A year ago, I was still stuck in my conversionary/colonial closet of gendered violence and oppression, trying to discern how to even want to live. Indeed, most of us who have been forced into a gender closet of transphobia have experienced severe trauma, leading to severe suffering… and it has taken my healing to be able to understand so much that did not make sense to me until now. But, once we begin to see, everything comes into focus, no less than putting on glasses after years of not realizing we needed them can change everything. That is what my life has felt like since I first started my gender transition less than a year ago.
Conversionary closets
Conversionary closets come in all kinds: humans have this ability to make those around them feel like who they are is not good enough, because they feel that lack of self-esteem or inner trauma on the inside of themselves. This causes projection and reaction formation and all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms that cause us to try to “fix” others because we are wounded inside. We project our worst fears and biggest secrets onto others. But we do not talk about the role of the unconscious enough: it is hard to study scientifically and, relegated to the domain of the Spirit, its power has been diminished, as most things are, as “just in our head”. We are missing the mark (the real meaning of sin in Hebrew) when we try to pathologize or medicate or legislate against spiritual concerns that require healing.
I am grateful for new ways of thinking or seeing that includes an awareness of these truths, such as the growing field of perceptual studies, which researches these less understood phenomena, Much of this research is connected to death studies, or studies of near death experiences or of children who remember experiences from before they were born. Conversionary closets try to limit Truth/Reality so that we conform to the status quo: and at their core is a denial/rejection of the One Who Is Greater than all of our minds and theories and religious beliefs and limited human theories. Our spiritual angst causes us to focus on what we can see and study, seeking a sense of certainty to try to offset our spiritual dis-ease: but this actually pushes us further away from the deeper Wisdom that comes from studying that which is unseen.
The Mi’kmaq (Indigenous peoples of the unceded Mi’kmaq land where I dwell, which is colonially known as Nova Scotia, Canada) have an idea called “two-eyed seeing” or Etuaptmumk. It was developed by Elder Albert Marshall to explain how healing requires a nonbinary shift away from “either/or” thinking to “both/and” living. This is the same concept that Judaism understands with its “Elu v’elu” (these and these are BOTH words of the living G!d) and enshrined in our understanding of learning through “chevruta” or which brings together two sets of eyes, by teaching us that true learning comes from seeing things from the other person’s perspective: which is to say, true learning is unlearning. True learning, from a Jewish perspective requires understanding how our unconscious keeps us from seeing things that others see. The Institute for Integrative Science and Health explores this concept which has many applications, including moving us closer to neurodecolonization and the mindfulness practices that can help us to heal by advancing what the Mi’kmaq call: Netukulimk that teaches about the same interconnected principles of unity and compassion that are at the core of every religion.
This understanding that wisdom comes from being able to see from everyone’s perspective: this teaches compassion and strategy. We understand what others might be struggling to face, and we can transform conflict into healing. This understanding is the true meaning of “shalom” which means “wholeness” as well as “peace”. Peace is not when one person wins: peace is when we are all whole so that G!d’s Love and Light and Energy may flow through us all. Peace also happens when we stop trying to defend our intentions and focus on understanding how our actions caused unintentional harm, and then working together to find ways of moving forward so that each person can be whole. This is the point of restorative practices: to restore us, as much as possible, to the state we were before harm happened. In Hebrew, the concept of “teshuvah” explains our Jewish version of this universal Truth. Here is a link to an awesome Jewish zine on the topic. Here is a link to Jewish ancestral teachings on the topic.
Being able to see through more than one perspective is especially meaningful to me because of the ways in which my coming out of the closet as transgender is helping me to see the world from the lens of my True Self, and in alignment with who I was created to be. I did not see others clearly before, because I was not seen clearly before. I had difficulty seeing myself because who I saw in the mirror did not align with how I saw myself on the inside, and people related to me in ways that pushed me further away from my essence. This led to profound psychic harm for me, but it also led to great confusion for those closest to me when my actions did not seem logical. I can’t help but wonder how much of this world’s problems are related to this same dynamic: the frustration of not being seen for our true selves contributing to our deepest distress.
There is a reason why the Indigenous recognize that Two Spirit People (who identify as both male and female or somewhere along the gender continuum) are teachers of spiritual wisdom: we have spent a lifetime seeing from the perspective of “the other”. This is not unique to those on the gender perspective: all of us at the intersectional margins of oppression have learned to see from more than one perspective. The question is whether trauma can help us to understand what we are seeing, or whether our unconscious/fawn response to trauma causes us to internalize the voice of the majority/those who hurt us and to turn on one another instead (lateral violence). Those of us who have worked on healing ourselves have a spiritual obligation to become elders in our communities and share what we have learned with others: unfortunately, in our death-phobic world, we lock up our elders in nursing homes and barely visit because it is depressing. I know of what I speak: I have spent a lifetime sitting with the forgotten and abandoned in nursing homes and hospice.
Our upside down world has us believing that what we see is real, when in fact, the opposite is true. The Babylonian Talmud in Pesachim talks about the need to see the world as it is “olam barur” but we see “olam hafuch“: an upside down world where truth is lies and good is bad. Kabbalah (Jewish ancestral mystical tradition) describes an upside down “tree of life” that causes us to live in this world of opposites. Spiritual healing requires seeing beyond our perspective so that we can understand life from the perspectives of those around us: this is the way we achieve peace. This is also the essence of restorative justice and healing practices which are beginning to become the norm here in unceded Mi’kma’ki, as we learn how to live life in alignment with the sacred land-based values of the Mi’kmaq people. The ways that Truth and Reconciliation are starting to take root here are not only giving me the structural safety that gives me the courage to become me (as I explain in this blog), but they are also showing me what is possible for the rest of the planet’s colonial wars. Judaism has these same wise principles: all religions do but colonization has kept us from seeing this and implementing this in our policies. Decolonizing ourselves must mean decolonizing our planet.
Grief, death and dying can teach us how to live, love and heal
It is not surprising that the global scientific health complex that is funded by drug companies is more inclined to medicate or look at short-term individual therapy to “fix” systemic issues reflective of our lack of attention to the Spirit, and our belief that religion is somehow the same as Spirit. But, these are radically different more often than not, because of the ways that religion has become coopted as a tool of colonization. It happens to every religion once it becomes integrated into a religious state and is best summarized by the Christian Doctrine of Discovery that is still enshrined in both the US and Canadian legal codes. Religion’s weaponization leads to a tragic consequence: adverse religious experiences that cause people to disconnect from their spirit and to become depressed and anxious. My work recently published a paper about the ways that our current mental health system’s burnout is related to its focus on the bio-medical to the exclusion of everything else. Working to transform our health care system is the focus of my paid job, and the grounding of my doctoral research which focused on burnout in hospice workers. We are burning out because we are not paying attention to the spirit: we are avoiding our grief and trauma, which is only amplifying its impact. Basic psychodynamic theory states the paradox of the unconscious trauma: avoidance causes the very thing we want to avoid. Our world demonstrates it: everywhere we look, we see death and violence, grief and trauma. Locking up our elders and being obsessed with looking young is yet another sign of our upside down world.
The medical model contains elements of its larger contexts, and tends to focus on caring for diseases than optimizing wellness. Much of this is because we live in a culture that denies death and does not provide adequate grief support to those who are dying or their loved ones. This causes a spiritual powder keg of pent up emotion that is not properly channeled. Our medical model’s failure to care for the Spirit is a symptom of colonization. Judaism teaches that the Spirit of G!d hovers over the bedside of one who is sick, and that tending to those who are ill is sacred. But we don’t live in a world that understands illness through a spiritual lens. Here is a video of one of my wise Mi’kmaq colleagues and teachers, as she speaks about the need for the current medical model to honor sacredness of dying and the spirituality of distress. What I understand of her wise words is that we live in an upside down grief denying world that is actively causing harm through its medical model’s failures to tend to the Spirit adequately. So much unresolved grief and anger then gets channeled into war, violence and our current profitable prison complex system which punishes people who really just need therapy and restorative justice and healing practices. Punishment causes us to feel bad about ourselves: shame then amplifies trauma and perpetuates the cycle.
Healing makes for compassion, helping us to see how we are similar, instead of focusing on all that is different because we are pointing a finger rather than accept ourselves. Becoming true to one’s self requires compassionate recognition that there are parts of us in everyone else and vice versa, and that we are all just wounded humans trying our best in a difficult world. Pointing fingers turns to acceptance, understanding and evolving. Healing pushes us past the “either/or” cognitive bias or fallacy which is the essence of colonization and war. Conversionary practices are methods to force us to betray ourselves/our own truths, to adopt instead those of our oppressors. The Crusades and colonization are examples of the role Christianity has historically played in causing these “missionary” wars and why they need to own their part in this by entering into Truth and Reconciliation: GLOBALLY. One country can’t be asked to decolonize alone: we all have to join together to do this. But we can’t wait until everyone agrees: this is where a harm-reduction approach comes in. What can we do to move past war and work toward healing?
Colonization is the power structure that sanctifies killing for national ideology and political independence. Any time we advocate for the death of the innocent, I believe that we are speaking words of idolatry, which in Hebrew is Avodah Zarah, literally worshipping “the other” which is to say the idea that “other” exists. The real idol is the belief that there is an other. There is no other. There is only G!d. Any other statement is false. All national ideologies are complicit in this truth: wagging an American flag while speaking out against Zionism is missing the point.
Saving Lives is our most sacred duty
Every time we kill another living being, I believe that Jewish tradition is clear: we are engaging in idolatry and reenacting intergenerational trauma. Judaism teaches: pikuach nefesh (saving a life) as the most important principle, and we must be willing to break every law to talk about it. So here I am breaking the biggest taboo of all: airing our dirty laundry. I do it because I don’t see any other way to get people to wake up and save lives. But I feel grounded in my ancestral teachings which are echoed in every religion on the planet.
This is how I can assess if something is true- when we all have our own version of these truths. This is how I understand “Elu v’elu divrei Elohim Chayim” (these are all words of the LIVING G!d). To see the translation of the holiness of Life, Love and Peace in every religion click here to see an awesome resource prepared by one of my former employers. So, I know that advocating for the side of Life and Love and Peace will always be the right answer. Compassion: this is the point of any religion or spiritual practice. Anything that does not lead to this reflects instead the intergenerational trauma that has been passed down to us and that is warping the message like a broken telephone game, only with lethal consequences.
Fear of my own kind/my neighbors/humans: Lateral Violence
A year ago, I posted the picture below about the child afraid of humans not animals. As a vegan, I am committed to honoring the sanctity of all lives, especially the most defenseless (like animals and children). Every war is a war against children. A year later, Facebook reminded me of this post, as I organize to try to advocate for the saving of all lives in the face of the mounting intersectional hate/divisive racist and transphobic and intersectionally oppressive rhetoric and acts of violence, this picture resonates all the more deeply.
Luckily in the last year I found my voice and it has begin to grow into one that aligns with my mind and heart and lived reality. This is making it much easier to speak truth to power, even when the ones to whom I must speak the loudest are those closest to me: lateral violence is the way we internalize the message of our oppressor, due to the fawn response, and we oppress each other. We have been taught that fighting back is our only option, and due to trauma instead of thinking critically, we believe that and cheer for the ones we have been taught are the “good” ones. But I believe that there are always more than two options to any problem. And the first step involves not blaming the people who are also traumatized, but rather looking at who is profiting from our shared trauma.
Another option: Choosing Lateral Love
The rabbis explain that the reason that the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed thousands of years ago was “sinat chinam” (free hate/lateral violence). We were filled with hate: which spilled over and caused us to hurt ourselves. Basically, recognizing lateral violence means that we stop blaming each other: hurt people hurt people. Healed people heal people. There is a lot of pain in this world: adding to it will not bring healing. Instead of lateral violence and hate, the rabbis teach lateral healing and love: ahavah chinam (healing through Soulful Love) which the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook, sought to get his siblings to understand, but sadly, trauma has kept Israel from listening to his wise words.
Until we do that, our own suffering will cause us to keep hurting others (here is an Orthodox Jewish interpretation of this dynamic, as applied to the Orthodox Jewish world). In that article, the exact same solution is offered that I shared in my previous blog and that emerges from the ancestral healing wisdom of all people: Joy as Resistance and focusing on lessons of compassion. If the goal of colonization is to wound the soul, then healing the soul has to be part of the path to peace and decolonization. For a scientific reflection on the soul wound and the Holocaust, click here and to learn more about Eduardo Duran’s concept of the Soul Wound and an approach to healing using a multicultural social justice framework. I am
Lateral violence, to me, speaks to the countless incidents of harm transgender people experience at the hands of all their other identities’ power sources, because transgender people threaten the status quo, because we are the ones who journey from one place to another. This is the real message of Abraham and Sarah’s journey to becoming themselves. They had to leave their home and go off to a place they did not know, with Abraham doing a surgical procedure on himself to align with his understanding of G!d. This is the Transgender Torah that informs me now. I understand so much of history and current events and biblical text through this trauma-informed prism that yearns for restorative narratives of intergenerational wounds that have been misinterpreted and glorified/enshrined into harmful policies and attitudes.
Colonization has impacted organized religious communities in all sorts of ways that are worthy of their own blog. Certainly, the Torah never talked about Roberts Rules of Order as the method by which synagogues ought to be governed. If only 13% of Jews in the United States even understand any Hebrew, it is not surprising to me that my lifetime of study has led me to draw different conclusions than many of my siblings, especially given how many years of study and therapeutic healing has led me to need to translate my ancestral teachings in such a way that I can distill the essence and remove the inherited trauma that sometimes attaches itself to how we have interpreted them. Please click here for the full report on how American Judaism has been so colonized, we don’t even understand our own language let alone values. Because lateral violence causes some to question my interpretations, please click here to view a Chabad explanation of colonization (decoder alert: they prefer the word “galut” or “exile” to describe the soul wound of our first colonial trauma of the destruction of our Temple thousands of years ago, causing us to flee our homeland… and our understanding of ourselves, our faith and our connection to the Sacred.
Healing our collective trauma: Becoming a revolution of blessing
We all need to heal from our collective trauma. As I noted in my last post about Joy, we need to seek it out actively, to rest and heal as a form of sacred resistance. EMDR and somatic therapy have also helped: it should be included in all gender-affirming care to undo the harms of this world that trapped us in a closet for a lifetime. Why do we not yet have universal mental health care? Well, we would be a lot less compliant/easy to manipulate. In case we did not learn the lesson with George Floyd (z”l), this week has given us yet another visual to horrify and awaken more of us: Aaron Bushnell‘s z”l (zichronam livrachah= may they rest in power and may their memory unleash a revolution of blessing and peace) tragically courageous and desperate act of self immolation this week can teach us anything, it is that we are all complicit. Every tax payer is funding this war. I do not want my taxes to go to fund war. I am a pacifist. I want an option for my taxes to fund houses and mental health counseling and restorative justice for all the intersectionally oppressed humans around me. I do not want my taxes to fund this war or any war.
Not wanting to participate in war does not mean that I feel like Hitler should not have been stopped. It means that I believe in focusing on prevention and understand that today’s war will inspire wars for generations to come. I believe that there are alternatives that should be tried and have not. I do not understand how anyone is safer because of war. I believe that there ought to be an investment in the psychosocial, structural and spiritual determinants of health to focus on prevention. I can already see people recoiling in horror and judgment that I called Aaron’s act of self-immolation courageous, while others are branding him “mentally ill”. But pathologizing is missing the point: choosing to support this war, to me, is the real sign of mental “illness” which I understand to be trauma. Trauma-informed political diplomacy and universal mental health would be a much more efficient and effective investment in peace and safety.
There is a logical inconsistency to believe that fighting a war on the battlefield is acceptable, but to not understand that he was fighting for what he thought was right. He chose not to die, drugged with anti-anxiety medicine so he could become a good soldier. He refused to keep fighting a “sanctioned war” and making profit for someone else. I oppose all wars, and grieve his death, but logically, I can understand how his decision to want to serve the larger good by fighting for human life led to this decision to do so in a way that would not hurt anyone else and that he hoped he might bring attention to this catastrophic emergency by doing the same act that sparked the Arab Spring. I am writing about him now, because I believe that it is important to do whatever we can to transform tragedy into Torah.
Aaron’s final words were: I am going to engage in an extreme form of protest, but compared to what is unfolding… it is not extreme at all. It is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. This is perhaps the most terrifying part: when people give up hope… when the new normal is constant war… then people engage in increasingly desperate acts. This desperation creates the powder keg that can become fatal. That is where investing in the psychosocial and structural and spiritual determinants of health can be so healing. The Hebrew word for war is “milchamah” which is related to the word for bread: where there is no bread, there will be war. Our ancestral language wants us to understand how to prevent war. If only more of us understood these inherited teachings that focus on healing and harm reduction.
Aaron worried about complicity, and the tragedy is that we are all complicit: everyone of us has blood on our hands, for this war, and for all wars, and for all the slavery that is still enshrined in the US constitution and for all the genocide that is at the core of the founding of colonial nation states like the USA and Canada upon unceded but blood drenched Turtle Island, and for all the gender violence and sex trafficking that should have us search landfills here and across the planet, looking for the missing and murdered women, girls and two spirit people who have been used as war prizes for traumatized colonizers. Colonization is far more pervasive a dynamic than just one or two countries: this entire planet has been colonized and the patterns by which this happens are universal, even if it looks different on the surface. Sadly gender-based violence is intertwined with wars and the ways in which most nation states assert their power.
The epidemic of sexual assault in the military prison profit complex reflects this dynamic. It is not by accident that Hamas attacked a kibbutz (community living for those who might otherwise be housing insecure) that was filled with non-Jewish/international refugees and immigrants fleeing trafficking from their home countries and across the Middle East; click here for one example of who was attacked and whose voices have been erased in this whole polarizing false narrative about what this war is really about. Click here to learn more about how queerphobia and violence is causing people to flee their homes across the Middle East, probably in very similar ways as Abraham and Sarah had to do long ago when they left their home (probably close to what is colonially known as Iraq) to find refuge somewhere else, until they had to go to Egypt and Abraham had to share his wife with Pharaoh, as indeed his son Isaac had to do. Add the trafficking lens to our biblical stories and let’s talk about the real story of Purim.
Every war causes desperate people who seek to flee to safety, and this feeds those who prey on them as well as the social tensions that emerge when newcomers arrive. The desperate need for survival aids and abets human traffickers (click here to understand how human trafficking is a global phenomenon amplified by global wars and the climate emergency). We need to search landfills across the planet and understand how transphobic rhetoric aids and abets human traffickers. Click here for a letter written by survivors of human traffickers to call out transphobes using words like “grooming” and “pedophile” to describe the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and their advocates, when in fact, they are the grooming targets. More evidence of our upside down world and why these words are actually aiding and abetting the commercial sexual exploitation of children (the real reason parents don’t have parental rights said survivors of abuse everywhere and the social workers who try to help them).
Why am I talking about human trafficking? Because as thousands of women and children seek to escape Gaza, there will be many who will look to human traffickers for rescue. This is true in every war. We don’t talk about the sexual violence and lasting violence of war, nor about the profit that is being generated every day, because we have been taught not to question patriotism or the options we are told we have. This is yet another reason why the response to terrorist attacks of violence ought not be more war and violence, but rather healing. Terrorism ought to be treated like an infection that shows where our planet is not yet healed.
We also do not talk enough about the impact of gender and sexual violence and colonial wars in the Middle East specifically, and its impact upon our faith communities, nor its influence in our policies and practices. The violence of Hamas is part of a much larger whole: Click here for more information about Netanyahu’s meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, and click here for information about Jeffrey Epstein’s funding of Jewish foundations that are responsible for the education and programming of much of American Judaism. Click here for information about how sex trafficking shows up in Jewish communities. We have an ethical obligation as Jews to understand and reflect upon our relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and how it continues to fund the messages about this war. Click here for a PBS investigation on the topic. Every religious community is involved: click here for an interfaith toolkit to combat human trafficking. Click here for an excellent expose on the ways that human trafficking and evangelical Christianity are fueling much of the transphobic hate that perpetuates gender and sexual violence by advocating for “parental rights” that ensure children’s silence. Every religion and every nation state has its own role to play in maintaining the status quo that ensures that human trafficking remains one of the largest economic forces and biggest threat to global peace and public health: click here for more information or google it for yourself.
Healing from conversion practices
Every religion is complicit. Evangelical Christianity is the 2024 version of Christian imperialism and colonization. The belief that there is ONLY one way is contrary to our shared ancestral and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Conversionary practices happen in lots of different ways and contexts. They happen everywhere. And none of this is new. From biblical times to the crusades to the doctrine of discovery to contemporary efforts to convert Anne Frank posthumously, Jews have been forced to experience deeply traumatizing conversion experiences, for generations. This has made it hard to think critically about our intergenerational trauma and the ways in which it has forced some Jews to engage in survival practices that go against what Judaism believes.
Conversionary practices come in lots of different ways. Most parts of this world have been impacted by colonization in some way. I am not pointing fingers to blame but to point out that everyone has their own version of the story. The good part of everyone being responsible is that maybe we will finally stop trying to “save face” and just acknowledge that the trauma and economic forces have gotten the best of us, and try to figure out a different way forward. And there is a different way: it starts by moving past the “us” vs “them”. This is the “two-eyed” seeing that Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall explains can help us to return to what his ancestral teachings call: M’sit No’Kmaq (all my relations) that are also present in all of our shared ancestral traditions. Click here for an excellent analysis of how this concept should transform our understanding of child attachment and healing.
I have posted elsewhere about some of my own conversion practice experiences that I endured. There are lots more, and the more people understand about it, the more they begin to see how so much of our collective suffering has been imposed on us by those who benefit from our exhaustion and oppression. I am still praying for restorative justice as part of my healing journey toward “tikkun” (restorative healing)- for myself and for those who I unintentionally harmed by not being out earlier. I am not blaming myself, but recognizing the impact of how my trauma impacted the trauma of someone else. Colonization teaches us to be afraid of punishment which keeps us from talking about our truths. Lateral violence helps maintain colonization, because we police each other and ensure complicity. In Judaism we call this “dina d’malchuta dina” (we will let the law of the land rule us, even if we know better). Survivalism causes us all to adapt to the oppressor in one way or another. For Judaism, right now, it looks like Israelism where we try to placate our abusive trafficker (America) who gives us nice things in exchange for our complicity. I have been making up for lost time, as part of emerging from my gender closet and speaking out, especially during this awful war… and as part of my healing journey toward becoming true to me. But every day and increasingly, I am blessed with opportunities to see healing decolonization and to understand that: there is another way. And it is a joyful and healing way. I want it for everyone! This is what is called sympathetic joy.
Questioning the story we are told is an important first step, as the recent movie “Israelism” shows and as this article in the Israeli newspaper seeks to highlight to stop the traumatized/traumatizing “brainwashing” that is part of too many Jewish educational experiences. As I watch my Jewish siblings’ intergenerational trauma lead them to make decisions that seem irrational and counter productive, the only way I can understand them is to focus on the trauma that is making them not see this: no negotiation for lasting/fair peace is possible while bombing/killing the same people that we need to be able to trust as future peace partners and neighbors. The movie talks about conversionary experiences like the March of the Living, which has turned much of contemporary American Judaism into “Israelism”: keeping us from following our own religion and being true to the ethical values (saving lives) that are at the core of our faith.
Many people might believe that I hate myself or I hate Israel. But that is the upside down world: I am speaking out of my deep love and belief that we are capable of better. I am speaking from a therapeutic lens and one that is grounded in Jewish tradition. I believe that Israel is the sacred ancestral land of my people. It is just that I understand that the years of colonization have led to the current situation: Israel is a shared land. This means that, instead of fighting over who owns a land that belongs to G!d, we need to learn how to share. This also means recognizing that this was the whole point of religion: reminding us that this land belongs to G!d, not humans. So, we could instead consider, as a starting point: what might a land acknowledgment look like- for Israel/Palestine/Canaan/the “promised” land? How might we translate this into our respective faith traditions and backgrounds so that it could feel like a “holy land”? What might all peace negotiations look like if they adopted principles of Truth and Reconciliation and shifted to the NON-BLAMING and NON-SHAMING approach of restorative justice. We all inherited the systems from which some of us benefit and some of us are oppressed, usually in intersectional ways that can help us to see past the intersectional positionality of one part of our identity to have compassion for those in others.
The story of the movie “Israelism” resonates: I too was a traumatized 16 year old, second-generation Holocaust survivor, who came back from my Jewish Federation funded free trip to Israel. There I connected with Israel and with what I was learning about Zionism, viscerally and powerfully, fusing my deep intergenerational trauma with the hope that Israel represents to so many Jews. I also received a series of trainings to advocate for Israel, and told that this would ensure “never again”. Dutifully, I went back and shared this with my third and fourth grade students, so that they could be prepared to fight against antisemitism which I was told was antizionism. I meet people who went to religious schools and summer camps with similar stories: traumatized teens serving as counselors, reenacting the Holocaust experience to educate kids. Teenage camp counselors pretending to be Nazi soldiers, chasing younger children through the camp until they find safety and refuge (and ice cream) in the cafeteria. Then the students are “educated”. We need a trauma-informed approach to Jewish education, because this is not working.
I say all this because it helps me better understand all of my beloved Jewish siblings, who are in deep pain and trauma. I say all this because this is my way of trying to fight antisemitism (which does exist), by helping people have compassion and understand what appears pretty illogical to the outsider. Like all people who are traumatized and in survival mode, early traumatic experiences such as these are keeping them from being able to feel and see from the perspective of others who they have been told repeatedly “lie” and “want to kill them”. The stories we tell shape our beliefs and attitudes. This is why I feel compelled to try to share a different perspective that can help us all make sense to each other again… because I believe that is the only way that peace and restorative justice can happen: through compassion.
The traumatic void
Trauma causes a void, because there was a void in our experience. In the absence of compassion that was shared with us (for example Canada’s response to how many Jews were allowed to see refuge during the Holocaust: “none is too many”), many humans do not have the ability to show compassion for others without some healing. The devastations of the Holocaust, and the world’s guilt and shame over its silence, fused to create a devastating blueprint for intergenerational trauma that became the architecture of the new world order that led to Britain and America trading places in the new colonial chess game of racism and intersectional oppression that has us fighting each other while the wealthy get richer and we get more and more traumatized and trapped in our reptilian brains. What that means is that when we get traumatized, we go into “automatic pilot”. We feel under attack and can’t think more clearly than this.
It is like the midrash (ancestral Jewish teaching) of G!d holding Mount Sinai over the heads of the recently freed from slavery children of Israel, and telling them to accept blind allegiance (literally deaf: “na’aseh v’nishmah/we will do and we will hear”). This idea of blind obedience is NOT authentically Jewish (truly), but a tragically common example of the ways that EVERY organized religion becomes more focused on perpetuating itself than its message. Survivalism/Darwinism dominates instead of peace, healing and thriving. This is exactly what America did to Israel, adopting it as its proxy in the new world order that led to the Cold War… in exchange for the ancestral lands of the Jewish people (where others had been living under colonial British rule and elsewhere, because Jews had been expelled to form their own colonial traumatic history of exile). I believe that the great “land back experiment” of Modern Israel without the decolonization of the rest of the world has led to the current tragedy unfolding. Israel has been surrounded by countries that it believes want to destroy it, while never having the chance to heal from what it experienced almost immediately before it was born.
Trauma causes us to act first and think second. This is how colonization works and the side benefit of a generation of people who grew up playing video games hardwiring murder to the automatic reflex: this ability to shoot first and think second is why teenage soldiers who are traumatized offspring of Holocaust descendants and who played video games their whole life are so traumatized that they are shooting their own people: hostages who are waving flags of surrender and crowds of desperate people seeking humanitarian aid. In their trauma they cannot distinguish between good and bad. Trauma lead us to not be able to make good decisions: the only answer to peace in the Middle East that I can understand is trauma therapy and restorative justice.
There has to be healing to this intergenerational trauma that has only amplified this past year, because otherwise, in ten years, my heart is crushed to think of this happening again. But, clinically I don’t understand how it would not, unless we shift courses and recognize that therapy and universal mental health is needed: for these people and for everyone. This is my Middle East Peace Plan: What if we invested half the money currently going to kill people toward therapy, and the other half toward building affordable housing or kibbutzim for all those living without shelter? This is an example of the kind of reparations I want to see, and where I would like to have a choice to invest with my tax dollars. I do not want my tax dollars to go toward the death of living beings, especially since I understand that doing so will take us further away from my prayer for healing.
Gaza is Israel’s Vietnam
I think that this war is going to be for Israel what Vietnam was for America. But it is also way more dangerous. We are moving away from the chance for peace and the seeds I sacrificed everything to plant throughout my career: all the interfaith relationships I sought to build, by sharing our values on “pikuach nefesh” (saving a life)… how can I stand authentically in this belief while my beloved brethren are killing children? It is not even logical to me how anyone can have an authentic dialogue or effective mediation in this situation, as trauma is everywhere on both sides. I am advocating for the lives of the innocent in Gaza, but also for the poor teenage kids (of all religions) who are forced into military service in Israel, and who are traumatized before they start, and then are so traumatized that they are shooting THEIR OWN SIDE. The therapist in me understands the role of the unconscious (repressed anger at being forced to do the unconscionable), and also the ways in which this will haunt them forever. Parents: how can you support this war?! Imagine the veterans of this war in twenty years: if I am traumatized from my experiences growing up in a world that was not war-torn, my heart breaks to try to imagine what will be the life of these teenage soldiers.
Sadly one year since posting this picture about being more afraid of humans than animals on Facebook, this world has only gotten more terrifying. But I am no longer scared silent: I have faced my fears and been willing to lose everything to be true to me. I am most scared of the consequences of staying silent, because I have lived that way for too long, and paid a devastating price that only those who have lived in the gender closet for decades can understand.
Queering is redeeming: the liberation of leaving our closets
We all have different closets: different parts of us that we were taught early were wrong, and which keep us from being true to us. Repressing our truest self in a traumatizing and colonial world is also why we are all so burnt out and thereby lacking in sympathetic joy: the fuel for compassion. This is the liberatory power of coming out: we have a degree of resilience in our ability to speak out, because we have spent a lifetime being condemned and condemning ourselves. This is perhaps why transgender people are a target: we already know what it is like to have nothing to lose: but unlike Israel that feels cornered… we have come out of the closet and experienced gender euphoria/found a reason to live… broken every taboo along the way.
And the real secret of gender euphoria is this: we have been on both sides of the gender divide, and we can now see through the trauma. For example, the person who used to hate me because I looked like a “queer” now bonds to me because I look like his positionality, while the person who used to relate to me now averts their eyes because I look like the kind of person that can be unsafe. Being able to see the fluidity of our labels and silos is part of what is healing about transitioning. It is not unique to transitioning: the new immigrant of color who was wealthy and powerful in their country of origin may suddenly experience racism in a way that they never did upon moving to a different country… the skinny woman who gains a significant amount of weight and watches the world change how they relate to her while she knows that she is still the same person…
Experiences such as these help us to understand that the world through the perspective of another. I get to see the opposite of what I experienced in my previous life: this is what the rabbis describe as the healing of the afterlife and the teaching of compassion. One rabbinic idea of the afterlife is that we reexperience everything we did to others, but from their perspective. But I get to live it in this life. And the healing is beyond astonishing. To understand more about what traditional Judaism teaches about purgatory and the afterlife, please click here, and stay tuned as I try to continue to work on writing about what it is like to live through the hell of a closet and come out on the other side of the gendered glass ceiling.
Speaking as my effort to open the closet door and bring healing to us all
So yes. I am going to speak out. I will never again pay the price of silence for my complicity. This genocide must stop now. The images haunt me. When I say “never again” I mean never again for anyone. I translate “love your neighbor as yourself” to mean what I want for myself, I should want for others and what I don’t want for myself, I should avoid for others. So, what I would want is for someone to speak out if my people were being killed, as indeed I do when it comes to 2SLGBTQIA+ children’s human rights. But most people are afraid to be the first to speak out. Please click here to watch my favorite (uplifting and short) Ted talk video about being the first person or second or third person to do the NOT YET popular thing. I say “not yet” because I believe that the tide is finally turning, as the trauma and carnage increases and becomes further incommensurate with the devastation of the attack, however horrible. Returning trauma with more trauma will not lead to long-standing peace. I believe that Truth and Reconciliation is the answer, because it is also the Jewish way of Teshuvah (restorative processes of making amends).
And as I speak out, I watch the numbers of people who are uncomfortable with truths I speak shrink. But, I have already lost people I loved and never could have imagined losing, in order to choose to come out. And that was still better than losing myself with the suicidal ideation that generally accompanies life in a closet. Here is the thing about decolonization/coming out of our conversionary closets- whatever they are… once you see the ways in which others have tried to exploit us and convert us to their traumatizing point of view… once you see the patterns and understand the theoretical construct, you can’t unsee them. And that is why they want to ban all the books and silence us and defund the media everywhere. But it is too late. There are too many of us who see and have begun to heal and discern a better way: restorative justice.
And that is why I am speaking out to advocate for a Decolonizing/Restorative approach to Judaism. This is why I have joined so many groups, Rabbis for Ceasefire and Teruah and Jewish Voices for Peace and others, including this new group of us that are still forming: https://reformjewsforjustice.com/ and why I have also helped to organize all the religious voices across Canada to come together to speak out against transphobia on March 14th. Colonization depends upon silos and silent shame: it can quickly be healed by our coming together, in faith and hope and collaborative allyship. Together, we are better. This is what the Ubuntu African ethic states: I am because we are. I am the We Generation as my brave former congregant wrote in her brilliant book that I just linked. What is my pronoun of choice: “we” because at the end of the day, everything else is an idol.
I hope you will consider joining me to reclaim our religious voices from those who seek to oppress us. May compassion for all living beings reign soon and speedily, that a true peace may descend upon us all: Oseh Shalom…
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 