Translating Trauma into Hope
Psalm 27 that we read in Elul is a study in trauma and hope. The Psalm ends with a message of optimism. “I am confident that I should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (verse 13). It is possible, in the aftermath of trauma, to choose life, to translate the trauma into hope.
Trauma, no matter how significant, does not determine our reaction to it or how we choose to remember it. As Viktor Frankl said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
It is our choice whether to embrace the trauma or to process it. As Rachel Naomi Remen writes in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, “Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don’t grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot’s wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.”
But here in Israel we tend to hold on tight to our trauma and to wave it about. It started with the way the Israeli government mandated Holocaust memory in the laws enacted in 1952. These laws were aimed, for political and utilitarian reasons, to emphasize the trauma, not to process it. The Holocaust Remembrance Day has become a bastion of traumatic memory. This traumatic memory remains ungrieved and thus impedes us, as Remen so eloquently states, from living life fully, our lives shadowed with trauma. Thus, we, the children of Holocaust survivors, must struggle between leaving behind our families’ past in order to continue with our lives or choosing to cleave to the trauma as part of our moral obligation to bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. But I have chosen, via my poetry, a third path, neither holding on to the trauma and having it be a barrier to my happiness nor running away from my Second Generation legacy and forgetting the past. The third way is to connect to the past via processing the trauma and grieving. By connecting, via my poetry, to the memory of my relatives murdered in the Holocaust and not merely to the traumatic events, I am creating a Holocaust remembrance of empowerment and resilience:
Provinces
I went on a tour of the camps with Yad VaShem
“To the Provinces of Persecution.”
We visited three camps where the victims were murdered,
And four camps in which they were not murdered, but
died from disease and starvation.
We walked along the paths where they marched and died,
And we visited forests where they laid in ditches and were shot.
We visited towns with no Jews
and synagogues without penitents.
But in all these places,
my family,
clung to life,
and planned a future that never came to be,
exchanging recipes soon to be prepared,
that remain uncooked.
They stood ramrod straight during roll call
so as not to be chosen.
Even when weakened,
they continued to dream dreams
to cling to life.
as death drew ever closer.
But we visited places with none of this vitality,
merely the pallor of death.
In Israel Yom HaShoah is not a day of grieving, it is not a day in which we process the trauma, rather grasp it tightly, we wave it about like a flag. Thus we have become a country that is anxious and fearful, full of strife and disunity. It has become a country where we view our brothers with enmity. We coin them traitors. But there is a different way. We can choose a memory of resilience, not of desolation. We can build museums that teach us to grieve, not to fear. We can educate for optimism, not for suspicion and disunity. We can choose to abandon our vales of sorrows for the land of the living. If we transform how we remember, we can become a nation who believes once again in the possibility of unity.
