CALL OF THE JEWISH SOUL
I never knew that I had a Jewish soul. I knew that my origins were Jewish, but
denied my identity because of the trauma associated with being Jewish.
My family did its best to save me from the restrictions associated with being
Jewish. My paternal grandfather had my father and his brothers baptized in order
to open vocational opportunities otherwise denied in Catholic Austria. My
mother, from an orthodox Jewish father and a liberal Jewish mother converted
when she married him. The hope was that we children could pass, assimilate, live
free and clear of anti-Semitic bias. This did not help in 1938! Because of my
Jewish blood, I was subject to eight months of Nazi occupation during which
none of us knew if we would survive, followed by my immediate family's exodus
to Outback Australia, where my father was lucky to find work as a farm hand.
Although my family tried its best to assimilate, I never felt that I belonged in
Australia. I left as soon as I could and became the quintessential wandering Jew.
roving from country to country and job to job looking for a place to call home. I
felt immediately at home in the USA. Europe had the culture but not my
language. Australia had my language but not my culture. America had both an
ethnically diverse culture that included Jews, and the language I grew up with.
Nevertheless, I still felt restless, and began to look inside myself, to the emotional
trauma and turmoil that were my personal legacy from the Holocaust, to get to
the root of my continued sense of alienation.
Graduate studies in psychology and my own psychotherapy helped resolve the
grief and fear caused by the multiple childhood losses, and to feel emotionally
secure enough to get married. My American, non-Jewish husband,
whose parents had fled the Communists revolution in Russia, shared my feeling
of displacement from his roots, and was emotionally as Jewish as was I.
Nevertheless, my Jewish roots were further concealed in my marriage.
My sixteen-year marriage was in many ways like the Jewish stay in Egypt. It
provided shelter, comfort, and a sense of security. My husband and I brought my
parents to the United States to live ten minutes from our home, and as the other
surviving members of our family were already in this country, the scattering of
our family in 1939 seemed to be overcome. I was once again affiliated with a
family tribe of parents, brother, nieces, stepchildren and grandchildren.
But something still was missing. Our family had no spiritual base. None of us
openly acknowledged our Judaism, nor did we practice rituals or observances of
ANY religion. So I began a spiritual quest - a search for my soul.
My quest lead me in many directions. I celebrated Easter in the Christian
commune in which my mother's sister was raising her family, danced with the
Sufis, meditated with the Buddhists, went on a vision quest to the Mayan ruins,
and investigated Unity, Unitarian, Church of Religious Science and metaphysical
congregations. In the course of these investigations, I found my personal,
spiritual identity, my connection with the One, and noticed its absence in my
marriage and family.
Leaving my marriage was like another exodus. The marriage that had provided
shelter and security had become oppressive. The husband who had been a
comfort to an insecure, child-like woman became repressive towards an adult
with a mind of her own. The yearning for freedom to express my spiritual Self
wrenched me away from the comfort of home and family as surely as it propelled
my ancestors out of Egypt. It was during the intensive residential workshop I
attended to help find the courage to leave my family that I first heard "the call of
the Jewish soul."
I had taken the symbolic step of walking away from the building in which we
were living into the wilderness behind the house. As I stood alone in the
wilderness of trees, shrubs, stones and insects meditating, I heard the name
"ELIJAH" resound in my head. The call was repeated three times. There was not a
living soul around.
The biblical story of Elijah seemed to fit in a way. Leaving a marriage that had
become false to my spiritual truth was a like Elijah burning the false idols. My
flight involved a wilderness of Court Hearings and injunctions and lost family
connections: my step children sided with my husband, my mother got cancer and
relocated to live with my brother out of State, and my husband behaved like a
real Jezebel, threatening my life, having me followed by detectives and forcing
me into unfamiliar surroundings. Yet I still denied my Judaism. Then more signs
began to appear. When I looked at the calendar after the last of the heart-
wrenching, long drawn out court hearings for the divorce, I noticed that it was
the first day of Hanukah. The ritual I created to change my name included a
Mikvah, (a ritual bath) a Jewish tradition of which I was unaware at the time,
and was coincidentally scheduled for the week-end of Rosh Hashanah (the
Jewish New Year). Even my new name, my mother's maiden name, Raphael, has
its source with a Hebrew ancestor.
On a journey to sacred sites in Egypt years later, as we approached the temple of
the crocodile king, Sobek, I found myself drawn to buy a black galabaya, (a
garment worn by Egyptian men and women,) although even as I bought it, I
disliked it.
Suddenly, the whole cocktail of negative emotions that stemmed from my
childhood displacement by the Holocaust surfaced, and I envisioned myself
angrily tossing that ugly black thing in the Nile. When I processed these feelings,
I realized that the black galabaya was a metaphor for the suffering and alienation
of the ancient Hebrews in Egypt, and that I was experiencing deep ancestral
memory. Initiates in the past were tested by having to swim through a canal of
water filled with crocodiles as a way of overcoming their fear.
As I tossed that black garment, that shroud representing feelings of victimization,
alienation and fear into the Nile, it felt like a ritual burial of all the barriers I had
felt, as a human and as a Jew, to full acceptance of every aspect of my identity.
Each of us has Jewish soul. Each of us has, at times, felt fearful, powerless,
victimized and alienated. Each of us carries individual and ancestral memory of
and fear and persecution. I did not toss that black garment into the Nile alone.
Every member of my group, including the Egyptian guide, participated in
energetically and physically releasing the yolk of fear and alienation. May we
each find the freedom to step openly into all of who we are. |
