When I was 14 or 15 years old, I was swimming in the lake at my family’s cabin in Maine. It’s a shallow part of the lake, and the shoreline extends from the dock around to the left, where there are bushes, trees, and various sticks and dead branches. I swam over to the left, and suddenly a black water snake darted out and began swimming toward me. I screamed and flapped about, running out of the water. And for the last almost 30 years, I have never once swum to the left along that shore. In fact, I taught my children to avoid the area, too.
In evolutionary biology, as I recently learned from my colleague Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell, there’s a concept that we’ve evolved to detect dangers and to avoid them – especially, it turns out, to tell the difference between a snake and a stick. They look similar on the ground, but our primate eyes and other senses have evolved to detect when it’s a snake – even to “over-detect,” because it’s safer to confuse a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick. Detecting and remembering the danger protects us.
But what if we start to see snakes everywhere? Every stick is a danger. We can’t walk in the woods anymore. We can’t move forward.
In this week’s Torah portion, we see Isaac building his family and his life. As Rabbi Geoff Mitelman pointed out in this newsletter last week, Abraham and Jacob are seen as patriarchs that move the story forward, but Isaac seems to be repeating his father’s story. Just like Abraham, he lies about his wife and says she is his sister, in an attempt to protect them from attack in Gerar (Genesis 26:6-11). He redigs Abraham’s wells, which had been stopped up by the Philistines after Abraham’s death (Genesis 26:18-22). He repeats the patterns of his father.
In Jewish community, we experience this, too. Fear is the lullaby our grandparents and parents sing us, to protect us. They teach us to see snakes everywhere, even if it makes us anxious. Or sad. Or angry. But at least we’ll never miss one. We redig those wells of trauma over and over again. And we teach our children.
On Rosh Hashanah this year, I sat with my daughter at Toronto’s Congregation Beth Tzedec, the largest Conservative synagogue in Canada. We were coming to the rabbi’s sermon. Suddenly, the service stopped. The senior rabbi looked to the back of the sanctuary and then announced that the Chief of Police of the City of Toronto, the Deputy Chief of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police (the Federal police force), the Deputy Chief of the Ontario Provincial Police, and several other senior police administrators had come to pay their respects to the congregation during this challenging time. In Toronto, we had experienced anti-Israel encampments, out-of-control protests (including outside of synagogues), bullets shot into Jewish school windows, physical attacks, and targeted vandalism of Jewish businesses.
As the officers began their long walk up the aisle of the grand sanctuary, I was surprised that I began to cry. Uncontrollable tears running down my cheeks. My daughter looked up at me and asked, “Why are you crying, Mommy?”
“I’m just so appreciative of how the police are trying to protect us,” I said, struggling to find the words. The woman behind me was also weeping.
The senior rabbi introduced the delegation and then turned to them. “We want to thank you,” he said. “Because we know what can happen when the police are not on our side.”
For most of the people in that room, we knew not from personal experience, but from the stories passed on to us. The movies. The books. The rehearsals of the traumatic experiences our people have gone through. The tears were my own tears, but also my great-grandmother’s tears, who fled the Russian Revolution.
We redig these generational wells over and over, drawing out fear and vigilance as a way to protect ourselves. Fear can be motivating. We get emails from community organizations showing photos and videos of violent protests and attacks on Jews in these last months. They share them to prompt action – signing a petition or making a donation, because the fight or flight response that’s induced in us demands our attention.
I can’t imagine that this is a good way to live, though. This re-traumatization, although perhaps well-intentioned to encourage action, leaves us breathless and in panic mode, making it harder to determine skillful next steps. I’m not sure this is a good communal strategy in the very long run. There must be another way to motivate Jewish action.
I don’t want to see snakes everywhere anymore. But I also don’t want to miss one when it counts.
With special thanks to Rabbi Miriam Margles of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and all my fellow participants, for the pilot program “Countering Antisemitism Within and Without: Trauma Informed Jewish Mindfulness Practice.”
**Pictured above: The Madagascar Leaf-Nosed Snake, which camouflages itself as a stick.
Rabbi Julia Appel is Clal’s Senior Director of Innovation, helping Jewish professionals and lay leaders revitalize their communities by serving their people better. She is passionate about creating Jewish community that meets the challenges of the 21st century – in which Jewish identity is a choice, not an obligation. Her writing has been featured in such publications as The Forward, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Jewish News, among others.