Healing a traumatized humanity

A great, and complicated, man died in August. For decades, Rabbi Michael Lerner was the leading Jewish American voice calling for Israel to understand what it had done to the Palestinians and make amends. He embraced a two state solution. He saw Israelis and Palestinians as two traumatized peoples in need of mutual healing. “The only way to speak about this conflict is to speak in a compassionate tone to both peoples,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2015. If he had been listened to, we would not be in this horror now.

His message was in fact much wider than that. It encompassed us all. I see Michael, for whom I worked for four years, as a classic prophet in the Jewish tradition of Isaiah or Jeremiah. He warned all of us that chasing after money and power would fail to satisfy us. It would in the end bring us to ruin.

But he always accompanied his warnings with a glorious vision for humanity. He believed a world based on love was actually possible.

In an email of his from 2022, he outlined his explanation for why that better world isn’t happening:

[T]rauma convinces people that nothing visionary is possible and that everyone just cares for themselves and hence can’t be trusted to support you.

In addition to supporting a vigorous social justice agenda to uphold and expand fundamental human rights, we also need a huge new empathic movement promoting a vision of a society based on love, generosity, caring for each other, and caring for the earth. People need to feel cared for, that they matter, and that they deserve respect. 

Why? Because it is impossible to win the expansion of human rights and redistribution of wealth without people feeling genuinely cared for and respected by a progressive movement. Sadly, many people do not experience that in progressive circles and/or the way those movements are portrayed in the media.

This was what drew me to apply in 2007 for the position of managing editor at Michael’s magazine, Tikkun. I had burned out as an activist on the Left. I accepted basic progressive ideas, but I couldn’t survive on the degree of blame, anger and analysis in the Left diet. I needed a more caring community.

Sadly, Michael’s office was a brilliant hub of ideas but an uneasy place to work. He could be impatient, angry and blaming. He expected me to constantly grab the attention of big players in Washington and the media on his behalf. In his earlier days he had been an influence in the Clinton White House and in the media. But he had burned his boats with too many people. Brilliant people had come to work with or for him but had not stayed long. He wanted me to hire someone to do public relations half of my job, and go half time myself. There are plenty of smarter people than me, but I doubted anyone could do it.

I felt scared for my job, but I still held a great deal of love and respect for Michael. I said to myself, what do you expect of a prophet other than irascible behavior? Maybe he dreamed so consistently of a movement “redolent with caring” because he wasn’t able to create it himself. I felt sad for him. His own unhealed traumas made it very hard for him to fully trust and cooperate with others. I realized there was a difference between having great ideas and being able to heal. Trauma hijacks the body and the “lizard brain.” It evades the conscious mind.

THIRD LEG OF THE STOOL

So it was no surprise that when funding for my job dried up and he laid me off, I went searching for people who could heal trauma. Michael’s combination of the political and the spiritual had, to my mind, been all about ideas. The third leg of the stool he was trying to craft had to be about embodying those ideas in one’s life. Michael clearly often felt unable to embody his ideas. But how do any of us do that?

I was raised Christian with an understanding that the way to deal with one’s own difficult nature was by confession of sin and giving oneself to God. God alone could change us. Anyone familiar with the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous will get the picture: we are powerless, and it takes a Higher Power to cure us. I know that works for many.

But, for me, that approach required too much belief. Living with Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists had made wonder why I should remain a Christian, if I only was one by accident of birth. So I had become a “don’t know,” an agnostic. I was also skeptical of the framework of sin, known as Original Sin in the Christian world. I wanted a more psychological, less theological, take.

And as one friend wrote to me, “I got myself in AA, and learned that our task is to change ourselves on the inside and stop trying to change other people or other structures.” But I firmly believe structures have to change.

After being laid off, I lucked into a training in facilitating a curriculum for men or women in prison. The groups met in prison for eight hours a month for 16-18 months. The restorative justice philosophy of the program was that “hurt people hurt people.” It is identifiable hurts and shame that one suffered as a child, or later, that lead one to either “act in”—harm oneself— or “act out”—harm another. It is now well understood that children who have suffered “Adverse Childhood Experiences” have worse health outcomes and are more prone to acting violently.

What was stunning in these groups was how people came to trust each other. I spent hundreds of hours with hundreds of men and women in prison. I did so because participants began to talk about what had been most shameful in their lives. Shame makes most of us clam up. But, as they say in these groups, “we are only as sick as our secrets.” As people told their secrets, they began to discover that “I am not the worst thing I have done in my life.” There was a good person down there to be recovered and loved back to health. Shame is very me-centric, but the trend of these groups was to open up our empathy for each other, for the people we had harmed, and for those who had harmed us. I say “we” because I am also ashamed of some things I have done: I assume that is true for all of us. It comes with being human.  

In a way this was similar to the Higher Power of AA, because there was something mysterious going on: people inside prison were flabbergasted that they were telling others their own secrets and were healing. “Healed people heal people” became a believable mantra. Some people imbued the mystery of healing with religious or spiritual meaning, others didn’t.

Recently I have been delighted to see these kinds of trauma healing practices being extended to activist circles. Several books have given me hope that Michael Lerner’s vision of a progressive movement redolent with caring was now being created by a younger generation. My friend Kazu Haga, with whom I facilitated one prison group, wrote Healing Resistance about combining nonviolent resistance strategies with personal healing. I recommend Staci Haines’ The Politics of Trauma and Ijeoma Oluo’s Be A Revolution.

Finally, Michael’s vision of a kinder world seems much more possible to me after reading Humankind: a Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Bregman confronts what he calls “veneer theory”—the theory that civilization is a thin veneer holding us brutal humans in check. He says it’s actually the opposite: civilization has produced pressures on us that our beneficent hunter gatherer genes are just not well equipped for. We were much healthier and kinder to each other before civilization appeared. But we can learn. We can heal. We just need to take ourselves seriously enough to do so.

I am a 75-year-old man who wishes he could be around for another 75 years. The chances for things to go catastrophically wrong are higher than ever. But I believe in social movements that strive to share power, reduce inequality, and take care of the most disadvantaged—just so long all of us in these movements learn to take accountability for our own selves and hold our leaders to the same standard. We need to craft the third leg of the stool.

This is a perilous and exciting moment for humans, as we come together under threat of climate change and other dysfunctions to heal ourselves and our traumas in ways both traditional and novel, spiritual and science-based. I now believe Michael Lerner’s vision of a caring society is a North Star we can realistically steer towards.