In this Lab, we explored our Jewish spiritual roots and how we experience this connection in the present moment. We reflected on how being Jewish during this period of world history affects our sense of inner security, grounding, and spiritual connection. We also examined how collective, ancestral, and individual trauma shapes these experiences.
The Lab invited individuals of Jewish heritage interested in exploring the topics of the lab.
We attempted to connect to various aspects of our Jewish belonging. This includes parts that we tend to turn away or distance from. We also explored resources that speak deeply to us that have their roots in our Jewish culture, ancestry and spiritual practices, and outside resources that brought in our collective and ancestral trauma, providing orientation and a historical perspective. We followed the basic arc of Thomas Hübl’s Collective Trauma Integration Process. This included weaving a coherent, safe resourced space exploring the multi-faceted trauma landscape as it arose. We listened to individual and collective voices. We reflected and integrated the trauma that was available for healing. We also reflected on and learned from our shared experience.<br /> <br /> We started out with a group of 33 participants and completed with 24 participants. We met for 12 group sessions from January - December 2024.
We facilitated practices around the intelligence of the nervous system including self contact, symptoms of activation, shutdown, regulation and co-regulation, discovering how our nervous systems regulate. We oriented ourselves to the changes we could feel in ourselves and the group throughout the Lab. Hearing each other’s stories and process with transparent communication created coherence. We introduced sensing into our Jewish roots early in the Lab. There emerged a strong sense of tribe. A powerful resource was connecting with the complex evolutionary journey of the survival of our ancestors through thousands of years and we began to have a felt sense of this. We also felt a strong imperative to include our vertical connection with the Light of our Jewish spiritual lineage. Poetry around belonging, writings of Jewish people during the holocaust, Jewish Mystics and stories supported a synchronized and resourced field.
We invited people to learn about the long history of antisemitism through links to specific videos; we read some evocative stories and quotes that referred to the profound trauma of the holocaust, including reflections of a young man in Auschwitz. This brought us to our grief and fear. Introducing the writings of Etty Hillesum brought in the element of agency and strengthened the resourcing around the immense hurts.
With regards to the current crisis in the Middle East, we invited the participants to explore what it brought up in them. We honored the hot trauma that people were living in, in Israel. We made space for a wide spectrum of responses, avoiding the politics but focusing on what arises. We created a spacious field through introducing the Talmudic tradition of tolerance and respect towards dissenting opinions and views. People were able to be with each other with their experiences of horror, shock, grief, numbness, anger and fear. The triads and group harvesting allowed for the digestion of what people were holding. This brought us closer.
As people brought into the space personal, ancestral and collective issues that arose for them - often after the triads, – we held space for them to further digest their experience, and with the group, found that the issues that were brought were shared by many in the group. They recognized those as underlying our wrestling with our Jewish belonging. Hurts in relationships with the family of origin and ancestral traumas echoed to many members and as one person processed many of us could feel the resonance.
In wrestling with our Jewish belonging it was an essential part of our journey to connect with our ancestral roots. With all the trauma our ancestors endured, the fact that our lineages and the Jewish people survived was important to make very explicit. We began connecting with our felt sense of our Jewish roots. It was moving that so many people in the group could feel their roots. As we cohered more as a group, we connected with our ancestral roots - those close and those further back in our lineages who we never knew. Connecting with the sense of our ancestors before the Holocaust was a source of resource to touch into the grief and loss and suffering more recently. We heard heartbreaking stories from Ukraine, Poland, Eastern Europe, Israel, England, and Spain - of the Sephardic lineage.
Participants were able to digest a lot in the triad process. We had a group made up of many mature people from diverse areas of the world and a wide range of relationships with their Jewish belonging. This brought a richness into our field. After participants returned from triads, we devoted significant time to harvesting what came up during their exploration. At times new insights and perspectives were expressed, and those could be felt throughout the group. At other times, new levels of individual and ancestral trauma were uncovered, which we processed in the group. It resonated with many people - our shared roots made a huge difference.
Already in the course of the lab, people have expressed gratitude for the space to wrestle with the issue of Jewish belonging. Some felt greater ease to embrace their Jewish belonging: e.g., one participant starting using her Jewish middle name rather than her more “gentrified” first name. People expressed greater peace within themselves around being Jewish no longer feeling distant or with charge. Some people expressed having less fear around the crises in the Middle East. People felt more settled in themselves.
The testimonies voiced by the participants in the last session of the lab were nothing less than dramatic. One theme that stood out was the sense of safety, belonging and grounding that was experienced. Together with the stories provided in the surveys, we feel that the experiment was successful in providing a coherent space where participants could feel safe.
My capacity has expanded for holding painful truths and offering this spaciousness to others when appropriate. I also continue to learn to live more consciously in this difficult time in history.
Something inside me has become softer about the subject of wrestling with Jewish identity. Something has relaxed. At the beginning of the process there were many fears related especially after Oct 7. It feels more relaxed now, less anticipating terrible outcomes. There is something more generally that has relaxed in my nervous system. It has to do with coming together as a group / triad to sit over sensitive issues and deeply listening to each other.
I can feel my ancestors from before the holocaust for the first time. I never thought this would be possible.
There is much richness when people from around the world, in different cultures and different situations take such a deep look at the universal and ancestral issues of wrestling with Jewish belonging. There is much comfort in creating a community who wrestle together. I find that our triad is especially deep and authentic in looking at these issues. I am grateful for this lab.
Being a part of the lab for a year gave me so many insights into the co-regulation and coherence process. I understand more today about what it means to listen, sense, and sometimes respond when I am with others. I’m so grateful for this generous work and for finding this community.
I was amazed at the depth of connection with a group virtually, and how profound the healing was from the relatively brief interactions we had. I feel more whole in myself and in my Jewishness as a result.
Crisis Trauma Relief
Trauma-Informed Practice
Collective Trauma Integration
Community of Practice
Raising Awareness
Overview
What we do
Who we are
Підпишіться на наші інформаційні листи. Допоможіть нам зцілювати колективну травму та зменшувати негативні ефекти для нашої глобальної культури.
Igal Harmelin 
English