The collective trauma of being Jewish - both the experience of being persecuted and that of being perpetrators. We explored the complexity and uncomfortable reality of how oppression lives in us through being both victims and perpetrators, and the relationship between the two. We approached these themes from contemporary, historical and ancestral dimensions, tapping into the collective experience of Being Jewish.
People who identified as being Jewish as well as non-Jewish participants who felt called to actively participate, primarily functioning as “windows” or witnesses.<br />
We conducted a careful assessment upfront to ensure that participants were equally committed to exploring persecution as well as perpetration. Our initial cohort of 34 stayed relatively stable throughout our sessions, with our final session having 28 participants and 2 members who indicated they could not be present. We had a mostly monthly cadence across our 12 sessions which ran from February through December, 2024.
We began every session with a brief welcome and introduction and then went into a 4-Sync meditation. Our first few sessions were devoted to building safety within the container, and focusing on how we resource ourselves. We co-created a “Compendium of Resources” to guide us in exploring hot trauma topics.
There were a number of people who were not that familiar with Thomas’s work so we spent time in each session weaving in “psycho-education” components such as resourcing, allowing and softening into feelings, holding space for others, transparent communication, the Triad process. We continued to remind them throughout the sessions that it is these core practices of attuning to body sensations and emotions that allow us to become aware of and digest previously unconscious material. In this way we slowly and consciously wove a collective space that could begin to surface deeper trauma residues and tensions without shattering the container.
We aligned our sessions to synchronize with the Jewish calendar, in ways both intentional and mystically informed. This created a level of coherence that felt at times like inspired guidance, as though we were being facilitated from a Higher Intelligence.
The following 3 stages were interwoven in this lab:
We began our exploration into persecution by presencing our Ancestral encoding of Welcome and Warning, by noticing our nervous system responses as Jews to our environment. The harvest following the Triads yielded very vulnerable sharing around lack of safety, staying small, facing rejection, confusion, ambivalence. Subsequent sessions deepened the exploration of how our ancestors experienced persecution and anti-semitism and how that lives in us individually. We broadened our inquiry to look at how our ancestral trauma and resilience impacts our conditioned response to the collective landscape of being Jewish including our current felt experience and responses to how that is currently playing out in the Middle East and globally.
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We turned towards perpetration initially by reading facts from Wikipedia about the loss of lives in the Israeli-Palestinian war, citing both Jews and Palestinians in the facts. While some members welcomed this inquiry, others became highly activated. We recognized that being in a “hot trauma” field post October 7th and through the first anniversary of Oct 7th created a need to go slow in order to process and digest the high level of activation in the field.
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These tensions occasionally came into the group from time to time and were met by us as facilitators in a spacious container where members could voice their activation, their distrust, fear, lack of safety and need to distance in relation to other members’ views or perspective. Being met in a safe relational space enabled some level of release through interpersonal communication and some members reported a slow melting of their numbing, and recognized the emergence of fear, grief, and anger that was able to be felt and grounded. When more charged material emerged, we slowed the process down with each participant and invited the group to notice resonances in themselves. We named when voices felt more collective.
The following 2 stages were interwoven in this lab:
Working in a “hot trauma” field yielded many insights and learnings. The first was respecting and honoring the resistance in the group to more deeply explore perpetration by slowing the pace at which the group could digest and integrate. While some members longed to sense into Jewish perpetration, many members were on a continuum ranging from denial and numbness to being highly activated by the topic of Being Jewish. This was understandable as some members were living in an active war zone in Israel, while others were being confronted with obvious and explicit forms of antisemitism. We recognized that this required a gentler easing into exploring taking accountability for causing suffering to others.
A “hidden topic” within our exploration of perpetration was the intra-family and community perpetration of harm intergenerationally. Many members related to intra-family persecution in the form of cutting off, “othering”, “sitting shiva” or declaring a living family member dead because of their choice to leave the Jewish faith or marry a non-Jew. Some members reported the pain of choosing to leave their families or communities because of their own need to escape what felt like an oppressive and unfair system of discrimination and judgement.
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Many members brought a deep sorrow and compassion for their families and ancestors, understanding their extreme vulnerability and need to preserve their survival and existence in the context of the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust and the persistent and virulent antisemitism in countries around the world. This felt like a deeply reparative healing impulse in our group. At the end, we as facilitators felt that that session had been “a walking prayer”.
As evidenced by the survey stories, many people spoke to a deeper capacity to hold space and feel compassion for those who hold different views or perspectives. Others spoke to a greater settling in their systems which allows for a heightened willingness to engage in discourse and action around the Middle East and the topic of antisemitism.
"To be in the program during a hot war in the Israel-Palestine region was a profound challenge and … opportunity to witness myself and the collective … which gives me more freedom to respond to it, as a part of it. I … really appreciated seeing how a team of expert facilitators led, held, and supported this group, with care, precision, and creativity."
"My insight … involves an even deeper level of appreciation for the complexity of the Jewish experience, especially since October 7, 2023. I could feel the yearning … to dig deeper and explore the perpetration component, while others … didn't seem to have the capacity to go there, which … seemed to … contribute to the ongoing tension within our beloved group. I have much empathy and love for all of my Jewish siblings."
"Being in a lab with three highly trained facilitators… I'm able to learn by watching and being present… I felt the ghost of the past being grounded and more flow opening through the collective field. A couple highlights … a retelling of the Passover story through the eyes of the women, when we brought in an item that symbolised our ancestors and how the flow began to open as people shared."
"I feel like a new space opened in my collective nervous system… I have more access not just to my ancestors, but to other people's ancestors… I experienced an unthawing of feminine wisdom in relationship to what has been a mainly patriarchal story… I've felt oceans of grief … I have processed shame and… gained a stronger understanding of how it is hard … to turn towards shame and digest it... We need healing spaces to lift the gag order on what hasn't been able to be spoken yet and held or met"
"Excellent experience. Well facilitated. Diverse group of participants. Insights: 1) don’t need to figure out a workable solution to the hotspot. 2) I can take in more perspectives without being reactive. 3)I can better embrace all sides in the “conflict."
"Gained greater understanding and compassion about the sense of othering.I have … a visceral feeling of connection with even those whose views I disagree with … because I feel the …. trauma imprint that we share from the Holocaust, centuries of oppression. The pervasiveness of fear, paranoia, desperation about annihilation, victimhood … makes more sense to me as an intelligent response to genuine events which continue to live as undigested trauma."
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Підпишіться на наші інформаційні листи. Допоможіть нам зцілювати колективну травму та зменшувати негативні ефекти для нашої глобальної культури.
Robin Alfred 
English