Buried deep within us, past traumatic events can interfere with our progress toward fulfillment, presence, and love. To develop a new sense of self that does not feel controlled by the past is an important part of our journey. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Yom HaShoah, the day for remembering those who perished in the Holocaust, is observed annually on the 27th day of Nisan. This year the observance begins at sundown on April 27 and ends with sundown on April 28. The date also connects with the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. As adopted by the Israeli Knesset, the full name for this time of commemoration is Yom HaShoah Ve-HaGevurah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, having spent 1942-1945 in four different concentration camps. His father, his mother, his brother, and his wife all died in the camps. A year after the end of World War II, Frankl published a book in German which was eventually translated into English as Man’s Search for Meaning. It is this search for meaning, Frankl argued, that is the essence of what it means to be alive. Even within suffering, it is possible to search for and create meaning. He wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This resistance to the weight of external forces, this affirmation of the power to choose one’s way and to create, lies at the heart of Torah. It is not a text about abandoning material reality for a spiritual one. It is about infusing the power of the sacred into everyday life. The land the Israelites journey towards is not the Perfect Land. It is the Land of Promise, a dimension that calls out for human initiative in the face of problems both mundane and extraordinary. To be actively engaged in shaping responses to life’s challenges is reviving.
Imagination is the engine that ignites the power of possibility in our lives: the capacity to see beyond what currently can be seen or touched. In 1913 Marc Chagall painted Paris Through My Window. Anchoring the image is the very real Eiffel Tower. But this is not a view Chagall could have experienced from where he was living in Paris at the time. If there was a window that provided this vista, it could only have been the window of his imagination. Such a window also enabled him to see an upside down train, a parachutist in the middle of the city, and two figures flying in midair toward each other.
Chagall rejected that he was engaged in fantasy. “I am against the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘symbolism.’ Our whole inner world is reality – perhaps even more real than the apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical ‘fantasy’ or fairy tales is really to admit that one does not understand nature.” Chagall did not retreat from reality and into fantasy. He lived Jewish wonder and amazement and hope. To be passive, to surrender in the face of life’s challenges is a form of death. Wonder, amazement and hope are the seeds for responsibility and change in the world.
In the lower right corner of Chagall’s painting is a two-headed figure looking in opposite directions. This may be the artist looking back to his home village of Vitebsk, a place rich with tales of wonder workers and humor in the face of grim oppression, and forward to his new home of Paris and modernity. He brought the former with him as he worked to create a new self in a new world.
This week’s Torah portion acknowledges that trauma is a part of life. It hints that the way through such injury is to recall that experience, to construct a new interpretation of it and to develop a new self not controlled by the past. As the order of this week and next week’s Torah portions discloses, to do so leads one away from death and toward holiness.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PDT) Thursday April 28 as we explore go behind to get ahead.
