Unprotected and Overexposed
Cherie Brown [International Liberation Reference Person for Jews] led an RC workshop for Jews from England, Israel, South Africa, Germany, and the Netherlands. It had profound significance for me.
I found out there is a reason why I feel like I’m “mad” [insane] and not “normal”: I was born in the North of England in 1952, seven years after the end of World War II, into a Jewish family that was facing the horrors of the Holocaust, and I lived in a world of division and oppression.
There was a workshop for allies alongside the workshop for Jews. On Sunday morning the allies joined us for a joint class, as we sang them a Jewish welcome song. My partner is a Holocaust survivor, born in Poland in 1937. After an earlier Jews and Allies Workshop, I overheard him talking to a Jewish friend. He said if the welcome and joint class had happened in Poland in the 1930s, “what happened would not have happened.”
Denial of reality is at the core of Jewish internalised oppression. Throughout our history what has been done to us as Jews has been denied. That has made us feel “crazy.” I’ve experienced the world one way and been told that it’s not like that. A word I heard a lot as I was growing up was meshuga, which means “crazy” in Hebrew and Yiddish. “You are driving me meshuga.” “Don’t be meshuga.” But our struggle is not a personal one. It is a result of systematic oppression. Cherie dared us to show, in Co-Counseling sessions, our heaviest distresses. She asked, “Where do you live inside?”
As Jews we are healing from two thousand years of trauma. And we live in a Gentile-dominated world—we are 0.02% of the world population, about fifteen million people. We are also both unprotected and overexposed. We can see that with Israel. There is an intense focus on Israel that no other country experiences.
Cherie challenged us to decide that “the trauma stops with me.” Every time we do that, we reclaim our own reality.
England
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Jews
(Present Time 209, October 2022)