Thriving Beyond Surviving

This podcast is about the deep connections between four stories I recently heard: a forest of five million trees growing in a desert; a Holocaust survivor describing how she survived and thrived; a Rabbi living for thirteen in a cave who became a beacon of light for Jews during the last two thousand years; and a thirteen year old girl silently suffering in a very difficult volatile family environment, surviving, but not thriving.

Hearing these stories challenge us to go beyond what is, they wake up our imagination, they plant hope in our lives and move us in the direction of action.

Transcript

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The Jewish Story Podcast Thriving Beyond Survival. In 1936, the Peel Commission was set up by the British authorities in mandatory Palestine to investigate the serious unrest in the area. The report, which was published in 1937, among other things, stated that there were major unrealized possibilities for economic growth. With the aid of irrigation projects, the reclamation of the land, afforestation and intensive cultivation methods. Palestine, they believed, had strong potential for continued growth and modernization. But only if the political conflict was solved. Could anyone then have imagined, despite the fact that the political conflict has not yet been resolved, that eighty-nine years later Israel will be the world's leading planter of trees? Some 250 million trees have been planted in Israel. I recently watched a video by one particular forest called Yatiir, which is situated in southern Israel in the Negev desert. Normally deserts are not populated by forests, as they are places of extreme aridity, sparse vegetation, moisture deficit, and high temperature variation. So how could five million trees survive and flourish in such an arid environment? Hearing about such a radical transformation of desert into forests turned on a light in my imagination, and fired connections with other events I experienced at the time. Some hours later I saw a video, the testimony of a Holocaust survivor called Hannah, ninety six years old. As I was listening to her, I asked myself the question how did human trees flourish in the most inhumane desert that has ever existed in the Holocaust? What could possibly have fertilized the soul of her soil of hers the soil of her soul under such circumstances? She described an event which she would never forget. Martha, a fellow inmate who had just lost all her family, would wake up in the morning and sing. Hannah asked her how she could sing in such circumstances. She answered because if I stop singing, I stop being human, and I won't give them that. She died three weeks later from typhus. What nourished Hannah's soul was the choice to hold on to her humanity like Martha. When everything else around was arid and devoid of life and desolate, there was something which would enable Hanna's tree to grow, and that was the understanding that the Nazis could take everything from her, but they could not take from her last freedom. The freedom to decide who you are inside, to choose to be human. Later on in life living in America, Hannah discovered that it was necessary again to nourish her human tree in order that she should continue to flourish. Hanna joined a Holocaust survivor's support group to help her cope with the burden of survivor's guilt. The facilitator, a rabbi, survivor of Chablinka, said to her, The dead don't want your guilt. They want your joy. They want you to live the life they couldn't live. She decided to live for all of them. She decided to move forward. The third time she fertilized the earth under her tree was after her daughter said to her one day, Mum, they took your childhood. Don't let them take your life. And the fourth time which provided the final nourishment was at the age of sixty-seven when she overcame her fears of flying and visited Israel. At the Western Wall, she understood for the first time that we, the Jews, had won. She saw that the Jews had not just survived, but thrived. Thriving meant keeping going one day at a time, one breath at a time. Every day you have a choice to live, and then you do it again the next day. I watched these two videos at the time of year when we were celebrating Lagba Omar, which is the thirty-third day of the counting, between the holidays of Passover and Shavuat weeks. The day of the passing of Rabbi Shimon Bayochai, a great Jewish teacher and mystic. Rabbi Shimon had once taken part in a discussion with two other renowned rabbis in which they discussed the motivation of the Roman authorities for all the public works that they had built in the country. One rabbi didn't speak, another rabbi said that the Romans built public works for the good of the local inhabitants. Rabbi Shimon said that they built them for their own good. When the Romans got word of this discussion, Rabbi Shimon became a wanted man, and he fled with his son Elizer to the countryside in the north of Israel, and hid in a cave for thirteen years. How did Rabbi Shimon and his son survive for thirteen years in a cave? There appeared a stream and carob tree miraculously near the cave, which provided them with the necessary nourishment. Rabbi Shimon and his son spent their time learning, discovering very deep spiritual insights in the Torah, which later on were written down in the book called the Zoha. In picts dug in the earth, they studied naked in order to preserve their clothes. For thirteen years they lived in the most minimalistic natural environment. But from this experience came teachings which have inspired the people of Israel for two thousand years. Lakba'am is a day during which some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people come to visit Rabbi Shimon's grave in Mehran to celebrate. From being a wanted man, fleeing for his life and living for thirteen years in a cave, to spreading the light of Torah to the people of Israel all over the world till this day is an astonishing example of surviving and thriving. A day later, I conducted a supervision session with a social work student who was doing her master's degree. One of the topics of discussion was a 13-year-old girl who lived with her three siblings and mother. Her father had left the house and gone to live with another woman. The relationship between the father and mother had been unstable for a number of years, complicated by alcohol and drug use by the father. The father, after separating from the family, became estranged from his daughter, which upset her considerably. The girl was unable to express her feelings towards her father, and clearly her inner world was in turmoil. It was in relating to this thirteen year old girl's inner world, locked off from the world around her, that so resonated with the story of the trees flourishing in the desert. Clearly this girl was in need of nourishment, as her environment was so volatile and problematic, but she could not find a way to nourish her soul. With very few fiends and no one in the family with whom to share her feelings, she spent all her time on her mobile phone. I felt there was a deep connection between the four stories, trees growing in the desert, a Holocaust survivor describing how she thrived in the camps, a rabbi living for thirteen years in a cave who became a beacon of light for Jews during the last two thousand years, and a thirteen year old girl silently suffering in a very difficult, volatile family environment, surviving but not thriving. What was required in order to help this young girl thrive? Coping with hostile environments is not new for Jews. Let us for a moment go back in time, some three thousand five hundred years to the first hostile environment in Jewish history in ancient Egypt. After two hundred years of slavery, Moses was sent on a mission by God to tell the people of God's message of hope, salvation, and freedom. But initially the Jews were incapable of hearing the message, so burdened were they by hard work and the anguish of their spirit. What eventually brought about the change that enabled the people to hear the message? According to the great Hasidic Rabbi Nachman from Brezhnev, the transformation that came about was the result of the story that Moses told the people of Israel. Rabbi Nachman says the main function of the story was to wake the people up, to arouse them from their sleep. For the people of Israel's sleep meant being sunk in a way of relating to themselves and their situation that prevented them from imagining any possibility of salvation. In other words, their slave mentality deprived them of their imaginative faculties. What was was all there was. The Jews who came to live in the land of Israel in the first half of the twentieth century initially saw a desert, but over the years they began to imagine that the desert could become something else. Hannah initially saw only death and destruction all around her, but over time came to see that there was more, that there was something which could grow inside of her. Rabbi Shimon spent most of the thirteen years he was in the cave naked in the hole in the earth, but he was able to transcend his earthly environment and become a vessel for the light of the Torah from beyond this world. How could the young girl struggling to survive in her volatile environment see beyond? Could the social worker tell her a story? Rachel Nomi Remin in a book by Grandfather's Blessings, tells the following story. Years ago I cared for a desperately sick two year old boy with bacterial meningitis. Deeply unconscious, Ricardo lay in a nest of IV lines and monitor cords, his tiny body almost hidden by the technology that supported and documented his struggle to live. His mother, a slight Filipino woman, sat at the foot of his bed day after day. She even slept there, sitting in her chair and leaning forward across the mattress. Whenever any of us came to examine Ricardo or draw blood from him, we would find her there, often with her eyes closed, one hand under her baby's blanket. She was holding on to his foot. After he began to recover and the life support equipment was withdrawn, I asked her about this. She smiled and looked away a little embarrassed, but she told me that for all those days she had felt that his life depended on her holding on to his foot. Moved, I asked her what had been going on in her mind all that time. Had she been praying for her for his recovery? No, she told me. While she was holding his foot, she would just close her eyes and dream her dreams for him. Day after day she would watch him grow up. She would imagine taking him to his first day of school, see him learning to read and to write and play ball, sit in church at his first communion, watch him graduate from high school, dance at his wedding. She would imagine him as the father of her grandchild over and over and over again. She flushed slightly. Perhaps she told me it made a difference. Remon notes that sometimes we may strengthen the life of others when we have an image of their future and hold on to it fiercely. Who could metaphorically hold the young girl's foot? A wounded and depleted soul, says Stevenson Bon in his book Living Myth, is one whose inner life has been stripped bare of imagination. It has been left barren like a desert, a concentration camp, a hole in the ground, it is a place where consciousness is limited, where the conscious mind knows only impossibility. Loss of imagination leads to a self which withdraws into itself deep into its cave where development stops. It is a place where no trees grow, a place where we are slaves. How does one flex the muscles of imagination? By hearing and telling stories, but also by playing games and engaging in creating activities. These activities enable us to experience our lives through the prism of a larger context. It puts us in touch with the space where our imagination can thrive, our soul can thrive, we can thrive. It is a place where meaning is revealed, it is a place where the separate parts in our lives begin to fit together. I began this talk impressed by the ability of Jews to imagine a forest in the desert. This impression aroused a connection to Hannah, who could imagine herself as a human being, in a place where the Nazis did everything inhumanly possible to turn human beings into non-human ones. It further connected to Rabbi Shimon, who in the cave could imagine the physical world as part of God's creation and how we fit it into that creation. And finally it connected to a young girl struggling to survive, who as of yet could not imagine. But if there is something that we can take from all the above stories, it is, as Rabbi Nachman told us, that telling a story challenges us to go beyond. Our imagination wakes up and hope sprouts from the earth leading to action. To conclude this talk, there is perhaps no better example of that process story, imagination, hope, action than the following story. The season winter the time december seventeen seventy five, the first night of Hanukkah, the place Valley Forge, North America. A lone Jewish soldier in the American army, hungry and cold, is sitting on the ground in a field. He sadly remembered his family that he had left behind in Poland and how they had suffered at the hands of the Poles. That was why he American emigrated to America, and that was why he was fighting for freedom. A soldier in George Washington's army, he firmly believed that the Americans would win. As he lit the first candle of Hanukkah, he remembered that before he left Poland his father had given him the menorah and said to him, When you light the Hanukkah candles, they will illuminate the way for you. He began to cry like a small child. Suddenly he felt a hand touching his head. It was General George Washington, commander of the American army. He asked him why he was crying. He immediately jumped up and said to General Washington, I am crying and praying for your victory, and I know that with the help of God we will win. Today they are strong. Tomorrow they will fall because justice is with us. We want to be free in this land. We want to build a home here for all those who flee from the hands of cruel noblemen. They will not rule over us. They will fall and you will rise. George Washington shook his hand and said, Thank you, soldier, and sat next to him on the ground in front of the Menorah. What is this candlestick? he asked. He told him the Jews at this time were lighting candles all over the world to celebrate the miracle of Chanukah. Washington asked him, You are a Jew from the nation of prophets, and you say we will be victorious? Yes came the answer. We will win just like the Maccabees won for ourselves and for all those who come here after us to build a new land and new lives. Washington got up and left. His face was shining. The Americans won the war. One year later, on the first night of Hanukkah, there was a knock on the door of the Jews' apartment in New York. It was President George Washington. Seeing the candle in the window, Washington said, Behold the wonderful candle, the candle of hope of the Jewish people. This candle and your beautiful words ignited a light in my heart that night. Soon you will receive a medal of honor from the United States of America, together with all the brave men of Valley Forge, but tonight please accept this token from me. He hung a golden medallion on the Jew's chest and shook his hand. On the medallion there was an etching of a Hanukkah Menorah. Under it it was written a token of gratitude for the light of your candle. George Washington. On that night in Valley Forge, a year beforehand, a lone Jewish American soldier had sat on the ground, starving, frozen, not dressed for the severe winter, along with hundreds of other soldiers like him, in an utterly bleak, desolate, and inhospitable place except for a candle and a story. Thank you for listening. Please pass on these stories.