In gratitude to Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, October 6, 1934 – February 7, 2015.
אֵלֶּה תּוֹלְדֹת נֹחַ
This is the generativity of Comfort
(Traditional: These are the generations of Noah)
Genesis. 6:9
This week, the opening words and story are about Noah. The Hebrew word Noah, Noach, means comfort and also is related to the word for regret. The second weekly Torah portion (Heb. parasha), offers comfort after the first week's disappointing debut and imminent ending of humanity. Torah and the Hasidic commentaries understand this as meeting the need for balancing suffering with a way out, echoing the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. There is suffering, yes. And there is a way out.
Torah is pointing to a beautiful relationship between what we may call healthy comfort and healthy regret. This began in last week's opening portion with Noah's naming, continues this week with his relationship to Creative Presence and culminates with the story of the Tower of Babel, the introduction of diversity as a corrective to how we humans walk on earth.
Comfort
This Torah section explores: what are the sources of comfort for humans as we walk on earth, on solid ground, over which, ultimately, we have no control? How does word and language fit in?
In the Hasidic Book of Truth, Sefat Emet, taught beleaguered Polish Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the ancient Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, translates Noach as “Rest” or “Comfort,” and that this is in fact the central Jewish practice of Sabbath. No matter how challenging life is, how few rubles in your pockets or little security in your towns, each week observers of this tradition create a temple of comfort in time. This is the Sabbath, the Shabbat.
This touching teaching of the meaning and experience of Shabbat is the same that Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gave to the activist social workers in Vietnam during the American Vietnam war. Once a week, according to Sr. Chan Khong, in her memoir, Learning True Love, the peacemaker social workers were urged to leave the war behind and enjoy a day of mindfulness.
The first time I realized that Shabbat was a Jewish day of mindfulness was in Poland in the year 2000. We had just finished a six-day bearing witness retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau with the Zen Peacemaker Order. We went to the nearby Polish city of Krakow for Shabbat.
Rabbi David Cooper, of blessed memory, after a week of leading us in the sh'ma prayer over the crematorium pits at Auschwitz, looked over us in the Polish banquet room and said, “Shabbat, it is the holiday that takes precedence over everything else, even mourning. And it comes once a week!”
What are Days of Mindfulness and Shabbat meant to generate? Comfort. Noah. What does comfort generate? Settledness, energy, stamina, renewal. Days of retreat and practice are the comfort and containers for embodied experiencing of what it feels like when we slow down, relax and become present with ourselves and who and what we love. We enter a temple in time, as Shabbat is called, a new dimension of being. The wisdom sages recognized that we inter-are with our environment. We can't expect to be fully at home in ourselves if we are constantly bombarded by the internet, projects, worries. Shabbat is a collective practice, when we "just sit" with family and community, creating a resonance between us of peacefulness and satisfaction. It creates a container for healing.
In his book, The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel explains that the Sabbath is a time to let go of "the control of space, the acquisition of things in space" and instead step into "spiritual communion." Shabbat is a weekly plunge into letting go of attachment to possession, to worshiping land and things. We create a designated time to reconsider our priorities and relax our attachment to “thinghood,” shifting our attention to the “thingless and insubstantial” reality of time.
Comfort and Regret
Shabbat comfort is a time to step into connection and find aliveness in connection rather than possession. Connection to ourselves, our loved ones, our tradition, for many, our God. We find comfort in these connections. We can deepen connection by integrating the aspect of Noah that is healthy regret. Shabbat as a Day of mindfulness is a day to reflect on how we have shown up in the world and also to sit closely with people in our lives and express regrets we have about how we did or didn't do this. There can be exquisite comfort in the experience of connecting with regret in a healthy way. Healthy, not as guilt, not to put ourselves down. Regret because we have learned something about how our actions impacted others or ourselves. Regret because we are growing. Regret because we learn more about our own needs and values and how our actions didn't serve them.
In the Plum Village Buddhist community, we practice "Beginning Anew," sitting together and expressing our appreciations and our regrets. Reb. Zalman, founder of Jewish Renewal, suggested we do this every new moon, calling it a Yom Kippur Kattan, a little Yom Kippur. We can do it every Shabbat, once a week, sharing what we have learned with each other through expressing regrets. Expressing regrets helps us move through the energy of sadness or stress we feel, preventing or healing trauma.
The ark in the Noah story is the container for comfort. Torah itself is seen in the tradition as the ark of comfort as we navigate life's turbulent waters. We are flooded with too much, too fast, too soon, as Reesma Menakem defines trauma. We are flooded with emotions and stimulation.
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה לְנֹחַ בֹּא־אַתָּה וְכׇל־בֵּיתְךָ אֶל־הַתֵּבָה כִּי־אֹתְךָ רָאִיתִי צַדִּיק לְפָנַי בַּדּוֹר הַזֶּה׃
Then Eternally Present said to Comfort, “Come into the word, with all your household,"
(Traditional: Then God said to Noach, come into the ark)
Genesis 7:1
The Hebrew word for ark, teivah, also means "word." With this double-meaning word, Torah reintroduces comfort into the world, after the violence of duality leads to the murder of brothers. The container for comfort is the teiva, הַתֵּבָ֑ה, the Hebrew word translated as both the word and the ark.
For the Sfat Emet, writing for his Hasidim, spiritual seekers at the turn of the 20th century, the teivah is the words and letters of Torah itself. This teacher was also speaking to the many Jews of that era turning to Marxism, anarchism and many other paths leading from the brutal exploitation and oppression of Jews and the masses. He stood with them in opposing injustice and wanting freedom. And for him, a political movement that can bring a new dawn of equality and freedom in human history needs to be grounded in the spiritual wisdom of Torah, for him a source of love:
My master, grandfather, and teacher of blessed memory [R. Yitzchak Meir Alter] said in the name of other rabbis that the ark [teiva] of Noah is [like] the words [teivot] and letters of the Torah, etc. [in that] every person can bring themselves to every word of the Torah and prayer. And in this way they may be saved from all hiddenness. And it is brought [in Sanhedrin 108b] “All [animals] that the ark accepted [were taken on board].” Surely a person must be worthy to enter into the words of Torah, but through absorption into the collective of Israel [klal yisrael], every person may cleave to the words of Torah.
— Sefat Emet, Book of Truth
Torah and Nonviolent Communication (NVC) are both rooted in the power of the word to create worlds. Marshall Rosenberg, founder of NVC, often shared a poem/song, “Words are windows or words are walls." Torah, like NVC, highlights two components of the word: choosing and forming the word and the energy carried and produced.
In the Torah story, Comfort receives and follows instructions to build the ark to save life. Only after the vessel is formed does Presence invite in Comfort. I learned from Rabbi Erin Smokler of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality that this two-step invitation is significant to Hasidic commentators, beginning with the Baal Shem Tov:
After Noah physically executes the enormous construction project of building the ark, he is still outside of it. So God issues him an intimate welcome. It is time to enter and begin the journey.
— R. Erin Smokler
Hasidism understands that the spoken and written word are our vessels of comfort in the world as we know it. This is what communicating is all about. First, we build our skills and literacy to form words and structures that can hold and transmit our truth and life. We learn which words are more likely to foster connection, which make our words windows rather than walls.
And we enter deeply into our hearts to know what we yearn for, what we want our words to carry. This is also how we listen, in the way of NVC, Buddhism and Torah. We listen deeply into other's hearts so that we can meet and understand the living energy inside their words. This is how we can experience intimacy with ourselves and others.
Without both steps, the words are hollow shells. Without making visible through words the values and yearnings that usually are hidden inside, we can’t heal and create the relationships and societies we need to sustain and find joy in life.
The Ark: A Refuge for Healing Collective Trauma
In the Torah story, the ark, the word, is the container to hold healing. How do we form words that carry the energy of healing?
Torah recognizes that healing is a collective matter, starting with healing the entire family system. Torah embeds/tsav in Noach the message to retreat into the word with all of his household. If we see healing only as an individual matter, we won't get to the root nor create the ark we need to carry our healing.
Marshall Rosenberg once said, explaining the interdependent relationship between individual and collective healing:
If I use Nonviolent Communication to liberate people to be less depressed, to get along better with their family, but not teach them, at the same time, to use their energy to rapidly transform systems in the world, then I am part of the problem. I am essentially calming people down, making them happier to live in the systems as they are, so I am using NVC as a narcotic.
— Marshall Rosenberg, Social Justice Retreat in Switzerland, June 2, 1990 (quote provided by NVC Trainer Sabre Roseline).
In the Torah portion, Presence chose Comfort to built the world-saving ark because, as it is written, “Comfort was a tzaddik.” A tzaddik, the Sefat Emet writes, "joins all of his life force" to his words and deeds. The deeds that provide a direct channel to Eternally Present in the traditional Jewish world are almost always preceded by words of blessing. The tzaddik joins all of his life force to the spoken blessings that surround each act.
The tzaddik's words are a channel for divine goodness to enter into the world. They are bridges between the inner and outer work of healing, an integrated person who embraces all parts of themself as created in the image of the divine. Comfort had capacity and wisdom to build a structure to hold the healing of all life.
I learned from Rabbi David Cooper at the Auschwitz Bearing Witness retreat that we welcome in an extra soul on Shabbat, an additional life force. As the sun sets into Friday night, we cover our eyes when we sing or recite the candle lighting prayer, so when we open our eyes, we see the light anew. This is how we enter into the vessel of comfort, the twenty-five hours of Shabbat refuge.
Collecting And Healing All Parts Of Ourselves
In the story of Noach, the entire household and community of life enters into a forty-day retreat to heal from the separation and exile that has brought alienation and destruction. One-by-one each being enters, each to begin anew by welcoming in and making peace with all the exiled, reviled and rejected parts of themselves. The ark hosts a system and process to re-collect the wholeness of all beings, even the inner exiled parts of the self, so that healed and integrated beings, free of shame, can create a new way of being human on earth.
Today, as in Hasidic times, we use words to carry the energies that heal shame. In Torah, shame arose in the Garden of Eden and the resulting trauma and violence have plagued humanity and all life ever since. Healing involves expanding our individual and collective capacity for acceptance and self-acceptance through love. This is the healing opportunity of forty days on the ark, and in any of our concentrated spiritual and healing practices:
...the spiritual implications of this discovery ... is that love is the answer in the inner world, just as it is in the outer world. Listening to, embracing, and loving parts [of ourselves allows us] to heal and transform as much as it does for people. In Buddhist terms, The Internal Family Systems Model of therapy helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches in the sense of helping each inner sentient being (part) become enlightened through compassion and love.
— Dr. Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness
Nonviolent Communication builds on The Internal Family Systems Model by valuing and including the feelings, needs and experiences of all parts of ourselves, our families and society. We also do this on the systemic and collective level. We envision a world where all parts of ourselves and all beings affected by choices and decisions participate in the decisions.
Marshall Rosenberg spoke often about how he supported the healing of people whose addictions had led them to convictions and imprisonment. His starting point was always, whatever anyone did, they did because it was the way they knew at the time to meet crucial universal life needs. Taking this as your starting point generates curiosity rather than judgment. It makes possible presence rather than attack. It generates trust and connection, the space necessary for healing.
From Richard Schwartz again:
...how we relate in the inner world will be how we relate in the outer. If we can appreciate and have compassion for our parts, even for the ones we’ve considered to be enemies, we can do the same for people who resemble them. On the other hand, if we hate or disdain our parts, we’ll do the same with anyone who reminds us of them. ...
This is the inner work of befriending, of letting go of notions of enemy. We give each part of ourselves, our families and society the chance to tell its story and bring its aliveness and wisdom into the circle. This is bringing everyone into the ark of healing.
הֵמָּה וְכׇל־הַחַיָּה לְמִינָהּ וְכׇל־הַבְּהֵמָה לְמִינָהּ וְכׇל־הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ לְמִינֵהוּ וְכׇל־הָעוֹף לְמִינֵהוּ כֹּל צִפּוֹר כׇּל־כָּנָף׃
... all beasts of every kind, all cattle of every kind, all creatures of every kind that creep on the earth, and all birds of every kind, every bird, every winged thing.
וַיָּבֹאוּ אֶל־נֹחַ אֶל־הַתֵּבָה שְׁנַיִם שְׁנַיִם מִכׇּל־הַבָּשָׂר אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ רוּחַ חַיִּים׃
They came to Noach into the ark, two each of all flesh in which there was breath of life.
Genesis 7:14-15
Torah is instructing us to put our religious and spiritual practices in service of life. About 15 years ago I went on pilgrimage to BodGaya, India with Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and a large delegation. When we got off the bus in the place of the Buddha's enlightenment, we were surrounded by children who suffered leprosy and polio. Their limbs scarred over, some of them moving about by laying on their bellies on flat pallets with wheels, the type that I might use for plants on my deck.
In my travels with Thich Nhat Hanh, we practiced walking meditation, following him off the bus, taking every step in mindfulness. Breathing in and out, touching the earth, planting and receiving love with each step. I couldn't do it this time. I felt deep resistance in my being to practicing walking meditation amidst such suffering and disparate privilege. I felt deadened trying to walk through such suffering, just following my breath and being contained only in myself. I needed a bigger ark. I needed to pull everyone in, to create an ark that brings in and protects these children and heals all of us that allow this to happen in the world today.
The teachings of this Torah portion come to me again. If I'm going to build an ark, I want to include everyone. If I don't include children with polio and leprosy, and all the winged creatures, and all of my household, what am I creating? I don't want my spiritual practices to be walls; I want them to be windows. I don't want my words to be empty shells. I want them to carry the energy of healing and comfort.
Interconnectedness
וַיִּיָּחֶל עוֹד שִׁבְעַת יָמִים אֲחֵרִים וַיְשַׁלַּח אֶת־הַיּוֹנָה וְלֹא־יָסְפָה שׁוּב־אֵלָיו עוֹד׃
He [Noach] waited still another seven days and sent the dove forth; and it did not return to him any more.
Genesis 8:12
This Torah verse celebrates Noach's realization that his freedom and the dove's freedom are bound up and dependent upon each other. He celebrates when the dove doesn't return; it is the message that Earth is ready to receive Noach and his household and all the legged beings. His time on the ark is ripening into an understanding of the interdependence between him and all creatures.
As the Dalai Lama says in a favorite book of fictional dharma,
As much as possible, it is useful to think of all other beings as being just like me. Every living being strives for happiness. Every being wants to avoid all forms of suffering. They are not just objects or things to be used for our benefit. You know, Mahatma Gandhi once said: "the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
— The Dalai Lama's Cat, a novel by David Michie
Open, Closed, Open: Embracing Diversity, Inclusion and Equity
The Torah portion ends with humans scattered and divided. From the unification and healing of life on the teiva, we end with the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the family. Once again Unified Beingness recognizes a human impulse that could lead to destruction of life. Instead of destruction, Life Giver embraces a new medicine.
וַיְהִי כׇל־הָאָרֶץ שָׂפָה אֶחָת וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים׃
Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words.
Genesis 11:1
At first blush we would think this is the beautiful New World that has dawned from the unification and healing that took place on the ark. As humans multiplied and covered the earth, we had the same language and the same words. What was the problem with this? What was out of harmony with a healthy unfolding of life?
Torah tells us: they built cities and towers "to make a name for themselves" and God was concerned. Genesis 11:4. If humans act this way, "then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach." Genesis 11:6. The Tower of Babel was the remedy.
What is the relevant wisdom in this for us? It is a celebration of diversity.
Writer and prophetess Toni Morrison, in her Nobel Prize speech in 1993, warned of the systematic ways in which the powerful can “loot” language for their own purposes, evacuating it of its humanity and speaking only “to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.” She called on writers to use language in another way: to help those without power find their own voices.
In her 1987 eulogy for James Baldwin, Morrison extolled him for having “un-gated” the language to allow black writers to “enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion.”
Torah recognizes that humans are meant to interact with each other, especially with ones who look differently and speak differently and act differently. In this way we are checks on each other. In this way we can learn from each other, by embracing and celebrating the indigenous ways and the advances of modern technology. Both together are necessary if we are to move away from the model of duality into an expansive embrace of all that is. As Toni Morrison wrote about the written word, its purpose is to help us uphold “the human project... to remain human—and to block the dehumanization and estrangement of others.” Toni Morrison and ‘the Human Project’, Nation, Robert Greene II, August 7, 2019.
Rather than building walls, rather than hiding from each other and repelling from our differences, we build the modern Ark, the word, and learn how to use our words to create bridges between our authentic voices and create healing across differences.
Singularity
by Marie Howe (after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home
The Flood
Is this what it was like,
in Noah’s time
the hubris of humans
summoning the floods,
to ride the waves
hoping someday to reach land
and begin again,
to witness everything that cannot be saved
beginning to die?
Is this what it feels like
to want to prevent
or survive the destruction,
to build an ark
as large as the world,
to try and save the panther,
elephants, songbirds,
our children and grandchildren?
Is this how it was
just before the flooding began,
when it was just a steady rain
still possible that a rainbow
might break open the darkness,
for its beauty and vulnerability
to wake us up in time?
This is what it is like
to inhabit the ark
as the vexed earth and
swelling sea retake
what we have dishonored,
standing skin to skin
as the last white doves
call and search
for the muddied and possibly
forgiving shore.
Elana Klugman
10-5-21
NVC and Collective Healing: Small Group Practices for Unfreezing Trauma
This is a series of practices featured in a video on my steps2peace website. You can do this with any number of people. Who do you want to call into your ark to practice together?
Small Group Practice #1:
With another person, in a small group, or journaling on your own:
- Identify a collective belief about another group or the world that you “inherited” from your family, ancestors or other identity group. Be as specific as possible. (e.g, beliefs about people who speak another language or wear certain clothing or uniforms)
- How does it feel in your body when you think that belief? What emotions arise in you?
- What needs is the belief attempting to meet? What did your ancestors want you to learn from these beliefs?
- What thoughts come up that reinforce the belief? (e.g: I would be betraying my ancestors to let go of the belief. It would be dangerous or stupid to let go of the belief. I will be excluded if I abandon that belief)
- What are you feeling when you think these thoughts?
- What needs or values of yours are these thoughts calling to your attention?
- Sit in the energy of whatever feelings and needs arise. Embrace and accept all of them. They are the energies of life flowing through you. Holding them, witnessing them, touching them, are part of healing any trauma they carry.
Note: If you are doing these practices with more than one person, take equal timed turns. For example, two people will witness the process; witnesses stay settled in their body, practicing being in empathic presence. This is part of the training to heal and offer healing presence.
Small Group Practice #2: Ancestral Healing with NVC New Strategies for Meeting the Needs
- How does holding onto these beliefs protect you?
- How does holding on to these beliefs harm you?
- Are there other strategies to meet the needs you embraced in Part 1?
Check in with your ancestors that this meets their needs too.
Small Group Practice #3: Using the NVC Skill of Observation to Unfreeze Trauma
Trauma blocks humans from integrating new information and experiences. Trauma is a disorder of not being able to be in the here and now because there is a frozen past that is part of my here and now. The NVC skill of translating the meaning, judgment, narrative we have made of a traumatic event into an observation of what happened is one way of beginning the process of integrating the lessons from the trauma into our lives.
Small Group Practice #4: Empathy Dyads | Creating Resonance with Accompaniment
Listener begins by connecting with their intention to be present, settled, to hold spaciousness for the other person’s experience. There is no fixing and nothing wrong with anything they say.
Small Group Practice #5: Integrating News (Participation without getting re traumatized)
- Sit with another person.
- Take turns sharing one news item from the week and your feelings and needs about it. Listener reflects back just the feelings and needs.
- Speaker may make a connecting request: what did you hear is really important/precious/core to me?
- Sit together, breathing together, in the energy of the precious needs
(Note: if a news item doesn’t come up, use something in your life)
Small Group Practice #6 : Mourning
The NVC practice of mourning the unmet needs in a group or dyad integrates many aspects of trauma healing. You can do this practice on your own, in a dyad or larger group. For people and groups who are traumatized by their own role in committing or allowing violence, survivor's guilt or other causes, mourning the needs of their own that weren’t met by their actions (or inactions) provides a way of integrating the experience without guilt or shame.
For those who are suffering collective and individual trauma from harm, mourning the unmet needs and being heard and witnessed in the mourning, are steps toward healing and perhaps (if freely chosen) reconciliation. Mourning can free the life energy that was frozen into trauma, allowing for integration of the experience.
In dyads or small groups, take turns witnessing each other move through the four steps of mourning needs that aren’t met, dreams that aren’t lived:
(At any point in these steps, allow any thoughts that come up. When you recognize a thought has arisen, welcome it as a messenger of something important. Say to yourself, I'm telling myself this thought because I’m feeling _________. I’m feeling that way because my need for ____________ is met or not met.)
- State what you are mourning. The experience you, your ancestors, others, had or are having.
- Connect with and feel the feelings in your body in relation to this need not being met (e.g., tightening in my neck, arms, belly...). Ask yourself, what am I feeling in my body?
- Connect and feel the emotions in your body in relation to this need not being met (e.g., fear, sadness, outrage, shock, anxiety). Ask yourself, what emotions am I feeling?
- Connect with the needs and dreams that are so precious and so missing that you feel this way. Fill yourself with the energy of the needs, as you imagine it would be if they are met.
- Sit in the energy of the needs. Experience them in fullness rather than absence. Let the energy nourish you deep into your cells. Either finish here, or, if you choose:
- Look for new strategies to meet the needs.
Small Group Practice #7: What Collective/Ancestral Trauma Am I Carrying?
How can NVC support me in not passing on ancestral trauma (karma) I have “inherited”? To contribute to healing for my own joy, for my family, community, human evolution and earth.
Take turns sharing enemy images.
- What enemy images have you inherited from your family, education, culture, historical experiences? Trauma therapist and teacher Peter Levine teaches that we humans are hardwired to seek predictability for basic survival.
- How is this enemy image a strategy to create predictability? How does it serve and not serve you? Your people today?
- How are these images reinforced today through media, religion, education, family, political system etc.
Some Working Definitions Of Trauma:
Something that happens too much, too fast, too soon, coupled with something that should have happened but didn’t. If I’m brutalized and I can’t extricate myself from it.
— Resmaa Menakem, Author, My Grandmother’s Hands
Trauma is the internal response to an overwhelming situation. Trauma is a response to an external event that causes us to fragment- to separate our body from our mental and emotional life. Trauma is the part of us that doesn’t want to change, is scared to change. Trauma is frozen life.
— Thomas Hubl, Spiritual teacher and healer
Roberta offered a session on collective trauma at a global Nonviolent Communication festival on the day after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. You can view a video of this workshop HERE.