Last Friday night, our growing Chavurah Collective gathered, some together over a potluck, with the services streaming over a crowded dinner table, while others, chilling comfortably with a glass of wine or a cup of tea, on their sofas or gathered at their computers and chatting with one another during the worship service… reveling in the freedom to Jew their own way: you Jew you, and I will Jew my own way… imagine! This is decolonizing Judaism/decolonizing faith: No one shushing you and no one doing any of the other less than inspiring behaviors that we find too often in our houses of worship. Celebrating diversity and finding ways to make faith accessible to everyone- this is why I created this growing community…
But one can only decolonize so much in a colonial world. Click on this awesome article for more on why “Rest is Resistance” and why our world’s focus on capitalism and productivity is killing us all. We have to find ways of resisting, where we can, while also honoring the difficult truth that we all have to make difficult choices because we have to survive in a world intent on killing our “thrive vibe” because “grind culture” makes us feel guilty if we stop to “do nothing” which is to say: BE. So, I am sharing a recording of this video if, for whatever reason, you were busy or working or somehow unable to join us live for services, but are still interested in experiencing a trauma-informed Sabbath worship service.
I say trauma-informed worship, because for many of us, religion feels traumatic/traumatizing and triggering… And as a trauma therapist that has worked hard to heal my own trauma, I cannot recite prayers that I know are reflective of theologies that cause harm because they are not yet therapized. The Global Center for Research describes the impact of Adverse Religious Experiences but we all know what it feels like, because we live in a world that is haunted by this intergenerational trauma: the Crusades that set the stage for the Holocaust that set the stage for our current world order as England traded former colonies (Palestine) like currency with the United States and other world powers, in the great redistribution of power after the Second World War that left us forever dependent upon the USA for our survival.
Of course, religion is traumatizing for many of us because of the ways the Religious Right uses it to preach a gospel of hatred cloaked in religious garb. This is not new, and indeed, religion has been weaponized as a tool of colonization (for more: please read this). This is the very definition of idolatry and it is everywhere. No less than Aaron was helping the Children of Israel melt gold to build a golden calf, we see ordained “people of god” doing terrifying things in the name of religion… all religions are corrupted by capitalism and patriotism no less than the money changers in the time of Jesus were traumatizing all the poor people who lived in cities and could not offer the first fruits of their land but still wanted to pray. But then there are all those people who can’t believe in a god that would allow the Holocaust and every other tragedy to happen. So many reasons to struggle to pray. The ancient rabbis said, if you can’t pray, then pray to be able to pray. There are many who judge me for not being traditionally Jewish… but everything I am doing is informed by the wisdom of the Talmud and Kabbalah: the healing Wisdom that emerged after our last two major traumas (healing after the destruction of the Temple led to the creation of the Talmud to teach Hillel’s message of love and peace, while healing after the crusades led to Lurianic Kabbalah). And so we are, in the same generation as the Holocaust, and it is time for a new approach to Judaism again: a restorative approach that can begin our generational healing, no less than the Children of Israel needed to wait a generation before entering Israel, lest they reenact the slave trauma that they had escaped, so too are we seeing the aftershocks of unhealed trauma. Our whole planet is wounded and we all need healing.
This is why my approach is trauma-informed. Because our world desperately needs spirituality to heal our crushed spirits, but religion is associated with trauma and influenced by it, but that is a topic for a different blog post. However, if you are interested, there is a FREE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE ON RELIGIOUS TRAUMA THAT STARTS TOMORROW and has some of the world’s leading experts on trauma speaking about this not yet understood issue, in particular, the way it manifests in the fundamentalist Christian or evangelical world. If you are interested in learning more about this conference, here is the link: https://www.brokentobeloved.org/
And here, at the bottom of this blogpost is a video of the service from Friday night: we start with grief over our upside down world and reflecting on the Torah of trees and the healing wisdom that they can teach, we wind our way backwards through the traditional order of the service, using less traditional interpretations of the prayers… until we reach light/Light. I also read and reflect upon the Torah portion of Bo, from the book of Exodus, specifically, the plague of darkness that caused people not to be able to see one another. This plague preceded the last plague: the death of the first born, before Pharaoh stopped trying to hold on to his workforce (slaves). Sadly, slavery did not end. It is alive and thriving as Pharaohs (Hebrew- Peh Rah: the “bad mouth” aka propaganda) harden their hearts (shame and guilt and fear causing callouses on our hearts, as a result of trauma and blame as reaction formation) and continue to amass cash at all of our expenses. The profits of Lockheed Martin during this war is almost never discussed, nor the fate of displaced people fleeing the war only to run into the waiting arms of human traffickers. We need more people like Moses to speak up and speak out to all the Pharaohs of this world. Today, I spent the day livestreaming a conference on human trafficking that will soon be uploaded to my paid job’s YouTube channel, where you can watch the professional development I get to help develop for social workers across unceded Mi’kma’ki (colonial name: Nova Scotia, Canada). Meanwhile, we are all so burnt out and traumatized that no one is paying attention to all the other things happening to further consolidate power in the hands of the few…
So, it is a sad and traumatizing world indeed. But it is possible to heal it- with an ancient and eternal gift: Shabbat. Literally, this word in Hebrew means- STOP. Just STOP. Stop the busyness that leads to burnout and apathy and guilt and shame and fear and the ways that trauma keeps amplifying… Stop. Rest. Heal. Love. Decolonize/Restorative Justice. Plant seeds of hope and healing… it may take a lifetime to watch the seed crack open and allow the new life to push forth… from deep in the dark ground up… pushing through the earth… But, in the same way as that seed is programmed to keep growing and healing, we have this same built-in capacity to heal… and it happens only when we stop and rest. This is why our culture keeps us so busy… so tired. We are the walking dead: so comatose and traumatized that we are killing each other and can’t even see who the true villains are. 99% of the world is cowering in front of the self-appointed, self-righteous and delusional Pharaohs of our day, without realizing that we could just stop everything and choose Love and Life. This is what Deuteronomy tells us. None of this needs to be hard. We just need to read our religious texts without the trauma: but alas, colonization has everything backwards. Even English reads left to right. So why do we think we should read anything literally?
Our religions tell us that when the messiah comes, the dead will come back to life. But we don’t need to wait until then, because we are the dead. Or perhaps the messiah has arrived but we are too busy medicating them for “hearing voices”.
I did my doctoral research on burnout in health care: it has only gotten worse in the last 10 years. The ones trying to heal us are burnt out and nearly dead themselves… and our medical system is killing us. It has become profit generating: it is causing more and more of us to die because we can’t afford to live the kind of life that can keep us healthy, let alone, if you are American, to even go see the doctor. The pharmaceuticals and the “peer reviewed” research are actually very ethically problematic if we consider the larger context of what constitutes “choice”. I speak as the grandchild of someone upon whom the Nazis who did medical experiments and as someone who oversaw medical ethics consultations for years… If we really think about the larger structural context: how much choice do people actually have regarding their participation in contemporary medical research experiments? We need people desperate for medicine to “consent” to experimental treatments for the purpose of research. Some of these choices are legitimate and life-saving, but how much of a real choice do people truly have if they are denied health care because they are too poor? Within the larger medical context of the United States, where medicine and pharmaceuticals are a for-profit industry, the ways that research serves as the only access to health care for many people is deeply disturbing.
Much of medicine (it is not all or nothing) has gotten corrupted. It needs to be healed. And we need to rethink our bizarre approach to mental health: we blame and pathologize… or we lock up the people who hear voices telling them that they are the messiah, and that we should help each other, while simultaneously voting into power the people who say the messiah or god or country wants them to die and kill others. We understand that there is a mind-body connection, but despite the growing violence in our world, we do not have universal mental health care. And in the States (south of the colonial border), it is even worse. We need a new way to live: restorative healing practices that reconnect us to our planet while we still have one… and realign us with its wisdom… teaching us not to fear darkness but to trust that dawn will come and to go rest until then, so that we can heal and be ready for morning Light.
This is my decolonizing Torah of healing and my Restorative Judaism prayer for Sabbath rest and for the emergence of a Tree of Life that places Pikuach Nefesh (the saving of a life) as its most sacred tenet. It is not particularly novel in some ways, because it is firmly rooted in tradition, but it is new because it goes against everything that is passing as religion. Of course, as a transgender rabbi that had to come out of the closet to live, it makes sense that I would have a different take… it discredits me from the eyes of many, but I am here to affirm that never have I felt so much joy or life or fulfillment. It also makes me passionate to help others who are struggling from the trauma of being told that we are not good enough as we are, but that instead, we must pretend to be someone we are not in order to be loved or socially accepted. And as I learned that going against what society tells me is going to condemn me to hell, so too do I want to affirm what is actually life-saving. And I have met a flood of other people who have their own version of the story… the person who came from India to Canada to learn about decolonization who went back home to visit his family and saw his social location with new eyes and suddenly recognized the deep trauma of colonization on his country and his psyche. We all have our own version of understanding, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
So here is a Torah of salvation: redeeming the spirit from the oppression of intergenerational trauma. I want to share my understanding of how to heal… how to heal the Torah that was handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai, but the letters were scrambled, because the people who tried to put them back together got confused by their inherited trauma impacting their ability to understand, and we have been repeating this broken telephone version of what god wants since… It is therefore time to rest, heal and reinterpret in a trauma-informed way. Why not try being trauma-informed as a harm-reduction approach, rather than keep doing the same wars that got us into this mess and are only making 99% of us more poor, if not dead?
This is why our rabbis explained that we are living in an upside down world: olam hafuch. Everything is backwards and upside down. We need to rethink all our assumptions in order to heal. So, here is my backwards Shabbat prayer service for new Trees of Life to be born. I share it just in time for Tu Bishvat, the birthday of the trees.
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 