Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg (RJR): One of the things now that I find really important to say is: overestimate how much any talking about trauma, healing and resilience will impact you in the day. Like, take a walk after you listen to this podcast, just leave space.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman (RDW):      Make space. That's just like, such a countercultural thing at this moment in time.

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RDW:      Hello, I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I want to thank all the listeners of Hashivenu over these last 18 months as we've learned how to do a podcast on resilience. It's been an extraordinary experience and the reception has been tremendous.

RDW:      We are starting a new season of Hashivenu, so what I'd love to do is, I hope you'll be interested. I'd love to ask all of you who are listening to take some time to rate our podcast. It is well-received and well-regarded and has a growing listenership and your rating on whatever platform you listen will really help us to boost the listenership.

RDW:      I want to tell you a little bit about the new season. We are shifting a little bit to focus in on unleashing the deep wisdom in Judaism that promotes resilience.

RDW:      We've been doing that all along, but right now we're going to focus in on practices and across Reconstructing Judaism, we're in the midst of cultivating and creating tools that promote resilience. And we're also experimenting with different ways to get these tools out to the wider Jewish community. Some of them look at different levels of commitment. Some of them we're thinking about different ways like podcasts and websites and face to face gatherings to promote an embrace of Jewish wisdom, of Jewish practice and of the cultivation of resilience.

RDW:      So, to start us off on this exploration, I am so happy to welcome Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg. Jessica is a recent graduate from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She graduated in 2018 and she'll share with us a little bit about her journey. She came to rabbinical school with a deep background as a community activist. While she was in rabbinical school, she developed a deep interest in and a growing expertise in trauma and how it has informed Jewish experience on both the individual and the collective level and most importantly I think to go along with that understanding, some thoughts about how to bring awareness and move beyond the trauma. And that I would put forward is significantly about what the work of cultivating resilience is about.

RDW:      And since she has graduated over these last couple of years, she has been able to kind of bring this all together in the work that she's doing as a rabbi. Jessica works for Bend the Arc as the rabbinic organizing fellow and she also does really important work for the rabbinical college, for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, she is the project director for work we are doing on creating a trauma-informed rabbinate and she also for Reconstructing Judaism is the project director for Reset, which cultivates resilience practices for Jewish social justice organizations. So we're going to talk about all of that and our larger mission in our conversation today. Welcome, Jessica.

RJR:      Thank you so much for having me.

RDW:      It's a great pleasure. And where I want to begin is to ask you to talk a little bit about the, I just painted the headlines. I want to talk about what drew you to rabbinical school and what were you hoping, I'm proud to say a child of the Reconstructionist movement.

RJR:      Child of the movement. Lifelong Reconstructionist.

RDW:      Yeah, so will you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, you have great parents. Talk about how you came to be here?

RJR:      In rabbinical school. Yeah. So, in my mid 20s, I was working as a community organizer in a neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I was involved in queer and gender justice work, racial justice work. And through in that work, I got in more contact with conversations about Israel/Palestine.

RJR:      And in the process of my first time really as an adult engaging with and thinking about my relationship to Israel/Palestine, decided I needed to recommit to my adult Jewish life. I'd been going to Reconstructionist synagogue, Mayim Rabim of the Twin Cities, and I had a consistent Jewish life, high school, college, after. But just found myself in these, both in my work as a neighborhood organizer and in my adult engagement with learning about Israel, asking questions about Jewish history, about Jewish practice and wanting more and deeper connection and really wanting to mature, my connection, practice, understanding.

RJR:      At the same time, in a lot of social justice and movement spaces, in particular, the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010, there was a healing justice track and it was the first time I really learned about a movement ... I mean, at that time, now I think people will talk about healing justice as a movement - at that time, not that many years ago, it was many practitioners and thinkers, I think, recognizing each other as like, oh, we're doing similar things.

RJR:      Primarily black and brown women, indigenous women saying that our political organizing is not separate from our individual and collective healing and our individual and collective healing cannot be separate from our anti-oppression values, political work in the world.

RJR:      And in that vein, I think one of the charges or one of the values that I heard was ground your political work in spiritual practice and culture and tradition and if possible, have it be your own, especially given the history of white folks appropriating other people's traditions, turn to your own people and learn your own history.

RJR:      I read an essay by Aurora Levins Morales called Historian as Curandera that talks about - in her book Medicine Stories - that talks about the role of the historian as a healer. And what stories are told and not, what parts of our histories are told and not as a deeply political act and part of healing collective bodies. And somehow through all of that, I decided that I wanted to learn my people's history. And I thought about actually -- the other track was maybe a masters in Jewish history, or you know, academic world of Jewish history. But what I really wanted was to have delivery methods. How do we get the good stuff out into the world and to people? And that's what I saw rabbinical school as an opportunity to do, was to learn my people's history and very much came to RRC, to Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, because of the civilizational frame and the deep learning of Jewish history. And then the, okay, how do we decide what stories we're going to tell and bring them to people's daily lives and understandings of the world?

RDW:      I want to pause.

RJR:      Yes, please pause.

RDW:      There's so much that woke up for me. One is just from my own experience, I as an undergraduate, I was a religion major and I was really, really interested in early Christianity and then I got really interested in Christianity in America and there was this moment when I was a junior where I was like, why am I so deeply immersed in another faith tradition?

RDW:      I'm not certain I could totally articulate what I meant, and some of it had to do with, I didn't really love the Jewish studies majors. Some of it was really very, very local, but I remember at this young age of - like, I have this choice of am I going to get deeply immersed in another faith tradition or am I going to get deeply immersed in my own? And making that choice to kind of start to move over to my own tradition in my academic work.

RDW:      And my personal practice was always very, very Jewish. And then just to reflect on history versus rabbinate, I felt like in my 20s I was choosing between rabbinical school and getting a PhD and thought in my 20s that I made the choice for rabbinical school.

RJR:      Okay, but you did both, right?

RDW:      I did both. So it turns out it was a choice to sequence rather than between them. So, that's it. But I will say about this and it goes really right to the storytelling and to the community building and to the delivery that you were talking about where I am so grateful that I chose the rabbinical school first, that I did do this sequence. I mean, the doctorate was incredibly helpful. Even, even though I had outstanding education in my undergraduate, in my rabbinical training, like it really helped me to think critically and to process a lot of different information, a lot of information very, very quickly.

RDW:      And I have no regrets about it. The rabbinical training cracked my heart open. It cracked my heart open in a way that was just life changing. I really think if I had done the academic piece, I'm not certain I ever would have looped back around to the rabbinical piece. And I think I would have been really, when people talk about the different meanings of academic, I think I would have been really removed.

RDW:      And at the end of the day, I really feel like the rabbinical work is about being with people and being with people at moments that matter, helping them create and find meaning individually and collectively. And that is personally redemptive and I think that that's really essential for the larger project.

RJR:      Yeah.

RDW:      So, okay. You came to rabbinical school.

RJR:      Here I am.

RDW:      Well, you're done.

RJR:      There I was.

RDW:      Done. There you were. It's a great celebration when you graduated. Tell me about how you found your way to investigating trauma.

RJR:      Yeah, so I came to rabbinical school, as I said, with these questions and this framework really of Historian as Curandera, as healer, as a possibility, as an aspiration. And I just had been hearing about in the water, in many rooms I'm in collective trauma, historical trauma as a framework that was of interest and especially as naming, as thinking about Jewish collective trauma as something that impacts how Jewish communities are shaped today. What we prioritize, how we respond to things. I was very lucky to get to do an independent study that Rabbi Mordecai Liebling supervised me on, where I started with a huge range of questions about what is collective historical trauma, what is the collective body, how do we heal it, what does it mean? And it started out as a one semester independent study and then I just kept reading.

RJR:      And I'd also just say that actually, diving into reading books about trauma slowed me down in a really good way, that I started reading a lot and learning about the impacts of traumatic events on individual bodies, brains, hearts, spirits, and learning about that brought up a lot of stuff for me and about own experiences in my own life.

RJR:      And one of the things now that I find really important to say is: overestimate how much any talking about trauma, healing and resilience will impact you in the day. Like, take a walk after you listen to this podcast, just leave space.

RDW:      Make space. That's just like, such a countercultural thing at this moment in time. I mean, we are so-

RJR:      And I have to continuously remind myself of this, that I will do a training, read an article and then just keep going about my day, answering emails, texting, and then like half an hour later I'm like, "I feel kind of dizzy," or something, you know, just like notice the impact and be like, "Aha, yeah, you did the thing again." So, just to finish that I did what ended up being a year long independent study and came to focus on rabbis and the role of rabbis in healing individual, collective and historical trauma. And that is how I ended up doing all the things I'm doing now.

RDW:      Well, I think I want to talk about a couple of things. One of the things that is I think important about your analysis is, and how you've educated me and the faculty of the Rabbinical College is that you really do an overlapping analysis and you think about individual trauma and you think about collective trauma and you think about historical trauma and you're looking for overlays and intersections and that kind of sensitivity and that kind of sophistication, flexibility and sophistication, I think is really, really important to pay attention to, that we are constantly affected and all these different levels and to try to both train leaders about it and even train individuals, practitioners and individuals in that kind of sensitivity, that the lens shifts, I think is part of what is really essential about the sensibility that you bring to it.

RJR:      Thank you. Yeah so, one of the things that has been really helpful for me in learning about trauma healing and resilience is that I want to learn from as wide a range of scholars, practitioners, wisdom makers as possible and have really found a lot of generative-ness from pulling from the field of psychology and clinical work, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, historians, healing justice organizers. Like, just a really wide range of practitioners.

RJR:      And what I've noticed is that people sometimes use the words intergenerational and collective and historical trauma interchangeably. For me, it's been helpful to kind of sort those things-

RDW:      Almost like, categorize them.

RJR:      Yeah, a little bit, and to say ... when I say intergenerational trauma, I'm talking about the impact on a specific family or family system of unresolved trauma in a parent or caretaker's life being passed on to families, to next generations.

RJR:      When I say collective trauma, I'm talking about the impact of an overwhelming event on a collective of people who are not necessarily all present for that event. For me growing up, September 11th as a collective trauma -- I was not in New York City and as someone with a shared identity felt impacted by that.

RJR:      And historical trauma, ancestral trauma, which really is learning a lot from native American scholars about naming how collective traumas that happened to groups of people then can be passed down through intergenerational means, calling that historical trauma, ancestral trauma.

RDW:      So one of the things that I have really a growing awareness of, and that I find it easy to ignore, and we kind of evoked it earlier in our conversation, is how embodied trauma is. There's a really influential text for practitioners out there called "The Body Keeps the Score" that really talks about how much the body really carries around the trauma, whatever the source of it is. And so I wonder, I think it's probably important for even as we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about resilience to just kind of pause a little bit the same way we said let's pause and make space, because I think that that's what we're making spaces to register the impact and to, in that registering, allow it to shift a little bit. So, can you talk a little bit about embodiment? Trauma and embodiment?

RJR:      I can try. Yeah, talking about embodiment feels really important to me. And I hesitate as a rabbi and not a body worker or someone trained specifically in body systems. And to me it's actually one of the areas that I feel I have the most learning to do. Like, you went for your PhD. After the podcast is done recording, you'll do some career counseling to me on what my next training is because I would love so much to learn more about bodies.

RDW:      I think it makes so much sense to me. I mean, you talk about what's next. I have the rabbinical training, I have the doctoral training and I think I've said this over the course of the podcast: I feel like the doctoral training is about the head. The rabbinical training is a lot about the head, but also about the heart and the integration of the two.

RDW:      And for me in this stage of my life, the next stage is about the body. And you know, for the last almost 10 years now, I've had a pretty serious yoga practice, which is about trying to, for me to even just be aware of my body and to learn new patterns in my body. For me, when I think about what is the next learning I want to do. Sometimes I think about, you know, somatics and paying attention and for sure, it has to do with integration. For sure, it has to do with my own history and how much I actually both embody my own traumas and just experiences, and then how much I cut myself off from my body in making my way through the day.

RJR:      Yeah, and I mean, I think part of the hesitation you're hearing in my voice is that I think sometimes when we first, and this was true for me as well, when people first hear about or read The Body Keeps the Score or hear about trauma healing and resilience, that it lives in the body, there's a rush towards that. And I've experienced this in some Jewish spaces and spiritual spaces and organizing spaces where, okay, now everybody pays such deep attention to your body. And what I've learned from people with more advanced trauma training than I have, that that's not actually always a good idea.

RDW:      That's right. That's right.

RJR:      It's not -- in a big public room with hundreds of people in synagogue, to pay close attention to where you're holding tension in your body might be a really bad move.

RDW:      Exactly.

RJR:      So I do want to just offer this as an area of ... one thing that in the training rabbis and Jewish leaders about trauma healing and resilience to think about what space you're in and what's appropriate for that space and have a lot of humility about that.

RDW:      I mean, Judaism historically is a deeply embodied, deeply material religion. But I think in the modern era it has gotten much more spiritualized. It has gotten much more intellectualized. And I think part of what we're trying to do -- pendulums swing; part of this, separate from trauma, is about kind of a return more toward ... I think there's a different balance, but you know, these things are messy as we find our way through them.

RJR:      So this question about what is Jewish wisdom about embodiment is something I'm really interested in. As we talked about, "go to our own people, mine our own traditions." I think there's a trope that Judaism is very "heady." We're just studying texts in our head, you know, studying all the time and very much in our heads and not in our bodies. Is there a truth to that or not? Obviously it's going to be really diverse in different Jewish communities.

RJR:      I'm really interested in halakha as an embodiment practice.

RDW:      Jewish law, ah. Say more.

RJR:      Kashrut as Jewish embodiment practice. The idea that you say modeh ani, the prayer of gratitude for waking up before you put your feet on the ground. There's an embodiment. We focus on the line of text, but for me, the act of waking up, being aware of my body and my aliveness, and hesitating, not putting my feet on the floor before I say that line.

RJR:      And I sometimes hold my feet right over the ground, while I say that line. That's an embodiment practice. Washing our hands aiss an embodiment practice. Mikvah is an embodiment practice. Wearing a tallit katan for me as an embodiment practice.

RDW:      That's a version of a tallis, it's almost like a shirt that you wear underneath your clothes where you have the four tzitzit, but you put it right next to your body, and wear it throughout the day.

RDW:      And the goal of that is to remind you.

RJR:      To have it be visible and on your body. So I think when I focus in on, you know, not embodiment in an abstract way but literally as something that lets me be aware of my body in space and all of its experiences, Jewish traditional practice has a lot of that and a lot of it is very fraught around gender and sexuality and different ideas about the body.

RJR:      And part of the cool thing about being Reconstructionist is that we have many generations of wrestling with the tradition and making it work in our time.

RDW:      Respecting it.

RJR:      So some of my tattoos are Jewish embodiment practices for me, that are ways of bringing Jewish tradition with them literally into my body in a way that I see and feel.

RDW:      For me, I feel like Shabbat, which we often -- Jacob Staub was on the podcast and talked about Shabbat. "Shavat vayinafash", that we rest and we are re-souled. S-O-U-L-E-D. But there, even though we're talking about soul, for me, when I feel like my soul is nourished is also when I feel like my body is nourished. Shabbat is about time and how am I going to fill that time?

RDW:      And many times that is going to shul and being with my community and chanting and singing and learning. And other times it may be about A, sleeping in and B, then having a lot of time to meditate and then having a lot of time for going for a Shabbat walk or a Shabbat bike ride. But it's about, I've spent my week running. I haven't taken the time that we prompted people toward at the beginning. And here's a time to take the time and to feel and to discern: what do I need? What do I want? And that's radical.

RJR:      Well, and singing in community is an embodiment experience or hopefully can be.

RDW:      Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about Reset, about resilience practices. And this year the project is really focused on Jewish social justice organizations. So we're paying attention to the same kind of thing that this podcast is and other projects that we're doing across the Reconstructionist movement. And this was with a real focus on activists and both about self care and practices. And then also maybe about toward a paradigm of sustainability and really being able to do the work, the mission driven, world changing work, in a really sustainable way. You want to talk a little bit more about?

RJR:      The vision of Reset is that when social change leaders and organizers are resourced to build their own resilience practices -- well, first of all that we need to resource people to have resilience practices. It's hard to just wake up in the morning and -- you know, meditation practices don't fall out of the sky. They actually really need to be supported by teachers, community, teaching, practice.

RDW:      Absolutely. Technology.

RJR:      Yeah, all the things. So, part of this program is resourcing social justice and social change organizers with recordings and videos of practices with communities of practice and with really wonderful teachers.

RJR:      And then the second part is how to people bring resilience practices to their social justice organizations, and how do we embody collective resilience at the organizational level? So, what does it look like for a whole organizational culture to embody resilience? Whether that's flexibility, balance, kindness, love, energy, abundance -- the different traits of resilience. How do we support organizations to practice that?

RJR:      And very much the same way that an individual needs to experiment with: is meditating in the morning right for me, or is chanting at night right for me, that we want to support organizations to experiment with different resilience practices and how to embed them in organizational culture for the sake of organizations embodying g resilience and better meeting their missions and visions for the world.

RDW:      That's really great. And Reset is one of those sites where we're really experimenting and a lot of different ways. And I know that some of the things that have been created for Reset include, you know, you just listed some of them some and we've discussed them over the course of this podcast, of the podcast serie,s like chant and meditation, guided meditation and study and mussar, midot tovot, cultivating character.

RDW:      I think it's a really important project. I think it really kind of embodies what you were talking about, some of the things that you encountered when you were in Minneapolis, in the Twin Cities. I think at the core of Reset is this understanding that we talk a lot about tikkun olam, about repairing the world, and this understanding that we can't really separate out tikkun nefesh, the repairing of the spirit, the repairing of the individual on the individual level, that those two are intertwined. And to try to separate them ... You know, the focus only on tikkun nefesh can be self absorbed, but the focus only on tikkun olam is not necessarily sustainable.

RJR:      And I've learned a lot from generative somatics as an organization that also works at this intersection of individual practice with collective vision. And one of the prompts they have, or they talk about: "healing for the sake of what?" And so for me, it's really like, how do we ground our tikkun nefesh for the sake of tikkun olam?

RDW:      That's exactly right.

RJR:      I'm doing my care, spiritual work, in a way that hopefully connects me to the health of the planet, to the health of my community and resources me to be able to show up more wholeheartedly, more clear, more empowered in the work of connecting planet and people.

RDW:      It's a beautiful way to end -- I think that is exactly -- to end on a reflection on interdependence because for sure when you look at the psychological literature on resilience, talking about both the awareness of that interdependence and the cultivation of that interdependence is quite possibly the most critical factor in terms of cultivating resilience.

RDW:      And indeed I think that that's what Jewish wisdom and Jewish teaching -- not just the wisdom but also the bringing it to life -- we are interconnected. We are dependent on one another. And in that dependence, there's beauty and that is what sustains us and that is what orients us toward how to be in the world and how to act.

RDW:      Great way to end. Thank you so much Jessica for such a rich conversation.

RJR:      Thanks for having me.

RDW:      I really appreciate it. I want to thank my guest, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg for our wonderful conversation on trauma and resilience and Reset: Resilience Practices for Jewish Social Justice Organizations. For more information, you can look on https://hashivenu.fireside.fm or on https://ReconstructingJudaism.org and you can also find more resources on https://ritualwell.org. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience.