On Healing
Reflections on the importance of healing wounds - peace within ourselves fosters peace outside ourselves.
I’d like to talk a little bit about growing up Jewish in America. I think I can potentially offer something that can help provide additional insight into what we are seeing perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Perhaps, this may also open some pathways for folks who feel conflicted between supporting Israel and being uncomfortable with many of the actions their military is taking. There are aspects of my own experience I just don’t really see reflected in the general dialog around Israel, so I’d like to offer them for anyone who may find them helpful in anyway.
Growing up Reform Jewish in Northeast, Ohio meant that I was immersed in a wonderfully rich community. While I did attend Sunday school and we did attend services and have family gatherings on big holidays, I feel comfortable saying that the Judaism I grew up with was more cultural than religious. Being Jewish was who we were, at our core, and it bound us together with other Jewish people - truly, it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve gotten to have in my life, this feeling of kindred-ness with my people.
Central to our identity is the State of Israel. Given the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust, the State of Israel has shone as this great beacon of hope that we, as a people, have not been forsaken. For so many of us Jewish folk around the world, Israel is the center of our gravity, it is our pride and joy, it is the very evidence to us that there is justice and beauty in this world.
In America, we all want to know what that thing is that makes each of us special. The State of Israel - just the very idea of it - has been this source of specialness, of great pride, for so many of us Jewish people. I can even recall being in elementary school and gaining a certain kind of satisfaction and glee knowing that I had a country of my very own.
Further, America is a country that tends to destroy community. And so, even for those of us that love America, we have all found ourselves more and more isolated, year-after-year. Kids used to go run off to the park after school to play with their friends, and now kids spend their free time in their rooms, on computers, and phones. I could write a whole dissertation on the topic, but I think most of us can simply look at our own lives and see that “things just aren’t how they used to be”.
When Jewish Americans go to Israel for the first time (and we are literally gifted this opportunity), we get to experience something that just isn’t normal in America - the unconditional love of every single person we meet. I cannot diminish this reality in the slightest, from my own experience - when Jewish Americans go to Israel for the first time, we experience a sense of community that simply does not exist in America. And, bathed in this sense of love and community, it only reinforces the holy and sacred place that Israel holds in our hearts. It truly feels like “the promised land”.
Importantly, America is not a country that does healing. We do not reflect on the past - if something goes wrong we brush it under the rug and we move on. America is all about what comes next, the next car, the next fad, the next election, the next big innovation, the next whatever. And we certainly don’t talk about our feelings. If someone says “how are you?”, it turns out that they are simply greeting you out of social decorum, they do not want to hear the actual answer.
Yet, if wounds aren’t healed, they will fester and become infected. You can just look at American politics to understand how this plays out - remember how a few years ago people were taking to the streets to speak against police brutality? What was the resolution of that moment in history? Well…there wasn’t any…more chaos ensued: attention got shifted to Ukraine and to Trump and to Israel and so-on-and-so-forth. In America, we do not take time to reflect and to heal our wounds. And there certainly is no room in the public discourse to discuss the feelings related to such events. After all, if we reflected on it, we might not like what we see.
And, this is the country so many Jewish people came to in the wake of the Holocaust. America has offered the Jewish people a home…but the wounds of Holocaust are some of the most severe wounds humanity is capable of experiencing. Bearing such terrible wounds, what we have truly needed was a great work of healing, but that is not what America offers.
In order to live with a terrible wound, one must either heal or must find something that can make up for that pain. The State of Israel has been that something for so many Jewish people. I cannot understate how wonderful it feels, as a Jewish person, to know that we have Israel. And so, instead of being able to reflect on the past and come to terms with it, we have instead been offered a sort of paradise to call our own. When we look at the past we say, “This will never happen again…because we have Israel now.” We become dependent on the idea of Israel to bolster our well-being.
The State of Israel, the general concept of it, is a source of immense pride, bliss, and well-being for the global Jewish population.
When I was a teenager, I began to become uncomfortable about Israeli policy towards Palestine. This was simultaneous with coming to understand that United States isn’t actually the global “good guy”. As I learned more about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, it was difficult to not start taking a critical eye towards the United States society. When I looked at Israel and Palestine, I saw what seemed to be similar dynamics of segregation and needless violence.
I learned, early on, that expressing criticism of Israel amongst other Jewish people can be a very explosive route to take. This is why it is so important to understand how important the very idea of Israel is to our well-being and this is why it is important to understand the central role it plays in how we continue to cope with the wounds of the Holocaust. To even suggest that Israel may be in the wrong is to bring up someone’s fears that the Holocaust might happen again - I have experienced this feeling in myself and I have witnessed it in so many other people. I have a great deal of compassion for how protective Jewish people can be of Israel, even when the country’s actions cross well past unjustifiable. Yet, as a kid, I felt alienated and confused - why did questioning illegal settlements in the West Bank make other Jewish people so emotionally charged?
There is an idea that every angel is also a demon. If we worship something that isn’t truly divine, then we are worshipping something that is capable of both “good” and “bad”. This is why the Torah tells us not to worship false idols - for every “good” thing they bring into our lives, they bring things just as much “bad”. And so, if the State of Israel is what allows so many of us Jewish folks to cope with the history of the Holocaust, then we can understand that it brings us a lot of “good”, so much that it can outweigh the very immense wound of our people’s genocide. This means that, in the name of this “good”, we are willing to accept the “bad” of the very same severity - hence why devout supporters of Israel can see the all-out destruction of Gaza as justified. The “good” outweighs the “bad”.
This is why healing is so important. For many, the idea that we still hold the wounds of an event many generations ago can be hard to accept - but, it is quite clear that so many of us Jewish people get very emotionally charged when anything brings up the idea of this wound. It is why Netanyahu spends so much time trying to convince his supporters that, if Israel didn’t do what it does, another Holocaust would happen…when he does this he is taking his fingers and digging them into our wounds and then pointing to his enemies and saying, “They did this to you.” It makes us angry and desperate because the wound still hurts. It is this pain that motivates a bunch of Israelis to destroy food trucks headed to a population in the midst of famine.
When we are healed we are grounded. To be healed doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions - to be healed means that our emotions aren’t so capable of taking control of us. When the wound of the Holocaust rears its head, as a Jewish people, we feel deeply that we live in a world that is trying to kill us. When this wound rears its head, the emotion takes control and we do not look at what is happening clearly or objectively. There is nothing wrong with this - we faced a great trauma - and, healing is hard and painful work…it is much easier to just move to the next thing, it is far more comfortable to sweep things under the rug. But, this does not mean we are not responsible when, in our own pain, we go off and hurt other people. Our own pain does not absolve us from our responsibility to act morally.
I have done a lot of work, myself, to understand the ways the wounds of the Holocaust have remained alive in me, how they have been passed down. I have great compassion for everyone who possesses similar wounds - it is hard and painful work and we live in a society that dissuades us from ever even knowing what it means to heal. Yet, the more work I do, the less control my emotions have over me and as a result, I have a much greater ability to sit with my emotions. You see, when our emotions don’t have full control over us, we actually are able to be “more emotional”, in the sense that we can experience them without being overwhelmed by them. I am describing the difference between being someone who gets controlled by their anger and being someone who can feel angry without losing control.
America and Israel have come to represent false idols for many people. One of the ways this functions is that we each have many wounds and we have come to believe that these two states are what protects us from feeling the pain of these wounds. We come to feel that we are deeply unsafe if we do not have these countries fighting on our behalf. From this place of worship, the harm done to “others” is justified.
Yet, when we hurt others, we are pushed even farther away from healing for, with blood on our hands, we are far less willing to look ourselves in the mirror. This is why America doesn’t do healing…because there is so much blood, from the indigenous peoples, to enslaved Black people, to wars across the Americas, the Middle East, and the Pacific, to the homeless, to the victims of the overdose crisis, to only name some examples. Time, alone, does not heal all wounds if the conditions for healing are not present. In order for America to ever embrace the power of healing, we would be required to look at ourselves in the mirror and…how painful that would be, how the very act of self-observation would alter the fabric of our society.
This is also why the modern evangelical Christian movement has such a broad appeal…instead of introspective healing work, the modern church simply says, “Jesus will forgive you for all of your sins” and then people just worship the idea of him instead of actually doing the healing work. This is not what the Gospels teach, yet it is what a people who can’t look in the mirror need.
And so, I conclude with a few thoughts: we are a people in pain and we each have our own unique forms of it. For Jewish people, ours is shaped by the history of the Holocaust. Yet, across America, everyone is in pain. That is why we have over 100,000 overdose deaths every year, why we have so much mental illness… we are a people in pain and we cover it up with the next trends, next car, next elections, next season, next playoff run, next party, next whatever.
A people in pain manifest a world that is in pain. I am deeply terrified that Israel has already committed atrocities that will propagate more cycles of trauma and pain for another century. Simultaneously, I understand the deep feeling that so many Jewish people hold for Israel that leads to this kind of violence.
And so, all I am trying to say is that there is great healing work that we must each do in our lives. If you don’t feel that way, that is fine. But, at its root, war can never lead to peace. If a war rages within us, a war will rage outside of us. If peace reigns within us, then peace will reign all about us. We don’t have to change, but, if we don’t do the work in our own lives to change, then nothing outside of our lives will change either.
With that said, my goal with much of my writing has been to foster conversations around self-introspection and healing. I have long felt this is at the heart of so many ills in our lives and in our society. Healing is the most important work that we can do, for ourselves, for our ancestors, and for our children. Otherwise, we simply pass our wounds along - that is the nature of karma.
With much love, thank you for being here,
Charlie