I wrote a thing! It is good.
Under the cut because it is long. It also meanders around and talks about how my healing path ties in with the spiritual path I've chosen, Judaism. Includes a metaphor about how healing is sometimes like fixing a house.
I woke up today wondering why does Passover last seven days? I wondered if it had to do with hametz, the mother dough. I'm nearly sure if one starts a bread starter, it needs seven days to mature for use. And though I still think this is a valid answer in its own way, chabad.org offers several answers, the most important being that the Torah tells us to. Why? Because contrary to what I thought (and please excuse me lack of geographical knowledge of Egypt, I didn't even think to look this up, but then I think we all sometimes the miss the obvious, easiest answer. Now I have learned something, but also relearned how to figure something out.) it took the early Jewish nation seven days to reach the Red Sea (if you like, you can think of it as the Sea of Reeds; I think that's a perfectly valid option and the difference is an essay for another day because of how it links up to my approach to faith and the Torah).
It fittingly coincides, as chabad.org points out, with why do we work for six days and rest on the seventh? Why do we have a rest year every seven years? We know that once the Egyptians were safe on the other side of their sea, they rejoiced with song. If it were me, I'd start looking for a way to make bread to celebrate, too, because carbs are delicious. (Maybe even an early version of a challah loaf even, tying in nice and neat with Sabbath bread!) Wouldn't that be something if they arrived at the other side on a Saturday? (Though admittedly we're not supposed to use musical instruments on the Sabbath as that is a labor forbidden through the Rabbic tradition.)
A good English saying is that it is darkest before the light. The Torah tells us that when Moses went to Pharaoh to demand that he let the Hebrews go, Pharaoh increased their work load. And we know that the Hebrews weren't spared all of the Plagues. What's more, after it all was over, they still had a week long walk ahead of them before they could fully rest; I'm sure they felt driven to put as much distance between them and Pharaoh. In a sense, it was darkest for them before the light broke.
The last thought there, that they felt driven to put distance between, is one that maybe they didn't felt, but I could understand the impulse. I think a lot of people can. When they are running from something or something that has hurt them.
As all of you know, I recently moved. There were a lot of reasons for this. One of them was work. Where I used to live, the price of living was out of my pay bracket given I was working minimum wage, but as much as I knew I was suited to office work, the admin positions I could find that didn't require a two or four year degree (which were few and far between) were either only part time and/or paid what I was currently being paid. Or they were at such a distance that it wouldn't make up for the wear and tear on my car to say nothing of the price of gas. And the job I was holding down is part of my PTSD (yes, legitimate, I have a therapist who diagnosed me). The place I moved to I had considered before because they were in such need of a young work force that they would pay you to move! But at the time I had heard about it, none of the jobs I thought I could hold down were any of the ones that would be compensated for moving cost. (A flaw if you ask me going at how many jobs need filling now in those industries, but that's a discussion about classism we can have another day.) I considered it again last year on an impulse to see if I could find an office job finally. And lo, there was!
I moved for my health - I needed a job that wouldn't stress me as much, but I also needed to see a doctor and I couldn't afford even copays at the job I used to have. I moved because of family in a way I wasn't ready yet to name, but I knew it deep in my gut. I wanted to finally see a therapist. I wanted to attend to my spiritual needs in a way I couldn't in old state due to fatigue and exhaustion and pain, all of which also took away time I had for anything but work. I wanted to be able to take proper care of my cat -- get him his shots, take him to the vet.
In a way, I saw this new place as my own land of milk and honey. What I didn't know yet was that in September, the new year for Jewish people would be a year of rest. And as it turns out, this Passover, a lot of things came together all at once. Let me walk you through how all of this came together.
This spring marks eight years since my mother threw a teenage hissy fit and moved out of the apartment she shared with my siblings and I. (In a move fitting of her immature attitude, she moved in with her mother.) That means a little over seven years since I have remade myself as someone not my mother's daughter, been healing from her influence. Her abuse as I now acknowledge - emotional, positioning herself as the victim always, with conditioning and gas lighting and her narcissim. It's been about three years since I moved out from a house where I was again emotionally abused. (I am still in process of accepting that it is not my fault, that I am not to blame for trusting someone who turned out abusive, that it truly isn't a fault in me for finding her safe. It's part and parcel of the fact that I was raised in such a household where abuse feels safe.)
Nearly a full week before this year's Passover began, I had to lay down a boundary with my father. He naturally didn't accept this. The fall out -- luckily over text messaging so I could check in with people -- brought to light what I refused to name, the thing deep in my gut that had me running from my last apartment. So very carefully, my father had positioned himself as a nice guy, someone who didn't do anything wrong because look, he isn't raising his voice, he isn't physically hurting me, he is standing at a distance. And he always wanted to actually hear my thoughts so he could reassure me that he hadn't actually hurt me.
It's a wonder my parents waited twelve years to separate. Though they take different tracks, in the end, their abuse was the same. Conditioning their children to see them in a particular way, gas lighting us to their way of thinking. Never assuming harm. Both of them wanting to assume that they had given their children the good things, never the bad. Wanting their children as some consolation prize in their failed marriage. Never wanting their children to become more emotionally mature. My mother sent me a letter in a meandering way a few years ago wanting her daughter back -- not wanting to know me as an adult. My father recently told me that I have no right to judge him for hurt he caused because he is the parent and I am the kid.
Much like a Hebrew freed from Pharaoh, I couldn't move soon enough once I was offered a job. I refused to even fully flesh out what I would do without housing -- I briefly considered renting a campsite for two months until my apartment was ready for me to move in. (Where I moved to is facing a severe housing shortage and though I had found an apartment to rent, it wouldn't be available for me until two months after I had started my job.) I just had to go because I wanted to be safe and taken care of.
I talked with my therapist about the exact type of abuse my dad had done to me the Thursday before Passover began. It has taken me almost a whole week to feel closer to balanced.
There are still a little over four months until this year of rest ends. Sometimes it is in rest that we can finally face our problems. I can only imagine what the Hebrews felt that seventh day, when they could actually see that they were safe. I find myself a little scared of what else I will find out in the next four months or if this is it. If I finally was in the darkest place before the light.
But what then? You wake on the eighth day and you have only what you could carry. You know you were delivered, but you will need more food, you need shelter, eventually even clothing.
In a different track, you need to fix your house. Everyone has one; it is where we house our beings. And some of us are luckily enough to only ever need to do the repair work of normal wear and tear. But sometimes something happens that causes a major issue. Sometimes we use the right tools to fix it. Sometimes we don't -- like using sand to repair a concrete foundation. It just doesn't work. Imagine sand is an addiction and you'll get at what I'm driving at.
The newly freed Hebrews, like myself, hadn't even been given a chance to have a properly built house. A good analogy here is an issue currently facing Connecticut residents. Back in the 1980s, there were houses built with what seemed to be good concrete. I was born into a house with a not just both parents, but an involved family. Connecticut residents who bought the houses with what seemed to be good concrete are now finding out that their foundations are falling apart. I'm finding out that the house I built is like a house built and then bought without proper inspection - the kind of house that is a nightmare of Russian nesting dolls never ending; just one problem after another and sometimes when you start work on a repair, you find out you can't do the repair until something else fixed and it ends up as night mare repair daisy chain. To fix this, do this but first this but oh no actually this first and so on.
My path in therapy has been naming first that I suffer from the curse of being too aware and also having had to do healing work on my own (which actually also mirrors my work with my primary care doctor or general practioner depending on where you are; the appointments I've had have been showing up with all the things that I've got wrong and naming what I've done for them and my doctor saying I think you just need a few more tools, but you are actually doing really well on your own; but I digress). But recently, to keep using the house repair metaphor, when we are pulling up the carpet we're finding mold; try to fix the concrete in the basement and oh there's a skeleton buried here; try to hang a photo and turns out there are termits eating the wood.
It's the end of Passover. The last night for those in Israel and the second to last night for those in diaspora. Like them, I am only beginning my spiritual journey with G-d and faith and living as a person who wants to honor the covenant begun with Abraham. Like them, it has been a long week running away from where I was hurt. Like them, I thought that freedom would mean walking into a land of milk and honey. That all it would take is making that first step.
And it is both that easy and that hard. Sometimes, you use sand to fill the holes -- the Hebrews tried to emulate what they knew with a golden calf. But sometimes you have the right tools and learn where to buy the right ones (I wouldn't fix a hole in my plaster with something I would find at the dollar store; I would ask advice from the old guy at the hardware store and ask what other people learned from their own repair work). Which also fits in with what I trust about Judaism more than what I have found in Christianity: forget the quibble about whether the events in the Torah are true, whether G-d saved them, the Rabbinic tradition wrote out for us a guideline of what lessons we are to learn from it. Or if you prefer not to follow Rabbinic tradition, a tribe in the desert which settled Ancient Israel collected stories from their neighbors into a story about themselves and if they found it important as a guide book, what are we meant to learn from? As I read elsewhere, sometimes the Torah and Rabbinic traditions and the Mishnah are much like manuals to help you repair your car.
Help you repair your house.
What is interesting about Rabbinic tradition and the Mishna is what mimics my own day to day: we have the Torah and there are very few instances where G-d is not there. The Mishnah deals with the day to day. Ok so we have this law laid down for us, but how do we actually apply it for our day to day living where we only have people? I have faith in a way that is separate from my study of the Torah. To me, the Torah instructs me in how to treat other people and helps me fix my house. The Mishnah provides clarity on it. Talking with my congregation that I have become apart of provides more clarity. We are a group of people in constant discussion and growth. And it is people who are meant to help people. Not only did G-d make sure that there were two to be help meets for each other, we were given a guidebook on how to treat each other and support one another, even the stranger.
The office I work in now takes an integrative approach to health care, looks at all the parts of person and their life to help them be as healthy as they possibly can be. So I have the congregation, the Torah, the Mishnah, Rabbis, a therapist, a doctor, my two siblings, my coworkers, and friends. Because you need a lot of tools to fix a house.
But I have only just gathered my tools. I have some supplies, but as anyone who has fixed a nightmare house knows, you never know what else you will need. I will in time find out what I need because I do have a nightmare house. I will need help to know which supplies are the correct ones. But the next step has to be mine.
When you find out that your house is unsafe to live in or needs extensive repairs, you focus on making one room your base. A safe place. Like those Hebrews on the other shore, I take stock of what I have on hand. I take stock of the tools, the knowledge, the people. It isn't an auspicious start and it seems daunting.
But we are no longer in Egypt. We are our own masters now. A whole sea separates us in the immediate and Pharaoh will need time to amass warriors again and time to build a boat if he does actually want to get us. Time is what we need to secure the house. Time to learn what needs repair and which ghost we will live with. We might ask ourselves if we are doing the right thing, running away like this, if maybe we should have tried to fight Pharaoh on our own. Maybe the best way to fix anything is to remain where the hurt happened, we ask. But just as we shouldn't fix a gashing wound where it happened, where it is unsanitary, we have to move on and build a life where we don't add to our to do list. We build a life where what we have fixed won't become redamaged like a badly set bone.
Tomorrow is a day of rest. The Sabbath. The last day of Passover for us in diaspora. I will rest.
Because tomorrow we start fixing the house.
Oh hey look I am a writer with words that are good! I forgot there for a while.
I woke up today wondering why does Passover last seven days? I wondered if it had to do with hametz, the mother dough. I'm nearly sure if one starts a bread starter, it needs seven days to mature for use. And though I still think this is a valid answer in its own way, chabad.org offers several answers, the most important being that the Torah tells us to. Why? Because contrary to what I thought (and please excuse me lack of geographical knowledge of Egypt, I didn't even think to look this up, but then I think we all sometimes the miss the obvious, easiest answer. Now I have learned something, but also relearned how to figure something out.) it took the early Jewish nation seven days to reach the Red Sea (if you like, you can think of it as the Sea of Reeds; I think that's a perfectly valid option and the difference is an essay for another day because of how it links up to my approach to faith and the Torah).
It fittingly coincides, as chabad.org points out, with why do we work for six days and rest on the seventh? Why do we have a rest year every seven years? We know that once the Egyptians were safe on the other side of their sea, they rejoiced with song. If it were me, I'd start looking for a way to make bread to celebrate, too, because carbs are delicious. (Maybe even an early version of a challah loaf even, tying in nice and neat with Sabbath bread!) Wouldn't that be something if they arrived at the other side on a Saturday? (Though admittedly we're not supposed to use musical instruments on the Sabbath as that is a labor forbidden through the Rabbic tradition.)
A good English saying is that it is darkest before the light. The Torah tells us that when Moses went to Pharaoh to demand that he let the Hebrews go, Pharaoh increased their work load. And we know that the Hebrews weren't spared all of the Plagues. What's more, after it all was over, they still had a week long walk ahead of them before they could fully rest; I'm sure they felt driven to put as much distance between them and Pharaoh. In a sense, it was darkest for them before the light broke.
The last thought there, that they felt driven to put distance between, is one that maybe they didn't felt, but I could understand the impulse. I think a lot of people can. When they are running from something or something that has hurt them.
As all of you know, I recently moved. There were a lot of reasons for this. One of them was work. Where I used to live, the price of living was out of my pay bracket given I was working minimum wage, but as much as I knew I was suited to office work, the admin positions I could find that didn't require a two or four year degree (which were few and far between) were either only part time and/or paid what I was currently being paid. Or they were at such a distance that it wouldn't make up for the wear and tear on my car to say nothing of the price of gas. And the job I was holding down is part of my PTSD (yes, legitimate, I have a therapist who diagnosed me). The place I moved to I had considered before because they were in such need of a young work force that they would pay you to move! But at the time I had heard about it, none of the jobs I thought I could hold down were any of the ones that would be compensated for moving cost. (A flaw if you ask me going at how many jobs need filling now in those industries, but that's a discussion about classism we can have another day.) I considered it again last year on an impulse to see if I could find an office job finally. And lo, there was!
I moved for my health - I needed a job that wouldn't stress me as much, but I also needed to see a doctor and I couldn't afford even copays at the job I used to have. I moved because of family in a way I wasn't ready yet to name, but I knew it deep in my gut. I wanted to finally see a therapist. I wanted to attend to my spiritual needs in a way I couldn't in old state due to fatigue and exhaustion and pain, all of which also took away time I had for anything but work. I wanted to be able to take proper care of my cat -- get him his shots, take him to the vet.
In a way, I saw this new place as my own land of milk and honey. What I didn't know yet was that in September, the new year for Jewish people would be a year of rest. And as it turns out, this Passover, a lot of things came together all at once. Let me walk you through how all of this came together.
This spring marks eight years since my mother threw a teenage hissy fit and moved out of the apartment she shared with my siblings and I. (In a move fitting of her immature attitude, she moved in with her mother.) That means a little over seven years since I have remade myself as someone not my mother's daughter, been healing from her influence. Her abuse as I now acknowledge - emotional, positioning herself as the victim always, with conditioning and gas lighting and her narcissim. It's been about three years since I moved out from a house where I was again emotionally abused. (I am still in process of accepting that it is not my fault, that I am not to blame for trusting someone who turned out abusive, that it truly isn't a fault in me for finding her safe. It's part and parcel of the fact that I was raised in such a household where abuse feels safe.)
Nearly a full week before this year's Passover began, I had to lay down a boundary with my father. He naturally didn't accept this. The fall out -- luckily over text messaging so I could check in with people -- brought to light what I refused to name, the thing deep in my gut that had me running from my last apartment. So very carefully, my father had positioned himself as a nice guy, someone who didn't do anything wrong because look, he isn't raising his voice, he isn't physically hurting me, he is standing at a distance. And he always wanted to actually hear my thoughts so he could reassure me that he hadn't actually hurt me.
It's a wonder my parents waited twelve years to separate. Though they take different tracks, in the end, their abuse was the same. Conditioning their children to see them in a particular way, gas lighting us to their way of thinking. Never assuming harm. Both of them wanting to assume that they had given their children the good things, never the bad. Wanting their children as some consolation prize in their failed marriage. Never wanting their children to become more emotionally mature. My mother sent me a letter in a meandering way a few years ago wanting her daughter back -- not wanting to know me as an adult. My father recently told me that I have no right to judge him for hurt he caused because he is the parent and I am the kid.
Much like a Hebrew freed from Pharaoh, I couldn't move soon enough once I was offered a job. I refused to even fully flesh out what I would do without housing -- I briefly considered renting a campsite for two months until my apartment was ready for me to move in. (Where I moved to is facing a severe housing shortage and though I had found an apartment to rent, it wouldn't be available for me until two months after I had started my job.) I just had to go because I wanted to be safe and taken care of.
I talked with my therapist about the exact type of abuse my dad had done to me the Thursday before Passover began. It has taken me almost a whole week to feel closer to balanced.
There are still a little over four months until this year of rest ends. Sometimes it is in rest that we can finally face our problems. I can only imagine what the Hebrews felt that seventh day, when they could actually see that they were safe. I find myself a little scared of what else I will find out in the next four months or if this is it. If I finally was in the darkest place before the light.
But what then? You wake on the eighth day and you have only what you could carry. You know you were delivered, but you will need more food, you need shelter, eventually even clothing.
In a different track, you need to fix your house. Everyone has one; it is where we house our beings. And some of us are luckily enough to only ever need to do the repair work of normal wear and tear. But sometimes something happens that causes a major issue. Sometimes we use the right tools to fix it. Sometimes we don't -- like using sand to repair a concrete foundation. It just doesn't work. Imagine sand is an addiction and you'll get at what I'm driving at.
The newly freed Hebrews, like myself, hadn't even been given a chance to have a properly built house. A good analogy here is an issue currently facing Connecticut residents. Back in the 1980s, there were houses built with what seemed to be good concrete. I was born into a house with a not just both parents, but an involved family. Connecticut residents who bought the houses with what seemed to be good concrete are now finding out that their foundations are falling apart. I'm finding out that the house I built is like a house built and then bought without proper inspection - the kind of house that is a nightmare of Russian nesting dolls never ending; just one problem after another and sometimes when you start work on a repair, you find out you can't do the repair until something else fixed and it ends up as night mare repair daisy chain. To fix this, do this but first this but oh no actually this first and so on.
My path in therapy has been naming first that I suffer from the curse of being too aware and also having had to do healing work on my own (which actually also mirrors my work with my primary care doctor or general practioner depending on where you are; the appointments I've had have been showing up with all the things that I've got wrong and naming what I've done for them and my doctor saying I think you just need a few more tools, but you are actually doing really well on your own; but I digress). But recently, to keep using the house repair metaphor, when we are pulling up the carpet we're finding mold; try to fix the concrete in the basement and oh there's a skeleton buried here; try to hang a photo and turns out there are termits eating the wood.
It's the end of Passover. The last night for those in Israel and the second to last night for those in diaspora. Like them, I am only beginning my spiritual journey with G-d and faith and living as a person who wants to honor the covenant begun with Abraham. Like them, it has been a long week running away from where I was hurt. Like them, I thought that freedom would mean walking into a land of milk and honey. That all it would take is making that first step.
And it is both that easy and that hard. Sometimes, you use sand to fill the holes -- the Hebrews tried to emulate what they knew with a golden calf. But sometimes you have the right tools and learn where to buy the right ones (I wouldn't fix a hole in my plaster with something I would find at the dollar store; I would ask advice from the old guy at the hardware store and ask what other people learned from their own repair work). Which also fits in with what I trust about Judaism more than what I have found in Christianity: forget the quibble about whether the events in the Torah are true, whether G-d saved them, the Rabbinic tradition wrote out for us a guideline of what lessons we are to learn from it. Or if you prefer not to follow Rabbinic tradition, a tribe in the desert which settled Ancient Israel collected stories from their neighbors into a story about themselves and if they found it important as a guide book, what are we meant to learn from? As I read elsewhere, sometimes the Torah and Rabbinic traditions and the Mishnah are much like manuals to help you repair your car.
Help you repair your house.
What is interesting about Rabbinic tradition and the Mishna is what mimics my own day to day: we have the Torah and there are very few instances where G-d is not there. The Mishnah deals with the day to day. Ok so we have this law laid down for us, but how do we actually apply it for our day to day living where we only have people? I have faith in a way that is separate from my study of the Torah. To me, the Torah instructs me in how to treat other people and helps me fix my house. The Mishnah provides clarity on it. Talking with my congregation that I have become apart of provides more clarity. We are a group of people in constant discussion and growth. And it is people who are meant to help people. Not only did G-d make sure that there were two to be help meets for each other, we were given a guidebook on how to treat each other and support one another, even the stranger.
The office I work in now takes an integrative approach to health care, looks at all the parts of person and their life to help them be as healthy as they possibly can be. So I have the congregation, the Torah, the Mishnah, Rabbis, a therapist, a doctor, my two siblings, my coworkers, and friends. Because you need a lot of tools to fix a house.
But I have only just gathered my tools. I have some supplies, but as anyone who has fixed a nightmare house knows, you never know what else you will need. I will in time find out what I need because I do have a nightmare house. I will need help to know which supplies are the correct ones. But the next step has to be mine.
When you find out that your house is unsafe to live in or needs extensive repairs, you focus on making one room your base. A safe place. Like those Hebrews on the other shore, I take stock of what I have on hand. I take stock of the tools, the knowledge, the people. It isn't an auspicious start and it seems daunting.
But we are no longer in Egypt. We are our own masters now. A whole sea separates us in the immediate and Pharaoh will need time to amass warriors again and time to build a boat if he does actually want to get us. Time is what we need to secure the house. Time to learn what needs repair and which ghost we will live with. We might ask ourselves if we are doing the right thing, running away like this, if maybe we should have tried to fight Pharaoh on our own. Maybe the best way to fix anything is to remain where the hurt happened, we ask. But just as we shouldn't fix a gashing wound where it happened, where it is unsanitary, we have to move on and build a life where we don't add to our to do list. We build a life where what we have fixed won't become redamaged like a badly set bone.
Tomorrow is a day of rest. The Sabbath. The last day of Passover for us in diaspora. I will rest.
Because tomorrow we start fixing the house.
Oh hey look I am a writer with words that are good! I forgot there for a while.