About a year ago I was having coffee with the director of a foundation that has supported our work at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality for a long time. It was a few months after October 7, and I asked her what they were noticing in the communal landscape.. She told me that she was thinking a lot about how much reactivity there seemed to be in our response to antisemitism. There was a lot of military language, like “We combat this,” “We fight that,” or “We stand with Jews” and “We stand against hate.” And while all of that has its place, my friend wondered if, collectively, we weren’t missing some other pieces of the puzzle. She asked me, “Is there anyone who’s taking a more trauma-informed response?”
That conversation got me thinking, and it led to, among other things, this miniseries here on Soulful Jewish Living. Today is going to be the fifth and final episode, and I want to take the opportunity to review what we’ve talked about a little bit and offer one final observation and practice to take with you.
I’ve heard from a lot of people about the very first story I told in this miniseries a few weeks ago—about my wife Natalie and the fact that we don’t have an electric car because, descendant of Holocaust survivors that she is, she wants to know we can drive to Canada at a moment’s notice and not worry about finding a charging station along the way. For a lot of people, that seemed to be very resonant. For others, it was kind of crazy. But the concept we introduced there, of intergenerational Jewish trauma, is an important one. And a critical first step in responding more mindfully to antisemitism is just being aware of that: yes, those feelings are real; no, you’re not meshugge; and, if your spouse isn’t ready for an electric car, get a hybrid.
We spent the next couple of episodes talking about triggers and creating more space between stimulus and response. We all have certain fears and a level of reactivity encoded in us—it’s part of what keeps us alive. But if we are always in a reactive mode and only responding to our fears, then we can wind up in a state of hyperarousal, or hypervigilance. Earlier in this series I quoted Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone, and I want to bring her back to comment on this, because I think it’s really crucial. Dr. Firestone totally agrees that a lot of Jewish history makes hypervigilance totally understandable and justified. Hard agree on that one. But she also points out, and here I quote:
Chronic vigilance… keeps people from seeing themselves or raising their children as truly safe members on this earth. Hyperarousal means being always on edge, on the periphery, vigilant for trouble, and reading signs of disaster on the horizon and in the tea leaves.
Right? You may know someone like this: As a result of suffering they’ve endured, or that their ancestors endured, they become hypervigilant—never feeling safe or at home, always ready for the worst outcome, always seeing the Nazis just around the corner. And that’s just not a healthy way to live. The sweet spot, as it were, is a zone of vigilance but not hypervigilance. We want to be aware of realistic threats to our safety and wellbeing, but, at the same time, not so hyper-aware that we become shell-shocked and frazzled.
Now as far as I’m concerned, the truth is that this is always our spiritual task as human beings. Mindfulness might well be paraphrased as living in that zone of vigilance but not hypervigilance. To give an example, think about driving: We’re all taught to drive defensively. That means we want to be careful and mindful of the risks, we want to keep a healthy distance from other drivers, give ourselves enough time to stop, etc. That’s healthy. But we could also look at every other driver as a possible threat, clutching the wheel with white knuckles, and driving 10 miles an hour on the highway because we’re so scared. Not healthy!
When we’re in that healthy zone, we’re able to be present with what is, but not be a prisoner of it. We’re able to acknowledge our suffering, or our potential suffering, and still choose a path of freedom. I think this is a profoundly Jewish teaching.
Last week we talked about the importance of connecting with positive Jewish narratives—the things we love about being Jewish. For our closing practice in this series I want to do a little Torah study with you, and offer a way of retelling our own Jewish story that might help us stay in the healthy zone of vigilance without crossing over into the danger zone of hypervigilance.
Most of what I’m going to ask you to do here is simply listen—but listen in a mindful way, perhaps seated with your eyes closed, or in another position that allows you to really be attentive, present, and not distracted.
One of the shortest and oldest Jewish narratives we have is a little paragraph that’s part of the traditional Passover Seder. You may be familiar with it. In Hebrew, it starts with the words, V’hi she’amda. In English, it’s usually translated something like this: “It wasn’t only one man—Pharaoh—who rose up to destroy us; rather, in every single generation people rise up to destroy us–but the Holy Blessed One saves us from their hands.”
If this sounds familiar, you’re right. It’s the original, “They tried to kill us, God saved us, let’s eat.” And it is an ancient, ancient text.
Yet if we’re being honest, telling the story this way—it kind of promotes that hypervigilance we talked about. In every generation they rise up to kill us. That may have a lot of truth in it, but what if there’s another way to tell it?
One of the beauties of our tradition is that Torah can be interpreted creatively. That’s what the literature of midrash and commentary is all about. And so I want to offer a reinterpretation of the very same words in Hebrew.
The Hebrew word that we usually translate as “to destroy us” in this paragraph is l’chaloteinu. The root of that word is the word kol, meaning everything. And I think there’s an opening in that word—because we have a tendency to catastrophize, to weave a story that, because something happened once, or twice or even many times, that it’s always going to be like that. It’s always going to be the worst.
But what if we didn’t catastrophize? What if we read that line like this? “It was not only one moment that arose that made us feel that kol, all, was lost–that we would perish. Rather, in every generation, those same forces arise to make us feel that sense of kol, all, is lost.”
Try to feel that for a moment. Those emotional forces of catastrophizing arise so often. But we can recognize them. We can create some separation between them and our minds. And that moment of separating—that’s our moment of liberation. That’s the Exodus, right there. That’s the Holy One freeing us—enabling us to tell a different story, to make a different choice, to not be trapped by our feelings of victimization.
To me, this is how we respond mindfully to antisemitism. Yes, there are people who hate us. Yes, there are real threats. But also, our tradition and our teachings are so beautiful, so powerful, that we can overcome them. Through our own Jewish practices, we can make it so that the fear the haters try to sow in us doesn’t overtake us and we can choose our own mindful, wise, courageous and holy path.
That, to me, is what it means to be a Jew.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.