Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma: New Preface from the Author, New Foreword by Gabor Mate (pending), Reading Group Guide

Praise for

Wounds into Wisdom:

"Suffering trauma is tragedy enough, but burying tragedy only creates a magnet for more suffering. Tirzah Firestone’s WOUNDS INTO WISDOM is for anyone who has suffered trauma, either directly or in a family whose generational trauma is buried. It helps readers uncover suffering and use it to help others—the final stage of healing. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can create what happens next."—Gloria Steinem

An explosion of suffering, death and trauma has overtaken humanity during the past century and shows no signs of abating. Rabbi Tirzah Firestone speaks on every page of this deeply moving book with her heart and mind and from the deepest wellsprings of Jewish tradition to find sources of solace to transform wounds into wisdom. Her book spills over with empathy and compassion, forging a uniquely spiritual voice that heals and lifts our souls.

—Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College and editor of Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings

If we are ever to transform conflict and bring peace to this wounded world, we will need to understand and address collective and intergenerational trauma. In this illuminating and inspiring book, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone interweaves deeply touching personal stories, including her own, with keen psychological insights to guide us on a journey of awakening and healing our traumas. Highly recommended!—William Ury, co-author of the bestsellers Getting to Yes and author of Getting to Yes with Yourself

This book is both a gift of wisdom and an opening of the heart. Representing years and years of feeling research, rabbi and psychotherapist Tirzah Firestone lets us listen in to the powerful stories of people who have suffered trauma in their lives. She offers us the wisdom of a compassionate therapist whose understanding is broad and deep. But she also offers us the spiritual perspective of a rabbi who has found her way to the deeper currents of Jewish understanding. Running through WOUNDS INTO WISDOM, and binding it, is an autobiographical account of her own family’s trauma. That account is powerful in itself, but it is also empowering—we can feel how the author has herself lived through trauma, and has even found her way to become a great healer and teacher. The book is addressed primarily to the Jewish experience of trauma in the twentieth century. But I believe it would be of profound help to anyone seeking to navigate the path to healing from trauma—which I believe, in some ways, is all of us.—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream

WOUNDS INTO WISDOM is a tour de force! Rabbi Firestone has woven together threads of truth about trauma that include her own family’s life-experience of trauma inherited from the Holocaust, the new science of the inherited effects of trauma on genetic material and on the brain, studies of the social impact of traumatic events on large groups of people, and the mystical traditions of Kabbalah about the wounded human soul. She has woven these threads into a shimmering shawl of healing.—Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of The Shalom Center and author of Godwrestling—Round 2 and Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought

With tender compassion and luminous insight, Rabbi Tirzah unwraps the hidden layers of stories, wounds, and wisdom that characterize the global Jewish community. She deftly lifts the complex history of modern Judaism to the light, offering an opportunity for particular reconciliation and universal healing.—Mirabai Starr, author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation

A very important book. Rabbi Tirzah is a wounded healer. She uses the tale of her own trauma in a Holocaust survivor family as a stepping stone toward understanding survivor stories told by a wide variety of Jews, including many Israelis. But she then broadens the lens, showing how these very particularistic tales of personal struggle and healing may help people of many cultures to deal with legacies of exile and loss. A narrative of deep empathy and much wisdom.—Professor Art Green, Founding Dean of Hebrew College, Boston, and author of Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas and Radical Judaism

WOUNDS INTO WISDOM is a book to share and spread. Rabbi Tirzah Firestone’s compassionate wisdom shines through every page as she leads her readers on a journey toward freedom and healing from communal trauma. Transformation no longer seems like a wishful aspiration, it is a birthright we all have the power to claim.—Naomi Levy, author of Einstein and the Rabbi

Brilliant, beautiful, and compels one to positive action. The people interviewed are so real and lovable.... [Firestone’s] writing opens one’s heart to healing and hope. This is a book I will read again for inspiration and specific principles to live a joyful, liberated life.—Dr. Anita L. Sanchez, author of The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times

Drawing on remarkable, true stories and tantalizing psychological and scientific theories that trace trauma in previous generations to subsequent ones, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone makes a strong case that the experiences of past generations live on in us. She provides a convincing case in remarkably clear language. WOUNDS INTO WISDOM  is a powerful game-changer in how we will come to view trauma.—Howard Schwartz, editor of Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism

WOUNDS INTO WISDOM is a timely and moving book that speaks to this particular historical moment, when current events are triggering deeply buried trauma and traumatizing new populations. Firestone makes a clear and urgent case for the importance of this work and its application to different contexts, and grounding it in her own family’s story makes the book come alive.—Judith Rosenbaum, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive

Tirzah Firestone’s WOUNDS INTO WISDOM offers hope to those whose lives have been shattered by trauma. The question at the heart of this book is this: Can you emerge from tragedy wiser and more free? Her answer eloquently stated and illustrated by powerful stories and profound insight, is yes you can. If tragedy haunts your life or the lives of those you love—read this book; it has the potential to change everything.—Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Minyan and annotation of sacred teachings in Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent

We all fear trauma and take pains to avoid or bury it. As a result, trauma can lodge in the body or the unconscious, and, as Tirzah Firestone writes in this compelling book, can be passed unknowingly from generation to generation, ‘like a train depositing its load, car after car, into our newborn skin.’ The power of this book is in the stories she relates of people who’ve suffered extreme pain, faced it head-on, and found a path to healing. The stories soften our hearts, inspire gratitude and compassion for our fellow humans, and give us the tools to make sure the train of trauma goes no further.—Sara Davidson, New York Times bestselling author of The December Project, Loose Change, and Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion

Tirzah Firestone is a compelling and genuinely fresh voice, revealing over and over again ‘resonant truths that hold meaning for today.’ I am moved by this book. And even when I disagree with her, Firestone makes me think in a broader way, as she will you.—Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of Jewish Literacy and Jewish Wisdom

Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma © 2019, 2022 by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-948626-82-8

eBook ISBN 978-1-948626-89-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Firestone, Tirzah, author. | Maté, Gabor, writer of foreword.

Title: Wounds into wisdom : healing intergenerational Jewish trauma, with

new preface; includes reading group and study guide / Rabbi Tirzah

Firestone, Ph.D. ; foreword by Gabor Maté.

Description: Rhinebeck, New York : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, [2022]

| Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022014230 (print) | LCCN 2022014231 (ebook) | ISBN

9781948626828 (paperback) | ISBN 9781948626897 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Psychological aspects. |

Psychic trauma--Transmission. | Psychic trauma--Social aspects. |

Holocaust survivors--Psychology. | Children of Holocaust

survivors--Psychology.

Classification: LCC D804.3 .F56723 2022 (print) | LCC D804.3 (ebook) |

DDC 362.87089/924--dc23/eng/20220525

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014230

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014231

Book and cover design by Colin Rolfe

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street, Suite 304

Rhinebeck, New York 12572

(845) 876-4861

monkfishpublishing.com

In memory of my brother Daniel and my sister Shulamith

Contents

Foreword by Gabor Maté, M.D.

Preface

Part I

Introduction: Shedding New Light on a Dark History

Chapter One: The Price of Silence

Chapter Two: Trauma, Mind, and Body: The Paradox of Survival

Chapter Three: The Importance of Being Witnessed

Chapter Four: Awakenings

Chapter Five: The Terrible Gift

Part II

Introduction: The Principles of Jewish Cultural Healing

Principle One: Facing the Loss

Principle Two: Harnessing the Power of Pain

Principle Three: Finding New Community

Principle Four: Resisting the Call to Fear, Blame, and Dehumanize

Principle Five: Disidentifying from Victimhood

Principle Six: Redefining Jewish Chosenness

Principle Seven: Taking Action

Endnotes

References

Reading and Discussion Guide

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Foreword

In Wounds into Wisdom Rabbi Tirzah Firestone melds her skills as a psychotherapist with the spiritual insights of the rabbinic tradition she is steeped in. The result is a work characterized by wisdom, insight, and compassion, all brought to bear on what is surely one of the most painful subjects in modern history: Jewish trauma and its intergenerational reverberations.

The book is a courageous undertaking in two senses. First, the author is unsparingly forthcoming in depicting how the catastrophic sufferings of the Jewish people in the twentieth century impacted her own family, the traumatic imprints of her survivor parents having been passed on to their offspring with dire results. The supreme irony was that her parents’ rigid clinging to tradition, with the intent of preserving what the Nazis had tried to annihilate, caused the dissolution of the family and the tragic demise of two of Tirzah’s gifted siblings. It is a tribute to Tirzah’s commitment to healing and to the religious teachings she had abandoned and then re-embraced that she was able to find in her grievous losses what she describes as a terrible gift. Indeed, that is part of her core message: that in the deepest suffering we may find the seeds of transformation.

The young Tirzah resented and rebelled against the biblical teaching that God remembers the sins of the fathers upon their children even unto the third and fourth generations. "What kind of God was that, I wondered, who couldn’t lay down his grudges, even to the point that innocent children would be caught up in their grandparents’ mistakes? And then to boast about it! The mature rabbi and therapist sees deeper. God here does not refer to a sadistic, punitive deity, but the most profound Reality. The Bible is conveying a universal truth: The violations and heartbreaks suffered in one era often continue to travel through time, creating a legacy of new suffering until they are finally faced and felt." Feeling and facing, learning from, and transforming the bitter actuality of Jewish trauma is Tirzah’s central intention and, ultimately, the wisdom she seek to bestow upon her readers. She guides us, too, to find the gifts in terrible events, as she has had to, in order to break the chain of trauma transmission mi dor l’dor, as the Hebrew has it, from generation to generation.

The second point of bravery in this book is its stalwart refusal to cast Jews purely in the role of victims. This is not an act of denial, but an affirmation of the Jewish spirit, a special expression of the indomitable spirit of humanity. There is no questioning nor obscuring of facts or history. The Nazi genocide as an act of mechanized mass murder in the service of psychotic hatred is unique in the annals of human experience, dripping with the blood of innocents as those annals are. Tirzah notes with compassion the impacts of the horrors without relegating its subjects and their descendants to passive role of victims. In this refusal she nowhere implies that we Jews were somehow responsible for what befell us, but she strongly advocates for our power in responding to the historical calamities of the centuries. That power, humanely deployed, divests us of victimhood.

A refreshing aspect of this book is its bracing examination of the concept of Jewish chosenness. Despite the historical tragedies, Tirzah rejects this special category, both in its senses of a people having been selected for unique and unrelenting suffering at the hands of others—that is, of a suspicious and fearful world view—and in its sense of some vague or overt moral or religious precedence. The latter is a semi-conscious habit which many Jews, if we are honest with ourselves, will acknowledge as a rarely articulated but often present undertone in Jewish self-discourse. She sees both as constrictive and as a subversion of the deep impulse to be, to the extent of our abilities, faithful to the spiritual calling our own prophetic tradition has venerated. In that vein, it is up to us—as to all peoples—to live up to the best expectations and highest qualities one’s culture has taught and embodied. This has everything to do with genuine pride but has nothing in common with chauvinism. It occurred to me, Tirzah reports, how dangerously fine the line was between chosenness and racial supremacy. Taken as religious mandate, an identity of chosenness implies a racial bias. It sanctions seeing oneself as superior; it denies the equality and dignity of other peoples, races, and voices.

For some readers the most controversial aspect of Rabbi Firestone’s discussion of Jewish trauma and healing may be her examination of the Israel/Palestine conflict which, by any objective measure, has seen the realization of a Jewish dream of liberation leading to the dispossession and suffering of another people. Tirzah here approaches the conflict not as a judge of either side nor as an advocate for either, but as a healer. Compassionately she hears both sides and gives voices to the grief and suffering and yearning for peace of both.

Beyond promising the possibilities of healing, the book ends with an extended section on its practicalities. Tirzah outlines seven principles, steps if you will, that, if followed, can lead to the restoration of wholeness both on the individual level and in the life of a people whose communal fabric has been frayed by multigenerational trauma. In this she relies on both modern psychological insights and on the legacy of tradition. One core strength of that tradition, paradoxically enough, is its capacity for renewal and change—in other words, in its refreshing willingness to challenge tradition itself. I discovered, Tirzah writes, that the Jewish path contains much life-giving medicine. Nor is it monolithic, but full of divergent voices, interpretations, and room for innovation. I understood that Judaism had survived not only by dint of its adherence to law and custom, but because of its ability to evolve and adapt to whatever conditions Jews were subjected, however challenging.

Both as an infant survivor of genocide and as a physician and author much concerned with the healing of trauma, both personal and collective, I was struck by how aptly Tirzah’s hard-earned lessons could be applied to people hurting within but also well beyond the Jewish community. Wounds Into Wisdom is a vivid demonstration that, while we may not be able to choose our past, we are certainly able to choose our attitude toward the present and future. Indeed, it is both our privilege and task to do so, for our own sake and that of future generations.

Gabor Maté, M.D.

Author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness

and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Preface

The world has changed immeasurably since Wounds into Wisdom was first released in 2019.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that being alive today is to be confronted with the effects of trauma in all directions. Whether we are talking about high-stakes wars, social isolation, gun violence, or the floods and fires of a warming planet, the tolls of trauma are everywhere.

I began my research for Wounds into Wisdom with the people closest to me: my own Jewish family and community. The science of trauma helped me to understand where I had come from and the historical factors that underlie the problematic behaviors within and around me. Later, as a rabbi, and psychotherapist, the knowledge of how trauma’s residues can be transmitted intergenerationally allowed me to put into context the conundrums that so many families and individuals I worked with were experiencing—anxiety, shame, addiction, emotional reactivity and numbness, to name just a few examples. Embarking on writing this book brought healing to me and my own family, and it has become a talisman in tender times.

It was when I embarked on teaching the research and principles from this book more broadly that I realized that the topic of healing intergenerational trauma has far vaster implications than I initially imagined. I quickly learned that the Seven Principles applied to every ethnicity and nationality I encountered. Just like our ancestors’ unresolved life experiences reverberate within us and shape us, so the collective misdeeds of past generations affect entire populations when they are not reconciled.

I am thinking here about the massive traumas resulting from the collective suffering caused by the Indigenous genocide in North America, the abduction and enslavement of millions of Africans by white-skinned Europeans, and the centuries of cruel domination of girls and women by societies around the world. Far from finished, these traumas are carried in our cellular memory as individuals and as entire populations. They now demand our attention and reckoning.

I’ve been deeply honored to teach and learn from people around the world. For example, when I was invited to address the prisoners of San Quentin, I was surprised by their deep understanding of trauma’s transmission. They broke my heart open with stories about their fathers’ failed efforts to love them, their mothers and grandmothers’ wisdom and tender care. I also experienced nobility in the face of great suffering from Indigenous elders in Canada who brought sacred ceremony to the burial grounds where their children’s bones had been freshly exhumed after being brutally murdered and buried by proponents of state-sponsored schools. I learned to listen with compassion to the descendants of Nazi officers who struggled with the onus of their ancestors’ crimes, and I cried with those who had suffered atrocities at the hands of Eastern European fascist regimes. All of them, people like you and me, were grappling with the unfinished business of their ancestors’ lives.

So while the research and case studies in this book involve Jewish trauma survivors, and bear the particular hallmarks of my people’s persecution, the teachings and principles derived from them apply to all people. Whether our forebears survived Jewish discrimination, or any other kind of discrimination, whether they were the victims or perpetrators, colonized or colonizers—all our wounds must be healed for us to break the chains of suffering for the generations that follow us.

Because whatever our background or ethnicity, life’s injuries mysteriously find their way into the future to seek resolution. That is why many of us feel the echoes of our ancestors’ lives vibrating in us today. The traumas they endured, the injustices they witnessed, the quandaries they never solved are looking to us for completion.

Since writing Wounds into Wisdom, I have had the immense honor of teaching side by side with extraordinary teachers representing many points of view—including Gloria Steinem, Resmaa Menakem, Sharon Salzberg, Mirabai Starr, Freedom Cartwright, Anita Sanchez, and Gabor Matè. Listening to their voices and the experiences of hundreds of students around the world, I have learned that all trauma is intergenerational. And while our individual wounds are rooted in our people’s particular stories and flavors, we all have an opportunity now to make a quantum leap in awareness. Because much that has gone unhealed in the past is coming due in our day. And much of the accrued wisdom of history is available to us now. We are the ones to help heal the past because it lives in the present. It lives in us.

I welcome you into these pages, on the journey of