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"A
central tenet of all the great spiritual traditions
is that pain and suffering, loss and sorrow, carry
within them keys that unlock gates of spiritual
experience that often had been closed before.
How extraordinary that we should be designed in
this way." Choices in Healing, Michael Lerner
"We
have not understood yet that the discovery of
the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task,
which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve
our civilization." C.G.Jung
During
September 2002, one year after the crash of the
World Trade Center, I was invited to join a group
of activists, conflict transformation practitioners
and peace studies researches for an inquiry into
the question "How does compassion arise in
the process of social healing?"
The
conference was being convened by Judith Thompson,
a long time peace and human rights activist completing
doctoral work in peace studies and was being hosted
by the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century.
The
gathering proposed to utilize the participants
lived experiences as the basis of their exploration
into the various aspects of compassion and social
healing.
During
the five hours flight to Boston I reflected on
the trajectory of my life that brought me to this
conference. The Holocaust left a gaping, unhealed
wound in its survivors which they, in turn, have
passed onto their children. Primo Levi, the most
lyrical of Holocaust writers expressed this in
his book, The Drowned and the Saved: "The
injury cannot be healed; it extends through time
and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced
to believe... perpetuate the tormentor's work
by denying peace to the tormented." (1988,
p.12)
In
most Holocaust families one of the children is
designated as the memorial candle for all the
relatives who perished. I was given the burden
and the mission of serving as the link that joins
the past to the present and the future. I spent
my adult years trying to deal with the effects
of intergenerationally transmitted trauma and
in an effort to seek healing, in 1998, I traveled
to Berlin, Germany, to participate in a dialogue
with descendants of the Nazi regime. Two years
later, four participants of the dialogue, two
on each side of the Holocaust, Jewish and German,
traveled to Bosnia to inspire the survivors of
the most recent European genocide to start their
healing.
The
conference I was traveling to, inspired me to
reflect on the meaning of compassion and I realized
that it can only be born out of suffering, the
kind of suffering which has the power to humanize.
Perhaps the soul inflicts suffering to give itself
compassion. Often the only bridge across the abyss
that separates us, compassion is a communion and
a deep resonance with another.
I
experienced the highest level of compassion from
descendants of the Third Reich during our dialogue
when many said to me "I am so sorry for what
my people did to your people." I discovered,
first in myself and then in others, the profound
connection between the ability to mourn one's
losses and feel compassion.
Compassion
is one of the noblest expressions of our humanity
and a sacred space in which according to Carl
Jung "a person can suffer the suffering he
always needed to suffer and lacked the courage."
I learned the most heart wrenching lessons about
compassion from Holocaust survivors: that a human
being crushed by suffering loses compassion and
conversely, a soul can expand from pain and feel
a great depth of compassion. It seems the edge
of extreme suffering cuts both ways.
The
Boston Research Institute for the 21st Century
was housed in a cheerful building and we took
our seats positioned in a circle. During the opening
speeches someone mentioned that evil has succeeded
because it was organized and the time has come
for the rest of us to do the same. Imre Kertesz,
the most recent Nobel Prize winner, reflects on
the notion of evil, in his book, "Kaddish
for a Child Not Born:"
"
And please stop saying that Auschwitz cannot
be
explained, that Auschwitz is the product of
irrational,incomprehensible forces, because
there is
always a rational explanation for wrongdoing:
It's
quite possible that Satan himself, like Iago
is
irrational: his creations, however, are rational
creatures indeed; their every action is as
soluble as a
mathematical formula... On the other hand,
I then
probably said , and this is important, what
is really
irrational and what truly cannot be explained
is not
evil, but contrarily, the good..."
In his book, "People of the Lie":
Scott Peck comments on the effects of evil
and warns us that: "there are no words
strong enough to describe the matter; I know
now that he or she who will do battle with
evil will be depleted beyond imagination,
sometimes beyond recovery."
In his essay titled "Mysterium Coniunctionis"
Carl Jung clearly states the dangers of being
overtaken by our dark side:
..."When man no longer knows by what
his soul is
sustained, the potential of the unconscious
is
increased and takes the lead. Desiriousness
overpowers
him and illusory goals set up in the place
of th
eternal images excite his greed. The beast
of prey
takes a hold of him and soon he forgets that
he is
a human being. ...Only the living presence
of the
eternal images can lend the human psyche dignity
which
makes it morally possible for a man to stand
by his own
soul, and be convinced that it is worth his
while to
persevere with it. Only then will he realize
that the
conflict is in him, that the discord and tribulations
are his riches, which should not be squandered
by
attacking others; and that, if fate should
exact a debt
from him in the form of guilt, it is a debt
to
himself."
One of the speakers remarked that we have failed
to live in the image of God and instead we made
God over in our image. Another speaker quoted
Solztenitin, the Russian writer, who said that
if the world was divided in evil and good, the
solution would be simple: get rid of the evil.
Unfortunately, we all have the capacity for good
and evil.
"We
humanize what is going on in the world and in
ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course
of speaking of it we learn to be human. "
Hannah Arendt
"I
am a verb in the language of the Divine."
Rabbi Cooper
"Each
man is haunted until his humanity awakens."
William Blake
When Reverend Michael spoke, we learned that he
was targeted because of his anti apartheid work.
A victim of a letter bomb, he lost both hands
and is partially blind and deaf. Yet, he has continued
to work tirelessly on behalf of human rights and
reconciliation in South Africa and worldwide.
Dumisa,
also from South Africa, who during the apartheid
years was repeatedly imprisoned for his political
activities is now one of the most eloquent spokesmen
for reconciliation and forgiveness. He talked
about the time he spent in solitary confinement
where he was looking forward to the interrogations,
such was the need for human contact and stimulation.
Dumisa radiates strength and nobility of spirit.
Svetlana,
a cardiologist from former Yugoslavia, told us
the story of how she was inspired to write about
"Good people in times of evil," during
the genocide in Bosnia because "you cannot
build a future based on evil." In her book
she documented the stories of those who crossed
lines of ethnicity to save neighbors, friends
and strangers during the wars in the Balkans.
Joseph,
a member of the Tutsi tribe from Rwanda lost his
immediate and extended family to the war with
the Hutus. He showed us pictures of his family
and I wanted to cry when he told us that his brother's
death had been his greatest loss. I remembered
how Holocaust survivors talked about a loved one,
that one person whose loss left an eternal emptiness,
a bleeding wound when torn from their lives. When
I asked him why has he not become embittered by
his experiences he replied that he didn't know,
but that bitterness would condemn future generations.
Joseph is a sociologist working in the field of
conflict transformation.
Before
telling our story, we each placed an object representing
compassion on the cloth that was our sacred altar.
In the middle of the cloth, there was a bouquet
of flowers in vivid colors and a tall, slow burning
candle.
Sometimes,
during the first day I became very ill, no doubt
from the images and stories I had heard as well
as a lifetime of living in the shadow of the Holocaust.
When I returned to our gathering, Richard, the
outspoken Irishman blinded as a child, expressed
that while everyone felt sorry for me, he was
jealous that I could leave the gathering because
"after a while the stories are overwhelming."
Arn
who was a child soldier in Cambodia is today a
celebrated human rights activist. When he told
us his story I had to steel myself against running
from the room: the unspeakable horrors and the
pain that radiated from him, made it almost impossible
to hear. Once more I was witnessing the extremes
of horror and cruelty that humanity is capable
of and I was jolted into the realization that
I owed it to him to listen. I felt as though in
some small measure I agreed to carry the burden
with him by hearing his story. My soul was singed
with his suffering and the sounds of his flute
which he played after he told us that he was forced
to play the same flute while he witnessed atrocities.
Arn continues to play his flute as a way of purging
and healing the memories.
Pat
shared her experiences as a member of Murder Victim
Families against the Death Penalty and the pain
of racial discrimination suffered by African Americans.
She works as the director for Fellowship of Reconciliation
and radiates a gentle wisdom and kindness. She
brought with her two paintings from death row
inmates.
Ruth
told us of her heritage and suffering as a Native
American. She works with restorative justice and
civic groups from over 40 countries. She cried
many tears and told us that her tears were cleansing.
Her regal countenance and her tears reminded me
of the stones called "Apache tears."
At first they seem opaque and dark, but in the
light, they become transparent and turn into the
color of a fine wine, not unlike pain that is
alchemically transformed into compassion.
Eva,
a Guatemalan from a family who has suffered heavy
losses during the civil war, at 14, became the
youngest member of a women's support group petitioning
the government to reveal the whereabouts of their
loved ones and stop the "disappearings."
Miki,
a human rights activist from Sarajevo, Bosnia
who, during the war was involved in projects to
ease the suffering of youth and the elderly, works
extensively on issues that involve peace making
and conflict resolution. He is married to Eva
and they have a six months old daughter whom they
brought to the conference. The presence of the
baby offered relief to the survivors of genocide
and the others who were witnessing our stories.
Maureen
and Richard, who had been blinded at the age of
ten by the British army, were the first couple
from "opposing sides" to speak to our
group. They modeled reconciliation between the
Loyalist and Republican communities in Northern
Ireland. They both work to turn their experiences
with the conflict in Ireland into learning for
future generations. I was touched to witness their
friendship and her tenderness towards Richard.
Yitzak,
a clinical psychologist from Israel, was severely
wounded in a terrorist attack in 1994 which prompted
him to develop a theory on reconciliation in the
therapeutic setting. He mentioned an organization
called Orphans with Parents, and I was reminded
how those of us with parents who survived concentration
camps grew up feeling orphaned even though our
parents were still alive. He commented that the
victim holds the key to the liberation of the
perpetrator by granting or withholding forgiveness.
And that the root of the word forgiveness, from
Greek, means untying a knot.
Zoughbi
is a Palestinian living in the West Bank and the
director of a Palestinian conflict resolution
center. He talked about the pain of bringing up
children whose safety is threatened every day.
Together with Yitzak, they brought us into the
presence of the horrors of the divide of Israeli
and Palestinian conflict.
One by One is a non profit organization created
by Jews and Christians whose lives have been deeply
affected by the Holocaust. They have held dialogues
in Berlin since 1992 to help stop the cycle of
intergenerational transmission of trauma and prejudice.
Judith Thompson, co-founder of Children of War,
comments on their work:
"The
impact of One by One's work goes far beyond
it's
own membership. They are helping to heal one
of the
deepest wounds in our collective psyche. They
are the
teachers for a new generation of peacemakers.
We are
all the beneficiaries of their courage and
wisdom."
(1992)
The children of Holocaust survivors and descendants
of the Third Reich are bound and divided by a
terrible history and the task of bearing witness
and attempting to heal the wounds left in the
human psyche by the Holocaust has fallen to us.
Gottfried
and I were the last dialogue with "the other."
I represented the only second generation genocide
survivor while Gottfried represented the side
of perpetrators.
When
he started talking, I remembered meeting him in
a mutual friend's car. Here I was, in a small
space, with a German man in his seventies whose
history I didn't know. I turned to him and said
"I am the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor,
my mother's whole family was murdered by Nazis,
her life was destroyed and I will not sit here
unless I know who you are and what you did during
the war."
Gottfried
talked about his shock with my directness and
his desire to run from the car. Instead, he told
me that he had been a Hitler Youth and only 15
when the war ended. I asked him if thought himself
capable of murders had the war continued and he
answered "I don't know." It was at that
moment that I trusted him and our relationship
started. We have since spoken together in high-schools
in Berlin, traveled to Bosnia, shared meals and
talked about the unspeakable.
I
had profound respect for this man who chose productive
responsibility over the futility of guilt and
carried the burden of accountability for a nation
afflicted with denial and silence. A nation who
went from collective brutality to collective amnesia.
He spoke of his reckoning with his conscience
in his late sixties and his discovery that his
willingness to be honest bridged the abyss between
him and the descendants of survivors.
When
my turn came, I spoke of my mother's "liberation"
from several concentration camps which didn't
bring her freedom from the horrors she had endured.
When she birthed me to replace her mother, we
both needed a mother and got a child instead.
I talked about the image permanently seared in
my mind of my grandmother marching to the gas
chamber, How during my dialogue with descendants
of the Nazi regime in Berlin, I realized that
I cannot change my history but rather my relationship
to that history and that the same poison that
kills can also heal. How I found emotional restitution
when one and then several descendants of the Third
Reich said "I am so sorry." And how
I learned that it was the "enemy that heals."
I
told Gottfried that he seemed to have more compassion
for me than for himself and expressed my deep
appreciation for his willingness to go to such
great length to represent the unpopular side of
perpetrators, show remorse and do repair work.
In front of our witnesses, I choked on my tears
while I expressed that although "I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I feared no
evil" for he and others like him, walked
with me.
With
the exception of one, every genocide of the 20th
Century was represented in the room and as the
week-end unfolded we learned that many of our
lives had been personally touched by genocide,
political imprisonment and torture. It seemed
that we all had in common a desire to make those
experiences count - to transform them into something
that can be of service to others.
The
conference presented me with the paradox and the
possibility to maintain one's compassion in spite
of having survived unspeakable horrors. These
people chose to transform their pain rather than
wallow in it and uphold the luminosity of the
human soul against the depth of darkness, evil,
hatred and bestiality that our specie can sink
to. Perhaps one way to continue to believe in
human goodness was to maintain one's own in spite
of impossible odds.
I
was humbled to be in the presence of beings whose
humanity matched their biological status and I
learned that compassion was engendered not only
by the depth of suffering but by one's willingness
to descend into that suffering and make meaning
out of it. In the words of Reverend Michael: "together
for three days we told and embodied the stories
of the depth of human degradation and the heights
of beauty which characterize the human family."
Someone
mentioned that anything which was life threatening
is life changing. The question was where, how
and why does a person turn their private wounds
into public purpose rather than become a perpetrator?
How did these people transcend their suffering
and turned it into service for mankind? Why did
their spirit grow instead of become crushed by
their suffering? Why are they involved with restorative
justice rather than restitution? Perhaps the answers
lay in continuing to ask the questions.
Albert
Navarro, former director of the European Commission
Humanitarian Aid Office thinks that " Mankind
is slowly but in a very determined way going back
to barbarism."
In his book, "Avalanche," Brugh Joy,
a transformational teacher who has worked with
thousands of individuals in awakening human awareness,
expressed this:
"I
have been impressed with certain individuals
who
have survived the ravages of chaos, whether
the black
pit of alcoholism and drug abuse or the extreme
trauma
of war. They seem to have gained a depth of
maturity,
a compassion, and a rich spirituality that
is
completely absent in people who are naive
and
untraumatized. It is as though such chaos
is a
contemporary rite of passage, an initiation,
one that
was previously handled through sacred rites
and vision
quests and that selects out those individuals
who have
the interior resources to become the great
teachers,
Priests, Healers, and Sages for a clan or
a
collective." (p.229)
Being in the same room with several survivors
of genocide, hearing their stories and feeling
their compassion, I must conclude that the alchemical
process that transforms psychic pain into compassion
is not for the faint of heart.
In
a piece he wrote after September 11, Richard Tarnas'
thinks that: "This is the essential insight
of the death-rebirth mystery: that every death
is on another level actually a birth." Charlene
Spretnak of the San Francisco Chronicle, in an
article she wrote on 10/5/01, mirrored those sentiments:
"It felt as if our having to bear the unbearable
had delivered us all into another way of being,
one shaped by the trauma of the immense tragedy
and the movement into regeneration."
Unlike developmental psychology with its limited
premise, James Hillman's theory of the acorn offers
insight into the paradox of the wounded healer
archetype:
"The
central and guiding force of the compelling
"acorn
theory" which proposes that each life
is formed by a
particular image, an image that is the essence
of that
life and calls it to a destiny, just as the
mighty
oak's destiny is written in the tiny acorn.
It is a
theory that offers a liberating vision of
childhood
troubles and another approach to themes such
as fate
and character and most of all calling, that
invisible
mystery at the center of every life that speaks
of the
fundamental question: What is it in my heart,
that I
must do, be and have? And Why?"
And
if the word character means at root, marked or
etched with sharp lines, like initiation cuts,
how much of our character determines our fate?
At
the end of the conference I wanted to stay immersed
in the feeling of compassion I experienced. Yet,
we had barely scratched the surface to the immensity
of the subject and perhaps more time together
was required to cause a quantum leap, not unlike
Rupert Sheldrake's 100th Monkey theory.
Perhaps
something was afoot, something akin to a paradigm
shift, since we found ourselves together in the
same room for three days.
On
my flight home, in syncronicity with my thoughts,
I read the following comments by Jason Pontin
in an article on cloning: " As to whether
a technology should be illegal because it alters
human nature, I have no objection to a new nature.
The late Robert Nozick, in his essay "The
Holocaust" asked whether the human nature
that administered Auschwitz was worth preserving;
"It now would not be a special tragedy if
humankind ended," he writes. "Perhaps
what we need do, is produce another, better species."
Pontin
concludes his article with these words "Bring
it on. Give me a new species altogether. It might
possibly make up for all our crimes." (Red
Herring, September 2002)
In a speech he gave on October 10 2002, Deepak
Chopra, comments on the urgency of changing what
needs changing:
"We
need a critical mass of people that will no
longer
participate or tolerate a culture of violence
that is
based on profound indifference to the pain
of our
fellow human beings and lack of respect for
life."
History is the story of victims and victimizers.
The critical first step in healing conflict is
the acknowledgement by the aggressor group or
its successors. This is the act of accepting responsibility
for the violent acts or events which caused the
traumatic losses to the victims. Without genuine
acts of acknowledgement and contrition the healing
process cannot begin. Because I was branded by
genocide, I can attest to the transforming power
of the words "I am so sorry," I have
heard in my dialogue with descendants of the Third
Reich.
Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist posits that
all the knowledge of the earth's past exists all
around us as electromagnetic fields of information
or "morphogenic fields." He explains
that the morphogenic field is changed by the first
person who breaks it thus making it easier for
others and that all over the world people are
changing the morphogenic fields of fear and silence.
This is evidenced by the fact that once an athletic
record is broken, it is psychologically easier
for others to do the same.
In
a talk he gave in Kansas City in 1998, Richard
Tarnas comments on the power and necessity of
remorse to the transformation of our species:
I think that it will take a fundamental moment
of
remorse - and this is absolutely essential
to the
death-rebirth experience - a long moment of
remorse, a
sustained weeping and grief. It will be a
grief of the
masculine for the feminine; of men for women;
of adults
for what happened to children; of the West
for what has
happened to every other part of the world;...
of
Christians for Jews; of whites for people
of color; of
the wealthy for the poor; of human beings
for animals
and all other forms of life. It will take
a
fundamental metanoia, a self-overcoming, and
a radical
sacrifice to make this transition... And in
the end it
will also require grace. (Tarnas, 1998, p13)
I will add that the remorse of all perpetrators
towards their victims should be followed by the
willingness to do repair work.
Perhaps
then and only then, we can prevent our legacies
from being passed on like a defective gene to
the next generation and can live in a world where
everyone tolerates everyone else.
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