Daniel Jackson: The reason being happy is a great commandment is because like other commandments, it's a formidable challenge. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Daniel Jackson: It's not the natural state of affairs for us to all be happy and it's a lifelong enterprise and for some people, it's an epic struggle. Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. My guest today is Daniel Jackson. Daniel is a photographer. He's a professor of computer science at MIT. He is married to one of the first woman Orthodox rabbis. He's the father of three children and he is the editor of an extraordinary collection, Portraits of Resilience. So Daniel and I came together out of this -- a shared interest in resilience and out of a shared commitment to Jewish living, to Jewish practice, to Jewish wisdom. And I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, Daniel. Daniel Jackson: Thank you so much, Deborah. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be part of your wonderful podcast series. Deborah Waxman: Oh, thank you. Daniel reached out after you heard one of the podcasts and we connected and had just such a rich conversation and I thought this is exactly the kind of conversation that we're seeking to capture on this podcast. And so I said, would you like to do it in a recorded fashion. So there's so much that we could talk about. But I think where I want to begin is to ask you how you came to your exploration of resilience. Daniel Jackson: Wow. Well, in some sense, I suppose for all of us the search for resilience is a lifelong search. It was heightened for me by, I guess two things. One was a very painful episode in my own family in 2010 in which one of our family members had a very difficult depressive episode. And then a really a bad period at my work, at my university, where we had increasing rates of depression and anxiety and peaking in the year 2014 with the most tragic spate of suicides. By the end of the year, we'd actually lost seven members of our community that included a colleague of mine, and as a community, we were struggling to find ways to move forward. As you mentioned, I'm a photographer and I was looking for photographic projects and wondering if there was a photographic project that might contribute to helping us become more resilient and to deal with these tragedies and to maybe somehow nudge our community in a happier direction. And that led to the project that I'd be happy to tell you about. Daniel Jackson: And then I think subsequently following the project, I've been mulling over its implications in particular, its connections to my Jewish life and into my Jewish commitments. Deborah Waxman: Well, so let's talk a little bit about Portraits of Resilience because it's really, I think an extraordinary project. Will you talk about about both the process of creating it as well as the product that you did create? Daniel Jackson: Sure. So the original idea was to make a gallery of photographic portraits of members of my university community, students and faculty and administrative staff, who had experienced depression or anxiety or some other kind of mental illness. And my idea was that this might somehow counter the stigmatization by putting up an array of faces and saying these are people who are not only not ashamed of what they experienced, but they're proud that they have faced these very difficult challenges. They're -- I thought of them as kind of warriors on the frontline of a modern battle who could return from the battle and inform us all about this worldwide epidemic and teach us something about it. So it started out purely photographically. But as I talked to my subjects in preparation for taking the photographs, I ended up learning amazing things, and in fact in the end, transcribing their entire stories verbatim. And this led eventually to the publication of my book, Portraits of Resilience, which pairs photographic images of the subjects with their stories. Deborah Waxman: Hmm. And so were there themes or motifs? I mean, I know when I started to study resilience from the study of psychology, they talked about particular traits. They talked about characteristics and practices and that has guided this podcast in how I think about the topics and the conversations. Was that manifest? Could you discern that in- Daniel Jackson: Oh, absolutely. So I would say that, first of all, I should say there are 24 people in my book and every one of the stories is very individual and one of the things I'm proud of is that there's nothing politically correct in the book. People said whatever they felt and they have the authenticity of the person speaking about their own experiences. Daniel Jackson: And so people say very different things, sometimes conflicting things. On the other hand, there are of course commonalities. The origins of their depression and mental health challenges almost always fit a pattern with varying components. But that pattern is almost always some genetic predisposition, some childhood trauma, maybe some abuse or some bad events. Then often some stress in a very competitive environment, often some social isolation in a kind of lethal cocktail. The remedies that people found were, likewise, a combination of different factors, often medications, which often had remarkable effects, particularly for the people who are most susceptible to biological factors. Talk therapy of course. Daniel Jackson: But what interested me in particular were the strategies people used and the role of their friends and the community and their understandings of some of the larger issues that might have tipped them over the edge that make depression and anxiety so prevalent in our society. Deborah Waxman: I think that's exactly, it's so interesting to me like that's exactly right about strategies and community. Those two things that you said. I mean, that's what I think whenever I try to apply the lens of resilience to Judaism. I think that it's so much deeper than this, but I'm just astonished at how much about Jewish living, about the practices embedded in it are essentially strategies toward helping us contend with what life presents us, whether it's joy or whether it's sorrow. That these are strategies to ground us, to locate us in time and in space and in connection to others and to bolster us to go on with what comes next. And I think the communal piece is so essential because I think that's how we understand ourselves most fully. And I do think that the hyper-individualism of contemporary society is not helping us in our humanity and is not helping us in our mental health. Daniel Jackson: I think you're so right. And I think particularly in a place like MIT, there's a tendency to sort of think of organized religion as a collection of dogmas, that it's all about subscribing to some narrow beliefs. And, but as you say, it's really about action. It's about what you do and it's about doing that in a community and the truth is that's why people find meaning in Judaism, I believe it's not because they sign up for some list of dogmas, because after all we all have different understandings of God and Jewish tradition and so on, but what we share is our community and pursuing our lives together. Deborah Waxman: I think that's right and I think especially where you started with the thought that the people in your book are struggling with depression. I was just having this conversation with someone about how when I try to make the case for being a part of a community, it is often because of community as a resilience factor, community as a place to both celebrate and also to support at moments of extremis or loss or crisis and how it's very hard to find yourself a community when you are at that place of extremist that it's, it is a bit of an investment. I was speaking not long ago to a man who lost his wife very suddenly. She was very healthy and she died and the details made it, this devastating loss, even harder. They were traveling abroad and it took a long time until they were able to return her body home. And he said to me afterwards, I am spending more time at my synagogue than I ever, ever imagined, but this is the group that is supporting me and sustaining me each and every day. I mean, his family too. But- Daniel Jackson: That's right. Deborah Waxman: ... And I was saying he had that existing relationship and for sure if he had walked through the door, it is likely they would have embraced him. But instead they all, they rushed to aid him at every step along the way. Daniel Jackson: I think that's right. And I think I would go even further than that and say that I think we're coming to realize that in our, in this sort of hyper -individualized view that we have in the modern era, we've created a notion of self, which I think is in some ways not altogether beneficial. And it's very different from older ancient notions of self, which are much more permeable and I think that we've come to realize that even our definition of ourselves is intricately tied up with our relationship to other people. Daniel Jackson: Actually, one of my, one of my portrait people said something to me, which has, I wouldn't say it's haunted me, it's inspired me. It's stuck in my mind ever since she said it. This was Lydia Krasilnikova, and she said, you don't realize what people are doing in your life, what roles they're playing, sometimes, until they die. And you don't know what you're holding together in other people's lives. You might not know that you are the glue holding together so much because you take yourself for granted. Just like we take other people for granted. And I love this idea of everyone is sort of glue holding everyone else together, but we're not like a billiard balls bouncing around, but we're in some kind of a larger sense. You know, what Thich Nhat Hanh called the inter-being -- we're part of each other's lives. Deborah Waxman: That's right. This deep interconnectivity. We cannot, I mean, like the John Donne poem, we're not an island. We cannot exist in isolation and in fact we suffer, we suffer terribly, I think, when we act as if we do -- and I think the planet suffers as well. I mean it really redounds in so many directions. I'm not certain I fully want to leave behind the tension between religion and science, but let's actually turn to religion first, even as Judaism is so much more than just a religion. Deborah Waxman: You started on this project, it began as a photographic project and it expanded to include the voices as well as the portraits. And it's a beautiful, beautiful collection. I know it mostly from your website PortraitsofResilience.com. Since you've completed it, it kind of kicked off an investigation for you about how it relates to to your life as a Jew. So I'd love for you to kind of narrow it a little bit about what that looks like and that investigation. Daniel Jackson: Sure. Well I guess during the project itself I was very caught up with trying to be respectful and open to the voices of my participants. And of course there was a lot of work in putting the book together and designing the book and then getting it published and so on. And then after the book was published, as I started to give some talks to promote the book and so on, and particularly talking to Jewish audiences, I found myself being asked to or maybe asking myself to connect the lessons of the book to traditional Jewish themes. And I realized that I hadn't really fully explored that. Truth be told, I had been thinking about it much earlier. I think I told you in an earlier discussion that when we were suffering from one of my family members having this terrible major depressive episode, I think I was thinking very much about that and the pain of that time. Daniel Jackson: And I was thinking about tefilah, prayer, and the ways in which the things that we say in our traditional prayers or our non traditional prayers connect or don't connect to this. And one phrase that that really struck me enormously was this phrase from the morning service, which I actually came to realize is actually not even universal in traditional prayer books because it turns out it's a unique to the Sephardic tradition, which I grew up with in the prayer, barukh she'amar, there is a a line barukh ma'avir afeylah u-mayvi orah, blessed be the one who causes afeylah, darkness, to pass and brings light. And for me this was a very resonant phrase first of all because in my understanding the word afeylah is used to connote a kind of deep, thick darkness. Daniel Jackson: And it really struck me that depression is really a very, very deep darkness for people who suffer from it. And we were just desperately hoping that this darkness would pass, it seemed to be interminable. So that sort of got me thinking about Jewish texts and their various resonances. Daniel Jackson: And then after, as I said, after the book came out, I started thinking about which Jewish texts would most connect to the lessons in the book. And I think that's when I started looking back at the writings of [inaudible 00:14:17] and his comments on depression and various other things and started trying to connect these things together. Deborah Waxman: It's so undervalued. I just was checking, so just a shout out for the Reconstructionist prayer book. In our version, wonderful book that our commission was compiling 30 years ago, They tried to draw extensively from Sephardi nusakh, from the Sephardi tradition. So that line is in that part of the liturgy in the Reconstructionist prayer book as well. Daniel Jackson: Oh that's great. that's wonderful. Deborah Waxman: When you're positing about afeylah as this kind of enveloping darkness, I was reminded that the author, William Styron, wrote a memoir of his depression, which was very influential for me maybe 15, 20 years ago when I read it. Really kind of trying to describe that his experience was really something very, very different from a day when you're feeling blue or you're feeling grumpy or you're feeling that this is... That it just shapes every single moment and every single interaction and impairs in such a powerful way, and he calls that memoir Darkness Visible. So it just seems like you're... I think that you're right, that is a metaphor. There's a lot of power there. I'd love to invite you to tie this in also to photography and to the interplay of light and darkness and the visual artistry that you create. Daniel Jackson: Thank you. Well, I guess one thing that comes to mind is I made a little promotional video when the book came out and I asked some of my subjects to talk about the experience of being in the book and being interviewed and photographed. And one of the wonderful comments that a colleague of mine, Sally Lee, made was she said that it was very empowering to be brought out of the darkness into the light. And it struck me that was both sort of literal in terms of the photograph and the rather bright lights that I used in the studio that I set up. And also metaphorical in the sense that there's lots of discussion about depression and anxiety, but very rarely are the people who actually experience it brought to the fore and given a voice and a face to talk about it. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. It's so interesting. There's light and there's also visibility, like light shines on to make things visible, to be willing to come out of it to seek treatment, willing to come out of it to tell one's story I think is very... Daniel Jackson: That's right. I mean, I was actually completely amazed in a sense that how my project participants were so willing to tell really incredibly personal, intimate details of their lives. And I kept thinking that at any point they would pull out, they wouldn't want to be on the web, they wouldn't want to be in the book, but every single one of them, just, if anything, became more enthusiastic as the project proceeded. And I came to realize that actually I, I had originally just thought of them as wonderful altruistic participants who are going to help de-stigmatize depression and anxiety for everybody else. Daniel Jackson: But I came to realize that they were also experiencing a kind of catharsis and confronting their own shame. And I came to realize that the stigmatization of depression is so often by the people who suffer it themselves, that they, of course completely mistakenly, they often blame themselves for their own depression. And showing your face and telling your story as a way to quieten that voice inside you that's telling you that it's your own fault. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I do think that... I mean I think that's the premise behind a lot of liberation movements. Certainly the women's movement in the 60s and the 70s, the encounter groups and telling one's story is so incredibly powerful. It's so interesting to kind of loop it back to Jewish liturgy. I want to reflect a little bit on another piece of the morning liturgy, but I also want to just talk about globally a little bit about Jewish liturgy. The traditional liturgy strongly prefers the we, the collective high holiday liturgy that illustrates it so powerfully our father, our King, Avinu Malkeinu, or for the sins that we committed that the whole long list of Al Cheyt sins is all in the collective. And one of the things that I have struggled with, with Jewish liturgy is the loss of the self in that. On the one hand I'm always going to make that argument for our community because I think that we, I really do think that we come to our full humanity in relationship with others. Deborah Waxman: And the flip side of that is when you get lost, when you get made invisible somehow or when you just can't see yourself within it. So I remember early in my rabbinical student career when I was really grappling with the theology and the intention undergirding the daily prayers, and in the morning service, every day there's a prayer, Ahavah Rabah with a great love, you have loved us. I agree. I understand that. I accept. I think that's incredibly powerful. It's, that's right before the Shema. The Shema talks about love. It's very, very important. But underneath it all was, but what about me? Am I loved? Am I lovable? So I could... There the we was, the story was lost. And so to raise up, the how to raise up the I within the we to find that best possible balance between the collective and the individual. Daniel Jackson: I think that's a great observation. I think it's something we all struggle with. It's that balance between our communal selves and our individual selves. You know, one of the things that comes to mind when you talk about this is that again, in the Sephardic tradition, there's a vidui, a confession that is recited in minkhah , the afternoon service. And this confession, I don't remember who it's written by. It's one of those wonderful, Spanish poet rabbis. And in it, the confession describes how the different parts of the body are each asked to plead forgiveness on account of every other part of the body. And the hands say, oh, but how could I do it? Because we've done all these bad things. And the mind, the head says, how could I do it? I've thought all these bad thoughts and the lips say, I've told all these lies and so on. Daniel Jackson: And then the confession ends with essentially this kind of feeling of resignation and inability for any of the parts of the body to advocate for themselves. And it ends with the beautiful words, ve-karah zeh el zeh ve-amar, "and each one said to the other", mirroring the language of the angels in the famous Kedushah prayer and immediately is followed by "ashamnu, bagadnu", we have sinned.... And so I find this very beautiful because what the author has done is essentially subverted the communal confession, exactly in line with your thought, which is to reinterpret the, we have sinned in terms of the different parts of the body. And I find that a very beautiful and moving idea. You know, we have all these multiple parts and that we have a, we have a "we" inside as well in some sense. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. But I think that one of the things that's really important to focus in on this conversation is both the confessional piece and then the forgiveness piece like that. The presumption that there is, I mean, I think because I feel like that's a critical part of resilience is moving beyond just the preoccupation with the deficits. I mean, I- Daniel Jackson: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think I think it's a big risk of the high holy day period that you can beat yourself up too much. One of the things that I like about the, the liturgy is that I think it has its very interesting sort of chiastic structure. We always start sort of with the negative. We've committed these offenses, we're sorry. And it always ends with forgiveness and positivity. You know, the way that we end even whenever we have a haftarah, a reading from the prophets, we always -- where the chapter will end with a very negative statement, we always bring back a positive one to close. Daniel Jackson: So what I like about the liturgy is that it almost has this fractal quality that that turning from the negative to the positive happens at every level. It happens in the day in going from the beginning of Kol Nidrey to the end of Ne'ilah, the closing prayer, with its very optimistic tone and it happens within the individual services. And it also often happens within the individual prayers. And I think this is a recognition of our psychological need to not dwell. We can't ruminate on our failures, we have to always be turning towards the positive. Deborah Waxman: I think that's right. And I think for me as a rabbi, it's one of the pieces of pain when I know that for people who only go to synagogue during the high holiday season. I was sitting with someone yesterday who described herself as "I'm a two day a year Jew" because I think that the breadth of Jewish liturgy... I would add, the breadth of Jewish practice, tries to orient ourselves toward that. And when you only dip into these days of intense self-reflection and even castigation, you're missing all of the things that buoy us and that orient us more toward toward the light. I mean there are two lines from the morning liturgy that I want to raise up. Both of them are from the yozter prayer, the prayer for creation, which is right before the Ahavah Rabbah prayer was just talking about. Deborah Waxman: So right after we do the call to worship, the very beginning... And so I think it's exactly that dynamic you were just talking about. This prayer that is celebrating God in nature and celebrating that miracle, that light has returned again after a time of darkness with the way the ancients may have experienced it. Well, the line draws from the book of the Prophet Isaiah, Yotzer or u-vorei hoshekh, who creates a light and a different word for creates darkness. Yotzer or u-vorei et ha-ra is the original, who makes peace and evil. I mean there are different translations of all of these words, but that's a rough translation. The liturgists shifted to yotzer or u-vorei hoshekh, who creates light and creates darkness. Oseh shalom u-vorei et ha-kol who makes peace and who is the fashioner of all things. Deborah Waxman: And I just think that to move beyond that duality, those dualisms, to some kind of holism that carries both the hard and the good, the joyous, the evil, and the well-meaning and the effectively good. Deborah Waxman: My breath is taken away every time I dwell on it. And when I'm having a hard time, I'm really aware of that switch because when I'm drawn toward the dualism, when I'm feeling stuck in the raw, in the evil, in the bad, and think, no, this is, I don't have a full understanding of this. I have strategies that can guide me out of it. I have people I can lean on. This is part of the whole, it is not limited to what I think it is. Daniel Jackson: Yeah. I think that's very wise. You know, I'm also reminded of that statement of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov who says, "afilu be-hastarah," even in the hiding of God, nimtzah Hashem yitbarakh, God is to be found. And I think there he's addressing an even more painful concern, which is that for some people, life just seems to be a place of permanent darkness. And I think that suddenly when I look at my own life, I'm very fortunate that it is a "hakol" as you say. It's in everything which is mostly very good with occasional things which are not so happy. But I'm struck that I think that Rabbi Nahman even wanted to point out that even in the times when we seem to be in a total void we can imagine God there with us. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, Rabbi Nahman's a great place for us to wind down. I mean, he's, for listeners who don't know him, he was a great Hasidic master and the consensus is that he himself suffered from terrible, terrible depression. So he was writing right at the beginning of the modern era when the individual was really just... Like the whole concept of the individual was just starting to emerge and readers of his works, you see that there's a psychology that he's working for and he's always trying to bolster both individuals who are suffering personally and also Jews who are suffering collectively. And he, he writes powerfully, eloquently. And I think with that, I don't know if desperation is the right word, but you know, with, with a desperate desire to understand and to try to break through this, I think. Daniel Jackson: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I'm no great scholar, but I've read a few fragments of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov and they're incredibly potent. The one that comes to mind most for me is a line that is now being made famous by his Hasidim because it was made into a song, which a lot of people know. Mitzvah gedolah lihiyot be-simkhah, it's a great mitzvah, commandment to always be happy. And I remember when I was my yeshiva days back in seminary I remember that people used to sing this passionately at weddings and we had this naive idea that what he meant by this was, it was a sort of well be jolly, you know? Deborah Waxman: Right. Party on. Yeah. Daniel Jackson: Yeah, that's right. Party on and you'd be happy all the time. and then of course, there's certainly something to be said or now we know psychologically if you can redirect your thoughts all the time to happier ones, then it has a deep longterm psychological effect. But you know, I came to realize that what Rabbi Nahman was saying was really something much more profound, which was that the reason being happy is a great commandment is because like other commandments, it's a formidable challenge. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Daniel Jackson: And what he was really saying was it's not the natural state of affairs for us all to be happy and that it's a lifelong enterprise. And for some people it's an epic struggle to find happiness. And I think that that can be both inspiring and reassuring. Deborah Waxman: Right. And I think that's exactly right. That this is, it's an orientation rather than just a description it's a, like, turn yourself to this. Set yourself on this course rather than just expect that you're there already. So, Daniel, what a rich and wonderful conversation. I know we could keep going, but I think we've come to the end of our time. Thank you so much. Daniel Jackson: Well, thank you. It's been wonderful talking to you and have very inspiring and I've been delighted to be part of this. Deborah Waxman: Oh, I'm so glad you're a part of it. And I hope that listeners will also spend some time looking at Portraits of Resilience, which you can find on the website by that name, PortraitsofResilience.com and if you're interested in Daniel's other photographs, you can find them at dnj.photo. That's it. It's a new domain, so don't, tack on anything after that. And we'll also upload links to those sites and some other resources both on hashivenu.fireside.fm and on reconstructingjudaism.org and you can always find more resources on ritualwell.org. Deborah Waxman: Many thanks. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.