I was in Cape Cod on Saturday teaching an online class about spontaneous healing when I heard the news about the massacre in Israel. My partner Jeff and I were right across the water from my co-teacher of Memoir As Medicine and friend Nancy Aronie and her husband Joel. I instantly thought of them- because they are Jewish.
I also thought of my spiritual mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, whose grandfather was a Kaballah rabbi, and the many Jewish doctors who have been part of the same spiritual community with me for 15 years. I thought of the wonderful people at the Boston Shabbat by the Creek that Jeff and I sometimes celebrate with on Saturdays. We’re not Jewish. We’re only chanting in Hebrew with our friends because we left the oppressive fundamentalist Christianity of our youths in sheer disgust over how racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and overall hateful so many people in our churches were. From my experience, the Jews in Shabbat By The Creek are just the opposite.
My next-door neighbor and owner of my dog’s best friend is Israeli, and he was in his home country for a visit when this all broke out. He survived the attacks, but he may not be coming back, I understand. Reservists are being called to active duty. I am already missing the daily morning visits from his dog. I wonder how all my Jewish friends are doing right now. I’m sure they’re not okay. I don’t have any close Palestinian friends, but if I did, I’d be thinking of them too.
So many of us are touched by this faraway tragedy. I am personally close with far more Jews and expatriated Israelis than Palestinians, so I’ll admit that I’m thinking more about my Jewish friends than strangers who are Palestinians, not because I don’t care about innocent Palestinians who have suffered so much atrocity, but just because my lack of personal relationships with Palestinians distances me one cell layer, while I know very well and love dearly dozens of Jews and Israelis.
I haven’t known quite what to say to the Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians in our community here, so I’ve been in silent shock and mourning, like many of you. I’ve just been taking it all in and waiting to comment until I have at least a whiff of clarity in my system. Let me just start by saying my heart sincerely goes out to you all- and I’m so sorry for the generational and historical wounds that are surely getting triggered big time right now- on both sides of this old/new war.
Yet again, we have proof that what Harvard physician Paul Farmer said is undeniably true: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” The sociopathy and narcissism of terrorists, ruthlessly immoral politicians, the young people they radicalize and indoctrinate, and those who commit hate crimes is rooted in the belief that some people matter less and others matter more. The hierarchy of human worth and the oppressive systems of violence that erupt from such injustice go back millennia, from kings and peasants to colonizers and the colonized to humans and the other living beings we think we’re better than. The violence rooted in such hierarchies really is the root of all that’s wrong with this world. And here we go again…
Tending Our Helplessness
Like I did the day Russia invaded Ukraine, as we all did on 9/11, like I did when I heard about what happened in Rwanda, I cried on Saturday out of helplessness and horror, grief and outrage, powerlessness and despair. I felt devastation at how truly evil sociopathic humans can be towards other innocent human beings. And as much as I stand for and with the innocent Israelis who are fighting for their lives, I also feel sorrow for the innocents in Gaza who are now getting pounded just because there is evil in their midst, even though it’s not their fault they live in the proximity of terrorists.
When my daughter was getting ready for school this morning, she was rescuing a beetle from the kitchen floor to take it outside. When you regularly live among doctors, therapists, humanitarian activists, helping professionals, and teenagers who care about protecting the lives of beetles, it’s hard to relate to or get into the minds of people who dehumanize children and commit hate crimes. It’s also hard, as a privileged person who generally feels safe, to understand how scared you have to get to wind up so radicalized by terrorists that you can butcher other humans. It’s painful for our naïve, trusting young parts that just want to believe there’s good in everybody and that the world is safer than it actually is to imagine all the horror. [You can ease some of your own helplessness by helping out financially to support organizations in Israel and also humanitarian aid efforts in both Israel and Gaza.]
Spiritual Bypassing Tendencies In Times of Crisis
I know my spiritual bypassing parts get active in times like this. I want to believe it’s a benevolent universe full of good, lovable people- to comfort the scared little ones inside me who become frightened of scary people who do bad things. I want to believe there’s some spiritual answer to why horrifying things happen to innocent people to protect myself from feeling the sheer injustice and randomness of evil.
But I no longer believe there is some pithy spiritual solution that can explain massacres and genocides, and that’s unnerving. I want to believe the souls of Israeli children and other innocent humans came to this Earth School to leave early- for some grand purpose. I want to believe in some heavenly afterlife or auspicious reincarnation rewarding these tortured humans for their unearned suffering. I want to believe that forgiveness is the antidote to hate and that all we have to do is open our hearts big enough and the sociopaths will finally get the love they’re starved for. I want to believe love trumps fear and all we have to do is choose love. I want to believe that if I just meditate for world peace from the comfort of my own meditation pillow, it will somehow help.
But I’ve lost most of the oomph of those comforting beliefs in the shattering of my anti-oppression/ anti-racism work and my IFS trauma therapy. In their absence, I just feel all the feels- the helplessness, the grief, the horror, the terror, and also the fullness of my love, empathy, and compassion for my fellow human beings who I don’t know personally but who are suffering and experiencing terrible fear and loss. With no spiritual veils to protect me from the feelings, the tears have been right behind my eyes- spilling out here and there and then receding- since Saturday. I feel my human fragility, rather than some sort of grandiose spiritual strength. I feel vulnerable, realizing that life is this uncertain and the state of the world can change in an unpredictable blink. I also feel a strangely comforting closeness to my own mortality as I see others cross out of human existence with so little warning, and it makes me oddly grateful for that which has not yet been lost.
Narcissism, Sociopathy, Power & Evil
My only real remaining belief system is that we all are born with a spark of something beautiful. That flame is ours to either cultivate and shine by doing our healing work- or to let dim because we either avoid doing our healing work and that light gets filmed over with untreated trauma that turns good people into people who hate- or because people lack enough privilege to even have access to healing work. And trauma breeds people who perpetrate trauma.
I do not believe the psychologists who say that sociopaths are born bad or that they’re monsters at their core. I don’t believe in bad babies, only bad parents and traumatizing cultures. I believe sociopathy is as much a trauma symptom as every other mental illness, and all trauma deserves our compassion. I believe victims of oppression and trauma can lose their empathy because nobody extended empathy to them. I believe such victims can be prime targets for radicalization, and they can be unduly influenced to hate.
