Shabbat

Trauma and Healing. Humility and Vulnerability.

One of the people most dear to my heart, Rabbi Susan Talve of Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis, wrote once that Shabbat is “the one day (Jews) do not mourn.”

“Shabbat brings the upper and lower worlds so close that we cannot help but be reminded about the just and compassionate world we are reaching for. Shabbat brings the worlds so close that we taste a time when our faith that the good in us will win is renewed”¹

She wrote these words when the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision that robbed women and transgender people of reproductive freedom fell on the Sabbath. These words rang in my ears last Friday night as I drove to Leo Baeck Temple in West LA.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trauma recently. I just finished a powerful book that Mark Chase recommended to me: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Healing Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem. He writes this:

“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”

“But it isn’t culture. It’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time.”

Most of my life, I thought of trauma as a really bad single event … or series of events. You know, like when I did my stint as a hospital chaplain in a “trauma center” … where they brought people with gunshot wounds and who had been in severe car accidents.

I’m learning to think much more broadly of trauma … not just in terms of longer-term environments to which we are exposed but something that looks and feels like culture because it is passed down from generation to generation.

When Menakem talks about “traumatic retention without context,” he means that we have been carrying this trauma in our bodies for so long that it feels just the way things are … and we are not conscious of where it comes from.

Yes, and … trauma touches trauma … so when something traumatic happens to us (or even if we are secondarily traumatized by watching or even reading about other people’s trauma … it gets us spinning in our own.

A couple things happen when we are spinning in our own trauma.

One is that our nervous system gets activated. We are on high alert. Brain chemicals like cortisol trigger a fight/flight/freeze response.

During that response, our brains focus on self-preservation, and we are less able to take in new information … including information about how others are feeling.

Simply put, when we are in pain, it’s very naturally hard for us to even recognize that other people are in pain … much less be truly empathetic to it. And when we are able to, way too often it is because we are discounting our own pain with guilt and shame (“I shouldn’t feel bad … other people have it far worse than me”), which doesn’t lead to true empathy but instead denies our own wounds that need healing even as we might be trying to heal another’s.

Except, at least in my experience, healing doesn’t come only from sitting in the corner and licking my wounds. Yes … I have a great therapist and spiritual director who help me in my healing … and I am learning that the goal … even the joy … is being able to be in my feelings, own them, affirm them, learn from them … while I am sitting with others in their feelings.

What I am learning is that the more I am able to do that, the more healing happens for everyone … and even more than that, the more I stop seeing people as “others” or “enemies.”

Which brings me back to my trip to Leo Baeck Temple a week ago last night.

Since the massacre of October 7, one of the most important people in my life has been Rabbi Ken Chasen of LBT. First of all, as I have gone through some challenging times in my own life vocationally, he has been a faithful friend and confidant.

And … even more than that, as for the past 11 months I have tried to be a ceaseless campaigner for a ceasefire and release of all hostages … recognizing not only the hostages taken by Hamas on that day but the thousands of Palestinians who are unjustly held in Israeli prisons … Ken has invited me into his life and the life of LBT, a congregation that even as Ken has been a lifelong proponent of justice for Palestinians, has “LBT Stands With Israel” blazoned across its website.

Because of that, even as I experience my own pain, even as I sit with the searing pain and grief of Palestinian friends who have lost family members by the tens and even into the hundreds, because of Ken and the hospitality of LBT to one like me who has been so vocal in my criticism of the Israeli government, I have been given the opportunity to sit with them in their pain as well, even as I deeply disagree with their support for the Israeli government.

That’s why I was driving to LBT last Friday night.  Because Ken had welcomed my request to join them for Shabbat that evening … to be with them after the long hard week after the execution of six hostages by Hamas.

I want to stop here and say that I am not saying this is something everyone should do. One of the first things I learned from the women of Thistle Farms is that healing from trauma comes on the timetable of those traumatized. You don’t ask women who have been raped and beaten to go sit at table with the men who have done this … or even people who support those who have done this … or even have done nothing to stop those who have done this.

I would never tell my friend who has had more than 60 family members murdered by the IDF in Gaza that she needs to go experience the trauma of the Jewish people. When your trauma is so deep and so personal, if that ever happens it has to be because you decide you want to do it … and it is extraordinary. And … you have to be at a point in your own healing that you are able to handle pain that is more than the overwhelming pain you are already feeling.

When this happens, it is extraordinary, beautiful and transformational – like the work of Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos with NewGround.

For me, my trauma around Palestine is mostly secondary … so I am able to go sit in synagogue and not be activated in any significant way. I have the privilege to make that choice because it is not my people who are being massacred.

(As an aside, to my Palestinian friends who might be reading this, I hope you do not feel betrayed by my going to LBT … and I understand if you do .. and I hope you would grant me the grace for us to have further conversation about it.)

Back to the words of Rabbi Talve that were bouncing around in my brain.

What would I find when I walked into Leo Baeck Temple?

How would I be received?

Would there be mourning?

Would there be dancing?

Would this be a community that would be able to be honest with themselves and each other about how they were feeling? About the complexity?

Or would they be just trying to pretend it was all OK and “business as usual?” (whatever the hell that is!)

Some of what I found, though it impacted me deeply, did not surprise me. Because it is who I have learned Ken and the LBT congregation are.

I was greeted so warmly. Ken pointed me out to the congregation and thanked me for being there and made a point of saying why I was there.

Though I have been very public in my support of Palestine and against Israel, I was greeted as a friend and brother by the congregation. It was truly a living out of the Torah portion of grace and hospitality to “the alien among us.”

Ken not only named the pain and tragedy of the six hostages who had been killed, but put it in the context of the incredible pain and tragedy of the ongoing massacre in Gaza. At a moment where trauma can lead us into that fight/flight/freeze place of passing the trauma on to others or running away from the pain … Ken beautifully led the congregation to a place of acknowledging and feeling both their own pain and doing it in the context of the whole world crying out in deep lament.

All of that impacted me deeply, and frankly, all of it I expected … knowing who Ken and LBT are.

Here is what I didn’t expect.

As soon as the first song began, Ken on his guitar and this wonderful diverse band behind him leading us in a joyful Hebrew tune … tears began pouring down my cheeks.

It was then I realized this was the first time I had been in a worshiping community since my last Sunday at All Saints Church two months before. It had been too painful to even think about going into a church … and frankly, it still is.

I have been in groups … even groups of dear friends. But I hadn’t been in a group of people coming together just because they needed to gather in the name of love. Gather to affirm together their commitment to an ancient faith that the G-d who is love is more powerful than any other force in the universe. And that that love was with them, for them … and for everyone with no exceptions.

And … there was more.

There was a feeling in that room. A feeling that gave me a palpable sense of the presence of the holy. Of the presence of the power of that love. 

I noticed it and even as the tears were flowing I stopped to dive into it and try to figure out what it was. And it was two things.

Humility.

Vulnerability.

Maybe that’s really just one thing, I don’t know. But what I realized created the safety for the healing tears to flow was that this was a community that was willing to be humble and vulnerable.

To acknowledge that they had been wounded and traumatized … and that at this moment the pain was too much and it was driving them to their knees … literally to the humus, to the ground. Their pain was bringing them low. 

And in that moment when they were driven to their knees, they chose not to curl up in a ball but to extend their arms out in love at the same time. 

Humility and vulnerability are the gateway through which we allow the holy to enter into our lives. 

Even though we were a wealthy group of people in an incredibly well-resourced synagogue in West LA – with all the power that comes with those things, in that moment I felt like we were 30 people huddled in a small room singing and weeping humbly and defiantly against an empire that wished to use fear and violence to silence our voices .. and yet we would not be silenced.

As a follower of the revolutionary Jesus, I felt the Christ in that space … even though i was probably the only one in that room who would give that Spirit that name. 

I am telling people that “I am on an indefinite sabbatical from the institutional church” … and indeed I am. I am burned and raw and angry and hurt. I am deeply grateful for my many friends who are able to live in institutional church spaces and work to lead them into humility and vulnerability … away from the church triumphant of those ABC’s of empire – Attendance, Buildings and Cash … and into the glorious joy of not counting so much the number of butts in the seats and money in the plate but the tears on the faces and joy in the hearts. 

I am burned and raw and angry and hurt. And I am learning that when we are willing to be courageous enough to be honest with ourselves and with each other … so is everyone else. 

And I’m learning that if we can meet in that space … even for an hour … maybe even for a minute … the Holy Healing Spirit, whatever you call them, that has been there all along … we become present to Them in a way that lets us begin to recognize the trauma we have, understand its context, begin to let it go … and perhaps most importantly, realize there are alternatives to continuing the cycle by visiting it once again on each other.

From the Mourner’s Kaddish

I don’t believe Rabbi Talve was wrong when she wrote that Shabbat is “the one day (Jews) do not mourn.” 

Clearly, there is mourning on Shabbat … we read the Kaddish and read the names of those who have died. 

And the trauma of grief is not only named it is put in its context. And that context is that “just and compassionate world we are reaching for.” A context that for me that night was not “don’t worry, be happy” … but singing in joy with tears of pain running down my face. 

It is Shabbat once again. And I am grieving. And I am singing. And I am remembering. 

And I am tasting. I am tasting a time when our faith that the good in us will win is renewed.

Alleluia. Amen.

Mike’s Terminal Playlist

Several years ago, I presided at the funeral of Geno Gregg, a beautiful human being who … as Norm MacDonald put it … fought pancreatic cancer “to a draw”. Geno loved music (we sang “We Will Rock You” as the retiring processional, with everyone stamping their feet and clapping their hands).

It got me thinking about the role music played in my life … and what music I would want on the playlist for the reception after my memorial service.

So I started something I call my “Terminal Playlist” - music that together sums up my life. The criteria for inclusion are two:

1. I have to really like the song.

2. It has to connect with a story or a person or something about my life.

I listen to this playlist all the time. Sometimes I add to it. Sometimes I take stuff off.

As a part of “telling the whole story” about me, every now and then I’ll share a song from it and tell you the story behind it. I’ll start of with this one … which is one of my big go-to’s when I need a big dose of joy.

When I was in high school, there were three sisters — Edina, Ileska and Andrea Hall … who lived a few blocks away from me. I mostly knew them through church stuff. As much as anyone I knew, they embodied joy for me … and they continually reminded me to be joyful, too.

They would leave a gift on my doorstep on St. Nicholas Day (chocolate because I’d been good, a stick because I’d been bad, and a charcoal brickette … “a lump of coal to warm your heart.”). Edina and I once had the idea to invite a bunch of friends to a “formal party” and told everyone that they had to get dressed up in their best clothes … then we took everyone to the dollar theatre and to a burger place that had an Elvis impersonator.

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) … all laughs. We have cried together. We have raged together. But I still don’t know anyone who personifies the joy of dancing and singing in my life more than them. I’m pretty sure I never would have played music and danced in church if I had never met them.

Anyway, “Pop Goes the World” was a song I think it was Edina introduced me to. And every time I hear it, it makes me want to dance and sing. I hope it does the same for you.

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1. https://accessmo.today/news-%2B-events/f/reflecting-on-the-dobbs-decision-jews-do-not-mourn-on-shabbat