Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone spoke in a Zoom webinar hosted by Victoria’s Kolot Mayim Reform Temple on Jan. 14. (PR photo)
Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone unraveled intergenerational trauma, and offered solutions to help remedy it, in a Zoom webinar hosted by Victoria’s Kolot Mayim Reform Temple on Jan. 14. Firestone, the author of the award-winning 2019 book Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, is a Jungian psychotherapist and a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement.
“When I was first approached by Kolot Mayim last year to present this talk, nobody had any idea of the life-changing events that we would be experiencing,” Firestone began, acknowledging the geopolitical developments on and after Oct. 7. “Nor did I ever fathom when I wrote Wounds into Wisdom that it would be so very painfully relevant today in the midst of historical traumas in the making.”
An objective of the January talk was to address traumas experienced by one’s ancestors that get transmitted onto future generations in the form of fears, anxieties and hopelessness. Firestone’s goal is to help current generations “metabolize life better” so that the damaging psychological effects of trauma are not extended to future generations. In other words, those who come after should experience life from a position of resilience and hopefulness.
Firestone, who currently lives in Boulder, Colo., spoke about her own parents, who were deeply impacted by the Shoah – her mother as a German survivor and her father as an American soldier stationed in Germany.
“The past does not disappear. The painful histories our ancestors endured, along with their warmth, resilience and all their good resources, are intertwined within us, both psycho-spiritually as well as physically and physiologically,” said Firestone. “And they create the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.”
Along these lines, the pain from trauma can be unspoken over the course of generations, yet becomes part of the individual nonetheless. Or, as in a quote from Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On, cited by Firestone: “Untold stories often pass on more powerfully from generation to generation than stories that can be recounted.”
Ongoing patterns, whether ones of heroism and activism or depression and anxiety, are transmitted across generations. A young woman Firestone worked with, for example, became an activist, not knowing it ran in the family – her grandmother and great-aunt, neither of whom she had ever met, were rebels in their shtetl decades earlier.
Another example involved a woman whose very first memories as a young child were nightmares. One night, she explained to her concerned mother why she would wake up crying so often. The image in the young child’s mind was of an old wooden town where a man at the train station would jump from the platform to the train tracks. The man would run along the tracks yelling, “Stop! Stop!” The train would go on with the young man unable to catch it.
When the mother heard her child’s story, she cried and asked in disbelief, “How could you possibly have known this?” It was the story of the child’s grandfather who, in the Second World War, found out belatedly that Jews in his town, including his young family, had been rounded up and deported by train. He ran after the train, but never caught up and never saw his family again. The man survived the Holocaust and started a new life and family in the United States.
Traumas can happen collectively. Firestone noted that Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev wrote, “I am a Jew, and there are scenes of the Holocaust that are indelibly etched in my mind, even though I was not alive at the time.”
Firestone also outlined research conducted by Rachel Yehuda of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, which showed that the children of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms when exposed to traumatic events than the children of other Jews.
In the latter part of her talk, Firestone focused on what can be done towards healing trauma. Every family has its own ruptures and resources, no matter who or where it is, she said. Whether through intelligence, resilience or good fortune, every family today is a survivor. Thus, she asked, “What family resources can you tap to assist you in this current moment in history?”
Among some of the keys she highlighted for healing trauma, and which are discussed in greater depth in her book, is being aware of family legacies. This awareness, she asserts, will hinder the transmission of trauma to succeeding generations.
Another is to face one’s losses. “When we face our grief, we can start to feel our grief. When we don’t feel our grief, it becomes pathogenic. It makes disease on the inside of us,” she said.
A third technique for healing, according to Firestone, is “to harness the power of one’s pain.” That is, one can use the tremendous power contained in pain to bring on more destruction and further pain or to bring light, warmth and hope.
Firestone advised taking action. Here she employed a saying from Midrash: “Had I not fallen, I would not have arisen. Had I not been subject to darkness, I would not have seen the light.”
In concluding her remarks, Firestone said, “We have a mandate to draw on our ancestors’ greatest traits – their survival skills, their courage, their ingenuity – to apply to circumstances now. There are so many people who are suffering. What can we do from our own pain by harnessing its power and going places that we could not have gone before we endured [it]?”
For more on Firestone and her writings and ideas, visit tirzahfirestone.com.
To register for future Kolot Mayim speaker series Zooms, the next of which takes place Feb. 4, click here.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.