thing or in a specified way:” This is the kind of triggering we might mean when we say, “the motion-sensor camera gets triggered when someone walks in front of it.”
The second definition is related to the actual idea of a trigger, like on a gun: “fired or exploded by pulling a trigger or releasing a triggering device.”
Then we come to the third definition: “having an intense negative emotional reaction to something, usually something connected with past trauma or a bad experience.” This is the kind of triggering people mean when they talk about trigger warnings, and it was the kind of triggering I seem to have experienced that night on the train in Austria.
What all of these definitions have in common is that the reaction is automatic. That is, there’s no time between the stimulus and the response. Walk in front of the motion sensor and it activates the camera. Pull the trigger on the gun and it fires. Experience the guy in uniform asking for your papers in German on the train in the middle of the night and you—well, at least, I—feel overwhelmed by fearful emotions I can’t control.
Now, I don’t really want to have a debate at this moment about trigger warnings or whether college classrooms are full of snowflakes. I think that’s a bit of a dodge from what we’re really talking about here. The fact is that these emotional reactions are real—and people of all kinds of backgrounds and political persuasions experience them. They are indeed triggered within us by external events, and when that triggering happens we can wind up overwhelmed by our emotions. And that, in turn, can make us reactive—unable to choose a mindful response, and often behaving in ways that, if we could do any better, we would, but we can’t.
This leads us to our practice. In our next episode we’re going to drill down some more on strategies for creating more space between stimulus and response. For this week, I’d like to invite you to practice with noticing or reflecting on when you become triggered—particularly with regard to antisemitism. As always, if this becomes too hard, you are always free to press the stop button. And, again as always, if you find yourself feeling debilitated, please, please seek the support of a mental health professional.
Allow yourself some time and space, either quietly in a meditative zone, or perhaps on a walk or while you’re journaling.
Allow your breathing to slow down. Allow your mind to settle. And when you’re ready, gently try to feel and notice if there’s moment that comes up for you when you’ve felt emotionally triggered as a Jew. We’re not talking about a trauma you’ve suffered, but a time when something happened and the memory of a trauma or negative experience was activated.
See if you can mentally stand at a distance from the memory, like you’re observing it from an airport control tower or a theater balcony.
All you’re doing here is just taking an inventory—you’re noticing that this thing happened. You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re not making any judgments about yourself. If anything, you can offer yourself some compassion: “I’m so sorry you felt that way. That must have hurt.”
And now, try to notice if, on perhaps a lower level, this kind of triggering might have happened another time—not, perhaps, so serious, but maybe when you saw a post on social media and felt a surge of rage, or read a headline that triggered some less than mindful response. Again, just stand on that balcony and notice it.
Like last week, the goal of this practice is simply to start noticing how this kind of triggering occurs, how it operates within us. Because, for many of us, it happens more often than we might be aware of. And if we can notice it a little bit more, that will set us up to be able to disrupt the process—which we’ll talk about next week.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.