Difficult times are when we most need support. So of course, at the beginning of October I immediately turned to my ancestors, with whom I have been working for several years, who have already gone through a process of healing and who helped so much in the ritual work last summer in Europe. I discovered that despite all the work so far, the shock hit them too, and they were not able to help. The Oct 7 massacre shook something deep, down through many generations. It felt like a tectonic shift, an earthquake exposing trauma so extensive that it crystallized into a central part of identity. But its exposure also makes healing possible.
Making demands from the ancestors is not generally a standard part of the healing process, but I found myself in front of them saying, “You can be victims or you can be miracle workers, but you can’t be both. You have to choose.” In retrospect, I can see how both might be possible, but at the time it was clear that in order to be a resource for me under the existing circumstances, they had to release the victim identity.
How deeply rooted this is in Jewish lineages! This is why we came here, to Israel – to change this once and for all. No more the weak Jew, helpless in the face of persecution. No more waiting for the Messiah and praying for next year in Jerusalem. Finally taking our fate in our own hands, taking action. That was the Zionist vision.
We didn’t go nearly far enough. We haven’t stopped clinging to being the victim. If we are likening what happened on Oct 7 to the Holocaust (for the first time the comparison is permissible, despite the huge difference in magnitude and in relative strength), if we did not manage to prevent it in any way (when we had so very many ways at our disposal), if we still point to the massacre we suffered in order to to justify wholesale killing (also – or maybe especially – if we swear that we really really do not want to kill tens of thousands, they literally forced it on us) – we are still in the position of the victim. At best a victim rising up against a threat, but a victim nonetheless. Very much not a creator of reality or wielder of miracles.
By definition, miracles are outside what is possible in the existing paradigm. Performing miracles sounds like New Age gobbledygook, but within the very existence of the State of Israel, so many things have already been accomplished that seemed utter fantasy. In the emotional areas of interpersonal relations and what happens between collectives, however, in contrast to the material world, we have dedicated so little to exploring what might be achieved. Precisely there, where it matters most, we continue to hold the firm belief that it is impossible for us to bring about change. We let ourselves devolve to the lowest possible denominator. You can see it everywhere, in the enmity within the nation as well as between us and our neighbors or between us and most of the rest of the world. Our identity as a people maintains not only that everyone is against us, but that there is nothing we can do about it.
Even in healthy lineages, as in living human beings, there is a gap between being a healthy, empowering, wise, supportive parent, and being a worker of miracles and wonders. Being a competent, functioning adult is not the same as having the ability to summon far-reaching transformation. There are those among us who can work magic, at least sometimes, and that’s inspirational. Becoming a collective capable of producing miracles brings possibilities that are the stuff of dreams. We’ve seen it in other areas. But to manifest it in our relationships, we have to let go of being the victim, and that’s far from an easy transformation. It’s so much easier to make excuses.
Not that I never find myself falling into that pattern in my own personal life. I have fair justification, as a fairly broad consensus agrees that having a spouse with dementia is one of the worst possible life situations. (With full recognition of some far worse situations we’ve been witnessing. Strength and support and kindness to everyone dealing with those!) So, how fortunate that the dead can learn and change, more easily than the living, and that after a not terribly long process I can lean on my ancestors and ask them to help me to live as a miracle worker instead of a victim of my own circumstances. Because I need the help. So far, they’re definitely coming through, and it’s working brilliantly.
Besides inviting others to Ancestral Healing, I write this as an invocation of the possibility of being a collective that works miracles. May we choose well which miracles we create.