[Based on the devar Torah delivered by the author at Reconstructionist Minyan Dorshei Derekh in Philadelphia on the occasion of her chanting from the Torah scroll for the first time on Shabbat Nakhamu.]
Honor your father and your mother, as your God יהוה has commanded you, that you may long endure, and that you may fare well, in the land that your God יהוה is assigning to you. (Deuteronomy 5:16)
Second-century Rabbi Shimon Bar Yokhai remarked that the commandment to honor one’s father and mother is the most difficult commandment to observe. For me, it became difficult to honor my father after I left home for college and beyond, when he began drinking heavily and refused our family’s pleas to get help. I needed to stay away and did so for several years. I will come back to that story later.
Addressing the often-difficult relationships between parents and children, various commentaries declare that honoring your parents doesn’t have to require loving them. Caring for them in their old age counts as honoring them, for example. I found a new perspective on honoring your parents this year when, at my daughter’s urging, I took a course called Yachatz, Healing Jewish Ancestral Trauma. The course centered on the impact of collective traumatic history on American Ashkenazi Jews. Here are two passages from the website, Transcending Jewish Trauma, created by Jo Kent Katz, that describe a key premise of the course.
While the impact of trauma on individuals may vary significantly, the impact of trauma on a group of people with a shared history of navigating systemic oppression can often be tracked collectively. We can refer to this as collective trauma.
It can be a profound awakening to recognize the depth to which our thoughts, emotions, and actions are impacted by our lived and inherited experiences with trauma and oppression. Originally, these behaviors were brilliantly adaptive responses; acute, refined, definitive attempts at securing the survival of our People. They were often the very tactic that kept us alive, that kept our People alive. We can call them ancestrally proven best practices. By noticing and reflecting on these inherited practices, we can make more conscious decisions about whether they still serve us today.
When we try to understand our parents, there may be reasons for their behavior that can’t be found in their individual stories, but rather in ancestral experiences. Jo Kent Katz created a tool called The Transcending Jewish Trauma Map. It’s a helpful way to explore a wide range of behaviors that result from Ashkenazi ancestral experiences of terror and otherness. Offering a personal example, Jo Kent Katz describes inheriting a pattern of urgency. She feels she is never going fast enough, getting enough done, is always on the move and others are never moving fast enough. She is often impatient with her partner, friends and co-workers, etc.
Her ancestral history sheds light on this urgency. Her grandmother had to flee Russia under great threat after seeing her parents killed by the Cossacks and suffered undiagnosed PTSD for the rest of her life. Katz connects her persistent sense of urgency to her grandmother’s traumatic escape. Urgency enabled her grandmother to survive. And then it was passed down to her mother and herself as a generalized way to live. Noticing and reflecting about the traumatic origins of the generalized urgency that drives her helps her interrupt practices that don’t serve her and may be harmful to the people around her.
Her story resonated with me immediately. I do not have Ashkenazi ancestry, but my husband Mark is 100% Ashkenazi. His Russian-born grandfather experienced a similar trauma. His grandfather saw his father, a rabbi, killed by the Cossacks after declaring that God would protect him.
Mark and I relate very differently to time. He runs early. I run late. I often feel rushed by him. He is often frustrated that I am not reliable about time, and he can’t predict when I will be ready.
With Mark’s permission, let me describe his airport practices and compare his airport practices to mine and my father’s. Mark considers his airport practices reasonable and appropriate. From my perspective, he clicks into semi-panic mode at the airport. He urgently works to be as far forward in every line that he can, as if he might lose his spot on the flight. If he doesn’t push forward, other people will take his place.
But there is another dimension to this. He feels responsible to be as efficient as possible, such as when going through security, so that as many people as possible can get through as quickly as possible. In this way he feels himself to be part of a collective and his behavior is for the good of all. Can you imagine how this might have been passed down to him by immigrant grandparents who were forced to flee?
Meanwhile, I am all “Lah-di-da!…It’s okay if I am not all that organized….If I drop something… or it takes a minute to find my license….or if I struggle to take my laptop out…It isn’t a matter of life or death!” I have an underlying unconscious trust that the system likes me, protects me. I am not under threat. There is no need to rush. Sadly, I don’t carry Mark’s sense of responsibility for the collective.
As I grew up, my family’s way of functioning, under my father’s control, was to always be running for the gate. We usually made it on at the last minute, adrenaline pumping.
For my father, getting to the airport early was for the uptight, for the people who didn’t know how to enjoy life. Whatever amount of time you were early was time out of your life, time that other people controlled. Never mind that this caused problems for the people around him. We missed flights, and we made other people miss flights. Furthermore, he demeaned people who tried to be prompt or, God forbid, early. In addition, he expected people to help him out of whatever jams he got into, to bend the rules for him.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I come from a lineage of oppressors. That is, my father’s family came to the U.S. in the 17th century and held slaves until the Civil War. I clearly need a different map. Using the concept, though, I looked for historical context that might shed light on my father’s patterns and my own. I know only a few stories, but they seem to hold clues. Here’s one:
My father’s mother, Louise, lived in Mexico with her parents from about the time she was eight until she was 23, when suddenly they had to flee. We were told there was a train trip in which the only things they took with them were two porcelain pigeons that they carried on their laps. (Like Shabbat candlesticks?) My great grandfather had been an executive at an American copper mining company in Mexico. They were expelled during the Mexican Revolution in about 1914.
They were on the perpetrating side of an oppressive system whose time had run out. Even so, I image this had a traumatic effect on my grandmother. I wonder how my grandmother may have imposed an undue sense of danger and urgency into ordinary life. Was this the cause my father’s life-long habit of digging in his heels and refusing to be rushed or to acknowledge risk? My grandmother escaped to a safe place where her family was part of the white ruling class. Safe, in a lasting way. I imagine that she didn’t suffer repeated trauma as she resettled in the same way Jewish immigrants did. As a result, my father had the luxury of privilege and safety that allowed him to rebel. Rebellion didn’t come at much of a price. For him, the greater threat was to be controlled, to lose power, to not hold a special status in society.
I have a procrastinating pattern that I think is related to this, coming from ancestors most concerned with maintaining power, on which they considered their survival to depend. People tell me I am a perfectionist. Maybe so, but it is a different kind of perfectionism than people with an Ashkenazi background might have. This is hard to say, but I think it has felt safer to me to delay action than to reveal myself as less than superior, lest I lose the esteem of others, lest I lose status and power. It is a pattern that has been born of privilege and protected and perpetuated by privilege–white privilege of the kind that my ancestors enjoyed and perpetuated.
This all leads me to think my father was afraid of losing power or control to his children. I was the oldest, the first to challenge him at every point of development. If he had lived longer, we might have navigated through that.
When I was 29, I began to fear my father might die soon. He was a life-long smoker as well as a heavy drinker. This pushed me to find a way to reconcile and repair. We began meeting. He would drive to Manhattan from Connecticut, where he had recently moved, to meet me.
We had a series of monthly lunches, from noon to one, my lunch hour, close to where I was working. As I’ve described, this kind of regularity was not his pattern. He was not an on-time or reliable person. I didn’t know he could do it. At the second meeting, he arrived quite late. (His explanation, ironically, was that he had stopped to buy my brother an alarm clock so that he could get to work on time.) I only had an hour-long lunch break, which left us no more than 15 minutes. As tempted as I was to stay beyond that hour, I couldn’t. He almost couldn’t believe it. He had a good reason for being late, after all! After that, though, he was on time for every lunch.
During those meetings, we laid the past aside and talked only of what was happening in our lives. The conversations were delicate and tender, cautious, but full of love for the fact that they were happening at all.
Key to the healing effect of these meetings for me was his honoring of the structure, timeliness and reliability that I needed. I hadn’t even known I needed them or that I could ask for them.
We only met about six times and then he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He was estimated to have 18 months to live, but he caught pneumonia and died soon after. By way of honoring him, I want to acknowledge that for those six meetings, he tamed that instinct to maintain power and found a way to be on time and reliable, and to interrupt the survival pattern that drove him so often in life. Those meetings meant the world to me after he died and have been deeply consoling ever since.
Chanting Torah today was an expression of belonging as a Jew in this community. As I took this step, I was made more aware of how I am different because of my non-Jewish parentage and ancestry. This moment wouldn’t have had a le-dor va-dor (connecting Torah chanting to past and future generations) resonance for my parents were they still alive. And it doesn’t connect me to mysterious, unknown ancestors. But it does connect me to you, this community, to other dear friends who are Jews, to my Jewish children, to a community that has taught me about caring for the collective and trusting the collective.
