Shabbat Lech Lecha
Written by Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh Friday, 07 November 2008
A congregant of mine in Ireland, a good friend and a man of so many different talents and such incredible skill as to make me feel hugely under-accomplished, asked me a couple of weeks ago whether trauma was trans-generational. It was a good question, although my immediate, Pavlovian response was to utter a resounding yes, and add ‘for Jews even more so’.
But having asked and answered the question it seems to me that it is worthy of much deeper consideration. Psychologists have proved that the traumas that affect one generation can be passed on to the next, and possibly to a third in extreme circumstances, albeit diminishing all the time until they eventually disappear. Aberrant behaviour, of course, is another matter, and sometimes patterns can be perpetuated across many generations, creating an apparently endless cycle of victimizers and victims from which everyone suffers.
Analysts who considered the psychological impact of the Shoah after the ending of the Second World War identified several phenomena: that of survivor guilt and Second Generation syndrome to name the two best known.
So we should next ask ourselves whether Jews are especially prone to trans-generational trauma? I think the answer here is, indeed must be an affirmative one. Why? Well, I suppose it all goes back to Abraham...
This Shabbat we start to read the saga of Abraham’s family, which commences with God’s command to him to go forth from his familiar surroundings, his home city and everything he knew, and journey to a far off place where this same God would lead him. When he arrives he is told that the land on which he stands has been gifted by his God to him and his future descendants, thereby binding him and them to it - whether they like it or not, for choice doesn’t come into it!
Two generations later, his grandson Jacob leads his family down to Egypt in a time of serious famine, and they end up spending rather longer in the country than they first thought, a sojourn which turns very nasty and bitter and from which they escape only by the skin of their teeth, combined with a few miracles.
And this is where the trans-generational trauma really starts, because God commands that the Exodus from Egypt be celebrated every year, for ever, and that in each generation parents should explain the reason for their observing a festival of liberation as being ‘because of what the Eternal did for me when I came out of Egypt’: in other words, no matter where we are, no matter how we live, we have to think our way back into the mindset of a slave, and I can think of few things more challenging than that, or indeed, more psychologically damaging.
Why? Because slaves are victims, slaves are powerless, slaves are put upon, and it is then hardly surprising if those who are encouraged annually to think of themselves as powerless victims do not end up in certain circumstances as literal victims, a self-perpetuating trauma of the worst kind.
Then, of course, there is the rest of Jewish history: it has had its great moments, its stupendous achievements, its intellectual brilliance, to be sure. But that is not what the vast majority of Jews remember, or what they are encouraged to remember. No, when we contemplate Jewish history what we IMMEDIATELY think of is hatred, persecution, abuse, misrepresentation, insult, damage, and murder.
We are probably the most practised people in the world at being victims – though not, of course, through any desire of our own, or any fault of our own: we have never had to do anything to be victimised, persecuted, marginalised and massacred we just had to be what we are and others did the rest.
Bearing all this in mind it is easy to understand how Jews more than any others understand trans-generational trauma, and accept it as part of the Jewish condition.
All of which brings us to this weekend, when we mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when a nationwide pogrom was unleashed on Jews by the Nazi regime of Hitler and his fascist cohorts, in a supposed gesture of outrage at the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew distraught at the cruel and inhuman treatment of his parents by the Nazi authorities.
On the night of the 9th-10th November, a wave of destruction, arrest and murder overwhelmed German Jewry, and after it was over the regime had the perverted nerve to demand restitution payment for the damage done to their property from the Jews themselves! For some in Germany and Austria it was the final straw, and they made strenuous efforts to get themselves and their families away from the lands of their birth; others tried to understand and rationalise what had happened, and many of them paid for their optimism with their lives.
And here we are, seventy years on, commemorating those terrible events and that appalling night, and empathising, as we always do, with the victims, some of whom are still in our midst.
But what we must also do, a biblical lifespan away from Kristallnacht, is ask ourselves what else the anniversary means to us, in 2008, as well, perhaps, as taking the even riskier step of asking what it does not mean.
We would be dishonest if we did not admit that as the years pass by most Jews find themselves inevitably and rightly distanced from the Shoah on every level, and there is nothing seriously wrong with this, it is only natural, and we inherit enough trans-generational trauma without adding to it unduly.
Further, there is so much more to being Jewish, and certainly to Judaism, than the terrible events of 1933-1945 and we should not allow them to define every aspect of our Jewishness and the way it manifests itself. Above all, perhaps, we must not allow recollections and evocations of the Shoah to define us, and define our victimhood status ad infinitum.
However, that does not mean that we should consign the Shoah to the pages of history, or consciously ignore it when occasions such as this significant anniversary come round.
We should always be able to pay tribute to the suffering of previous generations of Jews, especially during the Shoah when the level of Jewish suffering plumbed new depths. We should never lose sight of the dangers posed by anti-Semites and anti-Semitism, and be alert for its occurrence and courageous in our response to it.
We should never stick our heads in the sand when times are hard and be complacent. We should be unremitting in our vocal opposition to today’s purveyors of anti-Jewish hatred, most particularly the Arab countries where the worst forms of crude European anti-Semitism have found a comfortable home.
But we should also use occasions such as this as a personal goad; to remind ourselves how weak and inward-looking we are with regard to the suffering of others, how Judeo-centric is the mindset of so many Jews, and how little we do to stand up for the rights of other minorities, let alone actually doing anything to ameliorate their condition.
I cannot help feeling that one of the best ways of dealing with trans-generational trauma is using it as a spur to work for the betterment of the human condition in general, and that of the marginalised, and criminally disadvantaged in particular.
As Jews we know how the world all too easily ignored what was going on in Nazi Germany, and how strangely deaf many nations became to the cry of German and Austrian Jews for a safe haven. We should never allow the charge of inhuman negligence to be levelled against us, or let it be said that we learned the lessons of history as they applied to us but ignored them with regard to everyone else.
So this Shabbat, as we recall with sorrow the events of Kristallnacht 70 years ago, the destruction of homes, synagogues and businesses, the brutalization and bullying of innocent Jews, the deportation to concentration camps of over 30,000 and the murder of ninety one, let us use it now as a spur to diligence and sensitivity towards the world around us; a willingness to show solidarity with those who are in despair or distress, an acceptance of the fact that we are not the only ones to have suffered in human history – even if the level of our suffering, pro rata, has been greater than most, and an understanding that if enduring trans-generational trauma is our historical and unavoidable lot rather than letting it drag us down we can transcend it and use it to positive effect.
Ken yehi Ratzon
Amen
Rabbi Dr Charles H Middleburgh
Shabbat Lech Lecha
November 8th 2008
Cardiff Reform Synagogue
