then I too, will do the same to you; I will
order upon you shock, consumption, fever, and diseases of hopeless longing
and depression. I will break the pride of your
strength and make your skies like iron and your land like copper. I will
incite the wild beasts of the field against you, and they will utterly
destroy your livestock and diminish you. Your roads will become desolate. I
will bring upon you an army, and you will be delivered into the enemy's
hands.”
This ancient litany
of curses, known as the Tochecha, encompasses physical and mental illness,
natural disaster and war. These plagues exist in our own time, of course, and
I think that’s partly why the curses of Bechukotai speak real fear into our
modern ears. But for me, what’s most poignant in the Tochecha is a more
subtle threat that appears towards the end of the list, when God announces:
“And those of you who
survive I will bring fear into your hearts… the sound of a rustling leaf will
pursue you; you will flee as one flees the sword, but there will be no
pursuer.”
The feeling of being pursued in the absence
of a pursuer – fear unrooted in fact – is something I’ve been reflecting on
lately, as I’ve begun to pay closer attention to my own experiences of fear
and fearfulness.
For me, fear lives in the belly, a lump of
low-level dread. And sometimes, when I am particularly frightened of some
imagined future, it radiates up into my throat.
When I first began examining this fear in therapy a couple years
ago, my therapist asked me: “What are you afraid of?” And, without planning
on it, without any conscious thought behind my answer, I opened my mouth, and
I said: “I’m worried everyone I love will be taken away from me and killed.”
To be clear: My fear is utterly irrational, ungrounded in my
actual experiences of life and loss. I grew up loved in a safe, middle-class
home in Toronto, never persecuted for my religion, never experiencing war or
trauma. But, but: I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors.
In recent years, researchers have been working on better
understanding something called epigenetic inheritance: the fact that an individual’s
lived experiences can leave genetic alterations in their DNA that can get
passed on to subsequent generations.
In one
surprising study that confirmed the existence of epigenetic inheritance, researchers gave male lab mice electric shocks every time the
mice were exposed to the smell of orange blossoms. The Pavlovian result was
that the mice eventually grew to shudder at even a hint of the smell. This
was predictable. The surprise, however, was that the children and grandchildren
of these traumatized mice also instinctively feared the smell of orange
blossoms, even though they had never received any shocks, any sort of
negative conditioning.
Only last
year, another study analyzed the genes of 32 Jews who had either been interned in a concentration camp,
witnessed or experienced torture, or who had had to hide during the
Holocaust. It then analyzed the genes of their children and grandchildren,
and found identical increased mutations for stress disorders in the survivors
and their offspring.
It seems likely, then, that I didn’t only inherit my straight
hair from my mother, or my light eyes from my mother’s father. I also
inherited the memories of a trauma that I can never claim as my own. In the
words of Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, “I wasn’t one of the six million
who died in the Shoah, I wasn’t even among the survivors. No, I was not in
that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke within me, pillars of
fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day.”
So: it seems I bear the bodily wounds of a trauma I
never lived, always anticipating, on some level, an enemy who is not there.
And this is why Bechukotai is so
heartbreaking for me –because curses– even curses that come true -are one
thing. But to live in a fear that is rooted in belly and bone – a fear that
does not protect us, precisely because there is nothing to be protected from
– is a burden that no one should have to know, but so many of us do.
In reflecting on the nature of fear – how it
lives inside, how it feels in the body – I’ve noticed that fear can act like
a horse’s blinders – preventing us from looking up, looking around, noticing
the blessings of our lives. When we do not feel safe – when we are curled
into ourselves like an involute – we can lose the ability to feel that
we are blessed, even if our lives are awash in blessing.
So what is the way forward? How do we honour
inheritance, without allowing ourselves to dwell indefinitely in fear?
I want to bring you back to the parsha –
because I think it offers us two possible ways out of the darkness of
ungrounded fear.
Bechukotai opens with a list of blessings.
But being blessed is not enough. To counteract fear, we also need gratitude –
but not facile gratitude, not running through the
streets lobbing thank-yous like bouquets of flowers. True gratitude requires and
invites us to stop, look up, and notice blessing – to not be so
focused on the imagined fears of the present, on the future we are so
frightened of. If we can get out of the fear long enough to be present, to
notice that we are, actually, all right, we can unclench. And breathe.
So that’s one way out of fear – through seeing
blessing, through light.
The other way is to engage with the dark.
In Hebrew, the word for curse is klala. But
the root of this word – kuf lamed lamed, kalal – is also the Hebrew verb to
burnish - to polish to a shine.
If we allow tragedy to touch us – to not
always live in fear of rustling leaf and the imagined blow, but rather to
unclench and let the sting and the sweetness wash over us as they come
– we have the opportunity to be slowly transformed.
Loss and grief and sadness are the effects of
our modern curses, and the cost that comes with loving people. But
loss and grief and sadness offer us the opportunity to let life rub against
us, wearing down our rough edges, our spikes that we pushed out in anticipation
of pain. Life, if we let it, can polish us to a sheen. From the beauty of our
burnished selves, we can shine and reflect light to others. And see ourselves
more clearly, the darkness and the light that surrounds us.
~Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner, June 4, 2016
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