UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. She specializes in the healing of ancestral trauma and specifically Jewish ancestral trauma. And this is a topic that is a very close to my heart interest, something I’ve really personally been delving into: inherited family patterns and specifically inherited family patterns from the Jewish experience in my own family lineage. And I feel so fortunate to have the chance to dialogue here with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. She’s an author, a Jungian psychotherapist, and a leader in the International Jewish Renewal Movement. With Sounds True, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone has created an audio series. It’s called The Woman’s Kabbalah: Ecstatic Jewish Practices for Women. She’s the author of several books including The Receiving: Reclaiming Jewish Women’s Wisdom, and most recently a book called Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma. Tirzah, welcome.
Rabbi Tirzah Firestone: Thank you, Tami. I am totally delighted to be here with you and your community
TS: For so many years, we lived in Boulder together, where you still are. I’ve now moved to Vancouver, but I feel this sense of community connection with you, having been in Boulder together for so long. It wasn’t, though, until reading Wounds into Wisdom that I learned more about your own family journey and your personal autobiographical journey, which you weave throughout Wounds into Wisdom, about what you’ve gone through to confront, to accept, to face and metabolize and work through family trauma, inherited family trauma in your life. And I wonder, as we set the stage for our conversation and as a way to introduce you more fully, if you could share a bit about that. I realize it’s a big question.
RTF: Yeah. I think all of our deepest work in our lives is somehow autobiographical. And this was a deep propulsion that I had. I felt propelled to connect the dots. I was a psychotherapist. I have been a body worker, I had become a rabbi and worked with scads of families, intergenerationally in lifecycle rituals, marrying and burying people. So coming into contact with many generations within families and starting to notice the patterns that harked back to my own familial family, my own family patterns that had never quite been resolved. And so putting together my Jewish professional work, my pastoral care, my lifecycle rituals, which in a sense you’re a priestess or a priest when you were a rabbi, putting together personal, my private practice and all that, I had learned things started to just about a dozen years ago, started to just quake in me and propel me into this new chapter.
I want to add one more piece to it. The other piece was that I was doing human rights work in Israel and as a rabbi, and I will say just briefly that things that I saw there in the West Bank, for instance, when I traveled there, I started to have kind of flashbacks or kind of these moments of this is what is happening here. Just huge questions started to like a volcano, starting to rumble and pour out its lava, all of this alchemical stew you might say in the cauldron cooked. And then I went back to school, I got a doctorate in Jung in psychology and in trauma psychology more specifically, and realized that where I had come from my matrix, my own bloodlines, my Jewish bloodlines were my parents who I just thought for so many years were simply neurotic people. They were trauma survivors, they were had enormous unmetabolized, trauma residue.
And that was the source of all the dots started to connect also in Israel. All the dots started to connect that these people here who had gathered from all over the world, Jews from all over the world, mostly Jews from all over the world starting in the thirties, but after World War ii, were coming from around the world with enormous baggage, unworked trauma and residues that of course we’re going to create, we’re going to go into the making of a very specific society with certain, just like a family, you bring your background, you bring your past with you, bring your history with you and the unworked places are going to get lit. They’re going to detonate at certain times and there’ll be also enormous compassion because of the suffering that people bring together. So all of this, what I call an alchemical cookery, started to take place and it’s in this book, Wounds into Wisdom, which is really so much more than just about intergenerational Jewish trauma. It’s about intergenerational trauma, which all of us carry, I would say.
TS: You mentioned that in your own journey when you went to Israel, you started seeing certain images or having certain flashes and there was a moment when I was reading Wounds into Wisdom where you talked about the work of Dr. Vulkan, an acclaimed psychoanalyst in the field of collective trauma, that the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next can come through these image deposits. And I was like, oh, oh wait, this is really important. Some of what’s been happening for me and I imagine is also happening to our listeners that whether it’s in a dream or it’s in some kind of waking moment, there are images and it’s like, where is this coming from? This is not mine, this doesn’t make any sense. And I wonder if you can talk more about that and how people can start to, I don’t even know if decode is the right language. Is it important to decode these quote image deposits?
RTF: Very much so. Vamik Vulkan is one of the first psychoanalyst from Cyprus. He’s still alive. I just heard from one of his students, he’s still elderly alive. He just wrote a new book with his son. He is really the pioneer to this work about what is collective trauma. That it’s not just individuals who carry trauma, it’s also ethnicities carry trauma. And those image deposits have power within our psyche unless we turn to face them and see what are those. So for instance, he also talks, lemme just add to that. He talks about task deposits that one generation will leave in the next generation as its reservoir tasks. So images and tasks. So for instance, nine 11 is a powerful image that of course got played again and again and again in 2001 for American watchers and probably all over the world. That image of the flames on fire now that goes into us. It embeds itself in our nervous system. There is shock, there is horror, there is a sense of unsafety that comes with such an image.
What is the task that goes with it? Now here we get Vamik Vulkan traveled around the world in war zones and he realized that one generation would leave these deposits in the next generation as it died off to, I couldn’t do this, so do this for me. In some cases, in an unfortunate case, it would be take revenge for me because we need to get our honor back. We lost that our people were humiliated. Do it for us. And this is not in words by the way. This is tacit, this is unspoken. These are subliminal, unconscious, very deep images and injunctions in a sense. They’re mandates, they’re requests from get our honor back. It could also be make peace. We never succeeded in making peace. Forgive these people because we can’t go on like this continuing this violence, this cycle of violence. So these task deposits and these image deposits are so powerful. Now we can see this well, we don’t have to look very far on the world stage. All of this is unfolding and we know that much that is unfolding today is the residue or the repercussions of unfinished business from generations in the past. Need I say more,
TS: Could you give an example whether it’s from your own experience or from someone that you interviewed for Wounds into Wisdom or someone you worked with? Sure. Of a task deposit.
RTF: Okay, I’m going to tell a story of a young woman who I did not work with but my colleague did at cu. So this is a young millennial, she’s in her thirties. She told of her very first memory in life, which happened pre-verbal, which was a dream. And she had this dream recurrently. And I do want to say Tami, before anything else, I am going to invite everyone to have a sip of water. Have a glass of water nearby. Because when we talk about trauma, it can be activating. So sometimes just sipping tea or water, taking a break, stretching whatever you need to do because who knows, there’s something that one of us might say that we’ll be stimulating and provocative in a way that you want to just, let’s keep breathing together. So we’ll take periodic moments. So this,
TS: I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
RTF: Yeah, this story is like that. It was very activating to me when I heard it and the way she told this young woman told it. Her first memory, as I said, was a recurring dream that started way before she could even talk. And what would happen, she would wake up from this recurring image, talk about images and she would be overwhelmed. She would cry, her mother would rush in. She had a great mom rush in, pull her out of her crib, sit and rock her and soothe her and put her back to bed. Okay. By the time she was three, three-ish, she could tell her mother what the dream was. And in her three or four, she started to describe this scene. She was flying around an old town and she came to a big and a train station. Everything was wooden and old. And there she saw a man in a coat jumping from the platform of the train station into the tracks and running, running, running, running, running as fast as he could after a train that was just pulling out of the station. And he’s running and running and running and he’s yelling and he’s crying. She says, this man is so upset and he’s running and he’s crying and he can’t catch up with the train. And the train gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it’s out of sight. And then she wakes up because she can feel his overwhelming impotence, helplessness, exhaustion. Okay.
She tells, okay, she tells in 4-year-old language, she tells that story and her mother starts to cry and her mother is like in a ry and says, oh my god. Oh my God. How could you know that story? How could you possibly know that story? Nobody told you that story. Nobody reads that story. That’s exactly what happened to your grandfather. He came home, it was the war, the door was open, this is his first family was gone. His gentile neighbors stood around and said, hurry, hurry, get to the train station. They took all the Jews and they rounded them up and maybe you can still catch up with them. And he runs with all his might to the train station, jumps from the platform into the tracks, runs after that train with his family on it. And the train leaves, of course we know where the family is bound, probably to the death cabs.
He never saw them again. And he is destitute. He wants to be on that train, he wants to be with his family. He can’t locate them. He’s not going to ever find them again. So the mother is in shock. She is the daughter of his next family because he did go on and create a new family. But here we have this millennial who is, she grew up with this the strongest, really the strongest intrapsychic event of her life. And she so healthy. So let me just say the positives of this. She grew up with this story, this tale and these overwhelming emotions. Talk about a deposit, an image deposit. And her health asserted itself. She had a very good family and she got involved with what we call a 3G or third generation survivors circle. All people her age, young people who had grandparents who perished or survived the shuah, the Holocaust. And there, I’ll just say one last thing about this. My colleague and I were gobsmacked by this story, but she said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not unusual at all. Probably everyone in my circle has stories like this. We all have these dreams and these experiences where we know what our grandparents lived through.
TS: And just to clarify, I understand the image deposit from that very clearly. Was there some sense of a task that she was like, oh, and I’m called to do X, y, Z to help evolve my lineage in some way?
RTF: The task could be, look, I mean I think this could have completely paralyzed her as is the case for much of transgenerational or intergenerational trauma. It becomes a freezing or a paralyzing experience where we feel the impotence of history, of traumatic history. We feel frozen, we can’t do anything about it. But there’s also, in her case, and I talk about this a lot in Wounds into Wisdom, turning to face into those feelings, turning to face the loss, face the feelings, face the pain and feel a heartbreak. And then find family, then find others with whom you can have camaraderie, sacred camaraderie that you can talk about these things. Just like really any trauma survivor knows you need people around you who have gone through something that is of the same magnitude if not the same thing. And so for her, it became a mandate to find others, which was the healthy outcome.
To face it, to face the feeling, to get the facts, to tell the story again and again and again. Because when we can do that, then it’s working with our nervous systems to release those trauma fragments and it starts to morph. It starts to shift and change. And we find, I talk a lot about this in the book, we can start to harness the power of that pain. But you can’t really do that from the neck and up. You have to really feel it first. Feel the heartbreak, feel the impotence. Feel these awful feelings before you can harness them.
TS: Yeah, I want to talk about that word harness because I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by the pain when they face it head on. How do we move from feeling overwhelmed to harnessing the pain as a kind of fuel for our growth?
RTF: Yes. Well, pain of this magnitude that we’re talking about can be very dysregulating. It actually lives in our nervous system and it creates all kinds of symptoms. It can create, again, this is a material that I talk about, trauma residue can create a flattening out what we call a dissociation where we just get flat because we feel so we’ve had to compartmentalize this material and we’ve had to put it over here and that’s a lifesaving mechanism to put it over here. But at some point in our lives we need to reclaim it, otherwise it does just flatten us out. Not only flatten out our injuries, but it also flattens out our joy. So that’s number one. Another way that trauma residue lives inside of us is, this is more my family and my lineage is with hyperactivity always rushing around and you don’t stop and there’s always noise and there’s always outbursts and there’s anger and there’s all kinds of explosions and there’s lots of passion.
So it’s fun, but it’s really what it is is hyperactivity or hyper arousal, we call it in clinical terms, also can be termed hypervigilance because you’re always feeling like that shoe is going to drop it any moment. And so you’re always like on ready with hyper arousal. There is a sense that those stress hormones, cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline is always, if it’s not flowing, it’s just about to at any moment. So you can look at me funny and I will go from zero to 10 in a 10th of a second. I’m just like, what’s wrong? Or why’d you look at me with, does any of this sound familiar? I wonder to our listeners, that’s how I grew up. Certainly wasn’t flat at my house, it was hyper aroused.
TS: Okay, sounds very normal to me. And I have some Jewish friends that I sometimes spend time with and we’ll be talking about whatever, and my wife who’s not Jewish, they’ll say, well, she doesn’t know why we’re so upset about this. She’s not Jewish. And I think we laugh and we kind of move on, but I think for many people that sense of always being on the verge of something terrible happening, it’s very recognized and the nervous system state that goes with that is also recognizable and tears. One of the questions I wanted to ask you is, is it like that now for you or with all the work you’ve done, is it like, oh, there are. It’s only that way a little bit of the time or I’m curious,
RTF: Work really does accrue, I promise. Does it ever go away? I’m under huge stress when things are just mounting up. My default is to go into that hyperactivity, a hyper arousal or vigilance, fearing disaster, all of that. So that’s in a sense, it’s kind of a nervous system default, but the work of self-regulation, of nervous system learning, where do we idle? Is your default in a flat place, where’re, emotionally numb, hypo arousal? Is it hyper arousal? There’s a couple of other states that I would just name. One is shame and that is shame and isolation. Now again, all of these are lifesaving mechanisms. When we are traumatized, we don’t want to be on times Square, we don’t want to be partying. We want to go into our cave and lick our wounds, and that is lifesaving. We nurture and calm our nervous system in that way.
The problem is when it lasts too long, when we stay there, and one of the trauma residue hallmarks is a sense that I, not that I did something wrong, I am wrong that there’s something, this all happened because I’m wrong because something is so bad in me and I don’t really belong, I shouldn’t be here. I don’t really fit in all of those. It’s sort of a complex piece that is also can be trauma residue. Now, if you come from a family that has been discriminated against or enslaved or worse genocided, I’m thinking about so many indigenous populations around the world that embeds itself. Think about all the children who were taken into boarding schools around the world that embeds itself into the nervous system, even though it’s wrong, you know, suffered, you know were abused. But some part of you says, oh, well that’s because I’m me. And it takes it in. That takes a long time to unlearn. Now these are all very complex residues that can be loosened from the nervous system. Absolutely. Their grip can be loosened from our system. And it takes work though. It takes work.
TS: When you talk about collective trauma and the healing of collective trauma, and you were talking about just like in a family, there can be the trauma of a whole ethnic group that we’re a part of. I started feeling well, well then this process coming through, sensitive people will by necessity be endless. There’s a sense of an endless amount of trauma to be confronted and harnessed. And I wonder how you see that if I’m somehow looking at the situation as I hear you talk about it.
RTF: No, I don’t think you are. I think let’s just say what is collective trauma? It’s an event or a series of events historically that shatters the experience of safety for an entire group and ethnicity, a group of people. It could be a family who endures something horrible. It could be a collective trauma, it could be a town is engulfed in flames. And so there was a collective trauma that happens. And what it does, it’s a shared experience that alters the narrative and the psyche. It alters how you see yourself of that group or community. So this does take, this gets complicated because everyone has their personal foothold in that collective trauma. And then you have others who will in a sense could reinforce the trauma, could make it worse, could, but it’s also could make it better because there is a sense of compassion that can flow between people.
I understand what you went through. I went through it myself, and now here we get into something that’s very, I’m not sure if this is where you wanted to go, but I am just having a little ding, ding ding right now because, and I guess I’m putting my rabbi hat on here because in the Old Testament we call it the Elder Testament, there is a very recurrent theme, a light motif if you will, that gets repeated time and time again. It’s like a thread, a gold thread that wraps itself through the five books of Moses. And what is it? It says you in various forms, you people, you israelite people with the thousands of years of history, you Jewish people, Israelite people have been slaves. You have been persecuted, you have suffered. So it tells us the plight of the outcast because you were the outcast. So you know what it feels like to be marginalized because you were marginalized. You know how bad it is to be strangers and aliens. So because you were that now you’re through that because you’re reading this book. But never forget, never forget to love that person on the margin. You must love the stranger and include that stranger. Don’t make a second set of laws. Include them. Take them in because you know their plight.
Now I want to say that because I think that theme has kept me Jewish in hard times. I know that it’s at the base, it’s like such a deeply astute psychological injunction because it is saying we know we ancients human nature. Human nature is to not to be compassionate. Human nature is to other. The other is to scapegoat, to push someone out who’s different, who looks different, who acts different, who, et cetera. And that’s why I think the Torah tells us again and again, please remember you were that no, no, no, don’t go with human nature. Learn beyond that nervous system response to push someone out who’s other and include them and break open your heart for them. Let compassion flow for that person. Anyway, I want to say that because it could be that collective trauma could be an opening for enormous compassion if the situation is right, if people are awake,
TS: Okay, Tirzah. I’m going to ask you a beginner’s mind question. And by the way everyone, I hope you’re drinking. Take a sip of tea. I’m everyone in seeing the rise of antisemitism worldwide. I asked myself this beginner’s mind question several months ago, why are the Jews hated so much throughout so many hundreds of years of history? It’s not a new thing. Why? And I know you’ve done a lot of research and you’re the right person for me to ask this question to.
RTF: That’s such an unfair question. Sorry, I don’t have an answer. I don’t really have an answer. I know that that antisemitism today is so complicated because it is on the one hand, objectively true. It’s happening in strange places all over the world attacks. I just read of a antisemitic riot in Pakistan. I didn’t even know there was a place like that in Russia and shootings at schools in Canada and a Jewish woman stabbed in France and like, well, what is going on here? So there is that. There is an objective reality at the same time, there are all kinds of complicated facets to it which have to do with Israel Israel’s policies, the weaponization of the term antisemitism. So it’s both.
TS: Go back hundreds of years though even thousands. Thousands. Why Jews historically have been so persecuted. What’s the root of it in your view?
RTF: Yeah, what I can say is what I imagine, although I’m certainly not specialist in this, what I know for myself is that we have a center of gravity, you might say, or a frame of reference that isn’t to be the same as everyone else. It’s not to blend in. It is to, the frame of reference is in a sense of vertical, not a horizontal one. It’s to be God wrestlers, to be in rapport and communion with something beyond ourselves. And that has come down to us in traditions and customs and practices that are weird and different. It means that we don’t eat the same foods or our foods look different or we keep to ourselves. We have certain kind of butchers and we have a certain kind of clothing or we study texts in strange language that other people who we live who host us haven’t studied.
Where I’m thinking in the year 10,000 in Germany or in Alexandria in the year 300 or, I mean this goes back a long, long way where we did not, no, we did not. The Jewish people did not melt into the Roman Empire. They resisted, they did not melt into the Babylonian empire. They resisted, they did not. For each of the great civilizations that rose and fell, there was always this enclave over here of we’re different again, I think saying we’re different and had that smacks of chosenness, which is not a pretty, that’s a whole complex in itself almost begs for alterity. That’s that fancy word that we use in the field of psychology. That means that you’re going to be othered, you’re going to be scapegoated. We don’t like you. You’re different even if you do have even you can go undercover as white people and we like white people, but you act too weird and you stick to yourselves. That’s how I see it. How do you see it, Tami, when you’ve clearly thought about this too?
TS: To be honest, I haven’t had an answer and your answer is very, very interesting to me. And I notice it lands right in the center of me in a powerful way because I have felt this call as a Jewish person to be true to an inner vertical sense of what truth is regardless of the ramifications, whatever may come from it, whatever the consequences might be. So that feels very genuine in me as a Jewish person and I can get how that would upset people I guess.
RTF: Yeah, there is one more thing that I would add or a strand that I would pull out. And this is in, I take this up maybe ad nauseum in the book about chosenness. We have a very strong, that’s another maybe less leaned into theme, but being a chosen people, you can take that in a lot of different ways. But feeling for me that’s, I read Eric Erickson, who talks about every tribe for thousands of years has felt special. But I think being special nowadays is very dangerous. Feeling like your blood is redder than anyone else’s feeling that you have some special mandate or you have a special in or a foothold in a certain land. This belongs to you. We see this all over the world, this kind of superiority. I think that is dangerous stuff,
TS: Very dangerous. The flip side of being superior is being inferior and you’re going to get it for that. We’ll show you.
You write in Wounds into Wisdom about seven principles of Jewish cultural healing. So you take your work and you put them into these seven buckets of different themes we can look at. And one of them is redefining Jewish chosenness. And you write the identity of other and chosen keeps the trauma narrative alive and active. Do you feel it’s important to, this is strong language, but to reject the notion of being, quote, we are the chosen people. I noticed as a teenager when I heard that for the first time in my family, I heartily rejected it.
RTF: Everyone has chosen for, everyone comes in with a gift. Every individual, I really believe this, and this is throughout Jewish mysticism called Kabbalah, that there there’s 8 billion people on the planet. There is no one is random, no one is a mistake. Every single person has some gift, some contribution. And in the same way, every ethnicity, every religion, every tribe or nation has some flavor that it adds. My teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of blessed memory used to say that if everything is Gaia and this is all one organism, all the planet is a living, breathing, Gaia like a body, then each of us is a different organ in that planet. You can’t have a body without a liver or you don’t want to have three hearts. You want one heart. So each ethnicity, each tradition brings a function to Gaia that is inimitable. You can’t reproduce it. You must show up and be good at what you do. To me, a more sort of enlightened way of saying it, we’re all chosen to say that, yeah, we can feel just the danger of saying, but I’m more chosen. I’m more special than you. My God, what does that give me permission to do? And that is at the root of such as we know in 2025, such horror of things, atrocities have happened Because of that thinking.
TS: One of the principles you identify is disidentifying from victimhood. And I wonder if you can say more about that and especially if someone feels they’re carrying a big trauma burden, how they go about that.
RTF: Yeah, I mean that’s of course if I’ve been, God forbid, aggressed or violated personally, or if I have that embedded in my nervous system and in my psyche, that is going to keep me small. And for any kind of trauma individual or collective trauma, the work is finding our agency. It’s sometimes called sovereignty. How do we take back our agency? How do we grow beyond a worldview we are oppressed or that everyone’s beating up on us or that we’re never in power or that et cetera. So agency is really the medicine and we have to make our way back to that which is really growing, to use your words, growing another neural, growing new neural pathways, growing a different nervous system that says, no, no, no, I am so powerful. I am so voluminous. I am not a victim. And I know that because I feel in my heart. Part of it is very connected to taking action and self-care as an action, but also flowing my energy and my compassion to others who have suffered like me. And then it was Gloria Steinem when my book came out, I did a lot with Gloria and she was saying, that’s how you know that you’ve healed is when you’re helping others, that you’re helping others who have gone through a victimization, perhaps gone through some sort of oppression and you are there to show up for them.
TS: I wanted to talk more about, you’re calling it agency. I might say this power of choice or these moments where we can make a choice. I think sometimes when a trigger comes a stressor and there’s a sense that there’s a nervous system hijack, if you will, from some inherited family pattern, it doesn’t feel like there’s much space for a choice. So how do we first of all make enough space, take another sip of tea that we can make a choice? And maybe this would be another good place to share a story of a powerful choice you saw someone you work with, Mick.
RTF: Well, what’s coming up right now is about each other, about being witnessed, about being mirrored, about being, I like the term that I just learned as witnessed. To be witnessed, to be reflected in somebody’s eyes helps so much to make that leap from I’m alone, I’m in my shame, I’m in my whatever the oppression or the wound is and seeing myself and hearing myself be heard and witnessed. I’ll tell you a remarkable story. This is a true story again. This one is in the book and it’s a little 4-year-old boy who was in the Krakow ghetto.
His parents who were very young, I mean early twenties, found out that there was going to be in operation soon to round up all the children, 800 children from the Crackow ghetto and take them away and do away with them. The parents said, no way, this is not happening to our little boy and the mother in the middle of the night watch the guards at the barbed wire dressed, put her saw around this little 4-year-old boy who in the book I call Avi, his true name is Manas. And she gave him as she pushed him out under the barbed wire into the night, a little four-year-old, can you imagine? She gave him her student identity picture just a little the size of a practically a postage stamp and said, my sweetheart, when you get to your edge, when you can’t bear it anymore, you take my picture out, you keep it safe, you take my picture out and you look at me and look me in the eyes and know that I am going to be looking at you and I’m going to be watching you and I’m going to be loving you wherever you are, whatever you’re going through now, go.
And with that, she tucked it into his pocket. She pushed him out with a little piece of paper that was the address of a brothel in Krakow, Poland. He found his way in the middle of the night they took him in, but it was just temporary. This little boy was on the streets for three years till he was seven years old on the streets of Krakow. In the middle of war, sometimes in the forest, sometimes he was taken to, and he tells the story, he was taken into a Christian home. They obviously knew that he was a Jew, but they didn’t say anything. And every night they would go into their little prayer room, there’d be a big cross and the mother would say to him, you pray your prayers and we’ll pray our prayers. She was very good and he took out, I got that little, I could cry just telling the story, took out that little picture of his mother and talk to her and said, mommy is hard. Come back to me.
What do I do? What do I do? And he would just cry to her. And even that kind of witnessing, I mean that being witnessed even through a little picture, kept him alive. And also I want to say kept his parents alive. They were rounded up. They were at the end of the war. They found each other. And then I think he fell apart. He had a little breakdown, but he made it it to Palestine. Anyway, the story goes on. It’s in the book, but there is some leap of consciousness. There’s some leap of life that can be made when we know we are being seen, that we are being heard, that somebody cares about us to help us make that move from victim to, no, no, no, you are big. You exist, you have purpose, you’re here for a reason. Keep going, keep going. Blowing on the embers of our soul.
TS: You didn’t share in the introduction when I said, tell me a little bit about you didn’t share very much about your siblings and in Wounds into Wisdom. You write about the tragic loss of your two eldest siblings, your brother and your sister. And I wonder if in the wake of their deaths, their early deaths, both by suicide, yeah, that was, or probably or unclear, but tragic deaths. Let’s say tragic and early deaths. Do you feel some sense of the work that you’re doing in healing ancestral trauma is some gift to them? And how would you language that?
RTF: Thank you. That’s very tender question actually, if I’m not mistaken, I dedicated the book to my two oldest siblings. I feel that we were all imprinted with this powerful onus. We were all carriers of this unworked baggage that my parents brought to bear. My mother was a German refugee and escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. My father was from Brooklyn, but he went to Germany and he was at the liberation of one of the biggest death camps, Bergen Belsen. So they were traumatized out of their minds and they did not do their work. And I mean, who am I to say? But I’m their daughter. I guess I can say they tried. They did the best they could, but six of us were really, I would say imprinted with their legacy, the trauma legacy that they left us. And I think for the oldest, I was fifth of six, but the eldest ones took it the worst, took it hardest.
They were born at the end of the war and there was this desperation at the end of World War II to talk about task deposit you must live on for the 6 million who didn’t make it? You must carry Judaism through for the 6 million who couldn’t? You must live their lives for them. You must become these people. You must become rabbis, you must carry on the orthodoxy. And it was extremely orthodox family that we grew up in. So oh my god, any self-respecting child would rebel against that. But there was not a lot of room to rebel the story I tell further. But it is such a good advertisement, isn’t it? To do our work and not pass it on to our kids and to our world.
TS: Now you mentioned this with nit, it’s a cool word. It’s hard to say. It’s with nit sing. It’s a little funny. It makes you feel like you have a lisp and that includes bringing forward our stories so they can be witnessed by another person. What would you say to someone who is having these image deposits and flashes, but doesn’t necessarily know their whole family tree? They can’t tell you. It’s like they sense they’re working through something that’s not their own material, but they don’t even know exactly whose it is. It’s mysterious.
RTF: Yes. It’s so common. So first of all, don’t feel bad about not knowing. Some people don’t know anything or imagine, I work with people from who have been adopted. They don’t know anything about their bio families or they were sperm donor children. They can’t know anything. So there’s all kinds of situations, don’t feel bad. That’s number one. It’s very, very common. But when you start to open the door to do the ancestral healing work, now this is a psychic phenomenon. I can’t explain it. It’s not linear. Things start to happen and it might be that you take a course, you do your genealogy, you start to do a genogram, which is chart out. What do you know, you know about your father’s side, what do you know about your mother’s side, even if they’re adoptive? So that’s going to be your starting point, your adopted family, you might just opening that door.
I cannot tell you the kinds of amazing uncanny stories in students that I’ve had, that I have from all over the world who have these synchronistic events. So even literally, they make me laugh every time. Like get a call from two states away. Well, we have this plaque here, it’s an antique store and it seems to be maybe a relative of yours as well. It’s actually the exact grandfather that we were just trying to unbury his story. And here is a plaque dedicated to him. He was a doctor or I’ll tell you my own story. All of a sudden I’ve been doing this work for some years now, certainly through the pandemic and getting an email that we have this box of letters that we found in a auction house in Jerusalem that seemed to belong to your family. What they were 80-year-old letters, love letters between my parents when my father was in Germany, my mother was refugee already in the United States and they were newlyweds and they were writing each other back and forth. And I have this, I haven’t still gone through all the hundreds of letters just landed at my door. These things are so uncanny and almost comical. But when you say to life, to psyche, I am ready to know more things start to happen. And it might be that you call up an elder in your family or you call up someone or you look online to genie.com or ancestry.com or you just start to scratch the surface and nature takes over. You start to find out more and more trust the process.
TS: That’s very helpful. Now just a couple more questions, tears to someone who says, I’m not so concerned right now about inherited patterns as I am, the traumas that are happening right now in my life. For example, I know several people who have lost homes in the LA fires as probably you do as well. And many of us are very few degrees of separation from someone who has lost their home and their concern is protecting their children and future generations from being traumatized. What do you suggest in those instances?
RTF: Yeah, one of the reasons why we’re talking about this at all is because we have clinical data now over the past 15, 20 years that there is a transmission of trauma epigenetically. So this is important to know. So in 2001, I mean, so in other words, the Dutch hunger winter in 19 42, 19 43, we have 80 years of data. What happened to the children and the children of those children and the children of those children? In 2001, during nine 11, that data also, there were clinical studies of the children. I’m getting, I’m going to answer your question.
TS: No, I get it.
RTF: Yeah. The children that were in the homes where parents were freaking out or not, they were in homes where the television was playing those images again and again and again. What they found, what the studies show is that the children whose parents were regulated, it was a thing that happened. It was a terrible thing that happened, but their nervous systems were not disrupted. The parents who freaked out, ran through the streets, called all day long to friends were crying and carrying on. Well, the children pick that up. It stands to reason. Of course, that’s not rocket science, but they have the data that shows that that’s an evidence-based. These are evidence-based studies in the same way. Now, I would say for those of us who are going through just watching the news can be a traumatizing experience. It’s so important to know how to regulate ourselves, to know how to work with our breathing, know how to turn off the television, know how to come back home to ourselves in positive nurturing ways.
And that is going to create concentric circles around us for our children, our neighbors, our world. We have to have something else. Now, I would say, I would ask somebody who asked me that question, what is your practice? Or do you go swim? Do you pray? Do you dance? Or are you an artist? Can you pick up your journal and write a poem? Can you walk in nature? There are all these ways. What is your personal practice? Remember we’re talking about this. For me, it’s a prayer practice and a journaling practice. What is your way that regulates you and brings you back to yourself? That is the most important thing right now in these times that are so the limbic lava, you say the emotional brain is constantly aroused and we are being activated all the time by the media, by pictures coming full circle, the images in media, by social media, et cetera. So we have to learn, each of us has to have ways, whatever our particular unique ways are.
TS: And I think this is a good way to end Tirzah, which is if you could take us in for a moment into a practice to find safety, even when the breaker switches are flipped from some kind of stressor that might be occurring in our life and we feel that limbic labo, let’s end with something we can do together.
RTF: Perfect. Thank you so much for asking. I’d love to do that. So for everyone who’s listening in, if you are driving a car right now or a bike or doing something else, you’re going to do this intelligently or you’ll wait till later to do it because I’m going to ask you to bring your attention inside. Perhaps close your eyes if you’re in a stationary position or lower your gaze. Soften your gaze if you can. If you’re out walking, you certainly can do this, but bring your attention inside and simply notice your breath. Don’t change it, just notice it at first and start to when you’re ready, start to elongate it as if it were like taffy, just breathing into a count of four or so. And then breathing out so long and soft breaths on your exhalation. Just let your shoulders drop. Let your hands be heavy.
Let your face soften even the tongue in your mouth and your jaw. Just let all of those muscles relax, inhaling slow and steady and exhaling and relaxing. So your body, once you give it a loving command, will continue to do that. It will continue to unwind. And in the meantime, I’m going to ask you to do something else. As your body continues to relax, I want you to invite to mind someone who’s no longer on earth, someone who’s already on the other side, maybe for a long time, maybe not so long, someone that you’ve known. It could be an ancestor, a relative, a friend, a teacher, could even be a historical figure. Someone who is well, someone who is loving, someone who is wise, most of all, someone with whom you have a good positive connection.
You’re just casting out an invitation to the universe. Please someone come to me and just take your time. Let yourself see who shows up. It could be a grandmother or another relative, someone with whom you have a sense of kismet, affinity, affection. Allow yourself to be surprised by who wants to show up right now. And once you get a hunch of who that is, invite them closer. And don’t worry if nobody shows up. Sometimes it doesn’t happen on the first invitation, but if somebody is showing peeking in, let them come closer and feel their energy.
Feel their affection for you. Feel their gift to you, their gift of strength, their gift of blessing, their gift of yes. If someone is showing up for you, receive, make sure that you’re receiving their love, their blessing, perhaps a bit of advice. There might be words or a nonverbal communication, and they’re not asking for you to do anything. If they are truly well and wise, they’re just wanting to broadcast to transmit their blessings, their strength, their love to you, for you are on earth. And that is no mean feat these days. Our ancestors are wanting to help us and remember always reminding us that we are not alone. So receiving, accepting, allowing, and then taking it in materializing and letting now this loving being for now recede back into their own abode, sealing their gift in your heart, letting yourself come back to your breath refreshed. Wiggle your toes, wiggle your fingers. I’d like to ask you to rub your hands together and let the energy come back into your body, fully into your extremities so that there’s a little warmth there between your hands. And then take that warmth and put it somewhere on your own body that feels good, that needs some healing
TS: Tirzah, I want to call our conversation harnessing ancestral pain into power. And with that notion, I’m going to ask you to end by commenting on this quote, which is from the seventh and final principle that you cover in Wounds into Wisdom. You ask people to reflect on this question, what does this terrible wound inspire me to do that I would never have thought to do otherwise?
RTF: Yeah, that is for me, this work, not passing on the pain, but the wisdom that I alchemized from the pain. And what is it for you, for each of us? That question is alive.
TS: That is a very alive question to meditate. And it inspires courage in me to take the actions that I wouldn’t do otherwise. So I thank you for the question. What does this terrible inspire me to do that I would never have thought to do otherwise? Thank you.
RTF: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, author of Wounds into Wisdom. With Sounds True, she’s created an audio program: The Woman’s Kabbalah. Such a heart-based leader, and I love visiting with you. So thank you so very much.
RTF: Bye.
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