This Shabbat, the Jewish world’s sacred text was Noach (Genesis 6:9-11:32; Isaiah 54:1-10) which describes the story of Noah and the story of Babel. Noah built an ark to survive the great flood, and as soon as the earth was dry, he planted a vineyard, got drunk and engaged in incest. The moral of the story: if we don’t deal with the trauma of our lives appropriately, we will pass it on to those around us.
The next part of the bible describes the consequences of such intergenerational trauma: the story of Babel which shows the ways that our efforts to unite and collaborate were thwarted by division. It is a description of lateral violence, which reflects the ways that people who are oppressed lash out at each other rather than those who oppress them. This is an example of intergenerational trauma, and reflects the overarching but lesser understood but more pervasive and dangerous “fawn” response to trauma, which is considered adaptive because we turn on one another, often without even understanding what we are doing. Other terms include: “trauma bonding” or “codependence” or “appeasement” or “identifying with the aggressor”. It has sometimes been called the “Stockholm Syndrome“.
This traumatic response is effective because it depends upon the unconscious to block our awareness of what is really going on. Sadly, as someone who lived in a closet of denial/suppression, I know it only too well. It has taken me a tremendous amount of therapeutic healing work to heal enough to come out of the gender closet, especially in a world that seems to be doubling down on hate. Part of decolonizing and restorative justice is prioritizing “first voices” which is to say the voices of those of us with lived experience, as opposed to so-called “experts”: because reading books and taking a class will never teach you to understand viscerally what you have never experienced.
Decentering existing voices so that we are informed in first voices is radical. Our world is still organized in such a way that people who don’t know what it is like to be someone else still tell others what to do or what not to do: white people make decisions for black people, people of settler descent in North America make decisions for Indigenous people, men make decisions for women, cis-gendered for gendered-diverse… the list goes on. And this is true on a larger scale too: the new colonizers of our world are making decisions for those who live in other countries. And the rest of us who were exiled or uprooted from those places are so (rightfully) scared to be annihilated, that we are all (in competing and intersectional ways) lobbying for our leaders to make a statement to support our view of what we want to happen in a land where we do not live, but where our heart resides because we know that we are not truly safe where we are.
When I talk about decolonizing, I am talking about all of this. The very notion of division is a colonial idea. The beautiful vision that led to the building of the Tower of Babel is the hope for unity: we have to deconstruct our reading of the biblical text to understand this, because it is written as a cautionary tale, like so many parts of the bible is, given that it was edited for a specific colonizing purpose. But the text is waiting to be read through our newly awakening eyes, and increasingly, we are doing this… and like so long ago, these efforts are being thwarted.
A month ago, global historic protests for justice and democracy rocked Israel and the Jewish world against Netanyahu’s attempt to consolidate power, as Putin and Trump previously did in their respective countries. And so, not unlike the Arab Spring, we see the re-emergence of violence and a new incarnation of the the failure of the Tower of Babel, so that a few people can profit at the expense of so many lives that are lost and so many others who are being tortured. We turn on one another and can’t understand each other’s seemingly meaningless babbling (the word comes from the tower of Babel). Another flood of refugees, not unlike those fleeing the war in Syria, will soon flee seeking refuge elsewhere where they will get mistreated and resented. This is the colonial strategy: people are uprooted from their land in one way or another, and are brought into different lands to dispossess those still living there of their land, thereby ensuring sufficient lateral violence so that we can all compete with one another for the few meagre crumbs that are thrown our way, while the rich continue to get richer.
It is a broken world we are leaving our children… Indeed, this, in turn, is another distraction from the true perils of extinction that face us collectively as our planet veers toward catastrophe. This Shabbat, we all ought to be reading the story of Noah’s flood and inspired to act, however, instead, we are fighting over whether intersex children exist (they do) and whether gender diverse people are allowed to use pronouns that make them not want to die. We are fighting about books that teach accurate history. We are still not searching landfills for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls or two-spirit people. Slavery is still permitted in the United States constitution and anyone who shops at a number of companies that also depend upon human trafficking has blood on their hands. This is just a small list of the ways we are being distracted and traumatized, so that our collective guilt and shame causes us to further dissociate and turn on one another: finger pointing helped keep us safe when we were little so let’s do it again. Maybe the bully won’t pick on us if we turn on someone who is more hated than us. The legacy of the tower of Babel and the intergenerational trauma of Noah continues to be alive and well in our world.
Those of us who are most marginalized and oppressed on the intersectional wheel of power and privilege are the increasingly fashionable scapegoats of our era. This, along with untreated intergenerational trauma, and a colonizing system that uses propaganda/misinformation to label certain people as “bad” ensures that we will keep turning on one another or ourselves, rather than redirecting our anger at the true sources of our collective pain. Meanwhile the top 1% continue to consolidate wealth and power at our collective expense. And more and more people are murdered, tortured, raped, exploited and discarded while we comfort ourselves with the real fake news: fairytales about pilgrims and patriotism, bootstraps and blaming marginalized people who are struggling to stay alive in the face of intersectional hatred and oppression.
On my left arm, I have tattooed the word: “yizkor“. This is the Hebrew prayer of remembrance for those who have died. It is a daily reminder of my lifelong commitment to honor the memory of my grandfather who was murdered in Auschwitz. I remember also my other grandfather who survived the Nazi’s brutal medical experiments on him in the name of “evidence-based medicine”. While traditional Judaism frowns on tattoos, I chose to place mine in a visible place because of my commitment to dedicating my rabbinate to my people’s intergenerational prayer: never again. I have those words inscribed next to the image of a canary in a coal mine. For those unfamiliar with this concept: canaries were used by minors to detect dangerous carbon monoxide fumes so that miners would know when it was too dangerous for them to be there. I believe that all of us who have intersectional identities and are being marginalized and scapegoated and trained to turn on one another or ourselves are like canaries in the coal mine, but no one is listening because we are all asphyxiating while the wealthy continue to get richer.
It is a scary world. For people like me who have spent a lifetime studying how it is possible that the Holocaust happened, I see the signs clearly. But, in the same way as the rest of the world did not want to believe until it was too late, I worry that we still have not learned the lessons of the Rev. Martin Niemöller who explained that there is an order to who gets targeted. First they come for the easiest to target, and eventually it will be too late. And tonight, as we learn of the violent stabbing of Samantha Woll, (z”l: may her memory be blessed) president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit, and founder of the city’s Muslim-Jewish Dialogue Group, I reiterate my plea to the world: Please fight hate speech and please join with me in fighting intersectional hatred. Please contact your elected representative and let them know how you feel.
And let’s refocus on working together to create unity, even in the midst of deep and growing division. It is hard and it is scary, but the alternative is so much worse. I draw strength, comfort, courage and hope from the growing numbers of people who are starting to awaken to these truths and the consolidation of power in the hands of so few. I believe that we can stop the legacy of intergenerational trauma and violence by refocusing on intersectional justice and healing. It is possible to heal from deep trauma: I can attest to this first hand. The rabbis talk about “the birth pangs of the messiah” as a metaphor for the chaos that accompanies the transformation of a world order that is based upon trauma to one that is based upon compassion and justice. It does not happen easily, but it can happen. History has examples of this too, if we study it and know how to discern it.
So let us pray: let us pray for all the canaries in the coal mines, all the marginalized and traumatized, the wounded and the wounding… all of us caught in this maze of intergenerational trauma. And let us stop doing what we have always done: it is what led us into this mess. Let us stop and breathe. Rest. Rest is a form of radical resistance that can heal us and help us to see things differently. Neurodecolonize. This is what I am trying to explain, but it is also a meditative and healing practice. We need to heal from the intergenerational trauma, and there are ways to do it. This is what I would recommend: somatic therapies to integrate and heal that are grounded in the principles of EMDR. I say this from personal experience and as a therapist. It is possible to heal. And each of us need healing now more than ever, so we can have the strength to overcome our reflexes and defenses (trauma pushes us to the most regressive reactions) by hijacking our brains. So let us rest and heal: enough to see clearly and act- while we still can.
I have created a healing playlist of songs that inspire me and help me to stay focused on what matters. I am sharing it here with the prayer that it will bring healing to you. Together, may we rescue the canaries that are suffocating: let us remember that we are all related, and that we can only find redemption and salvation if we unite together in love and restorative justice. May the time come soon when the rainy season will give way to rainbows and dry land… and when that happens, let us dedicate time to healing ourselves and one another, so that “never again” becomes a reality for us all.
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 