Several years ago at our Pesach seder, my sister-in-law, a child psychologist, talked about the re-telling of the Passover story as a way of telling our trauma narrative. When she works with patients, the act of telling one’s story is crucial to emerging from trauma. Putting ourselves back into the story, instead of shying away from it, allows us to find some semblance of control over what we’ve been through. While we may wonder why we tell the story of our Exodus every single year, perhaps it’s important to tell the story in order to ensure that we emerge from trauma. In this week’s Torah portion, we read in painstaking detail about each of the stops that the Israelites made on their journey through the wilderness. They camped here, then they traveled there, they camped there, then they kept going… it’s hardly an exciting narrative portion of the Torah. Why does the Torah include this long litany of places? Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah offers a parable to a king whose son was sick. They went far away to find healing, and on their return back home his father told their story based on all the places they had been: we slept there, you had a headache here, you had chills here. The father helps the son make sense of and process what they have been through. So, too, the Israelites needed to recall all of the places they had been as a part of their journey to the Promised Land. I cannot imagine that wandering through the wilderness was easy. In fact, it may have actually been traumatic. On the eve of their entrance to the land, its own type of communal healing, they needed to stop and recall all of the places they had been.
Today is Rosh Chodesh Av, and we enter into the most intense dark period on our calendar. We recall all of those difficulties and traumas that have happened as a part of our past. But I’ve realized, like my sister-in-law’s comments on the Pesach seder, it’s not just for the purpose of remembering or relocating ourselves in our pain. It’s for the purpose of emerging from our pain so that we can grow, so that we can heal, so we can be more whole. This period on our calendar of pain and sadness is deliberately situated just prior to the High Holidays. We go through this process of uncovering stories of pain so that we can arrive at Rosh Hashanah with a better understanding of ourselves and our journeys. We go through this so that we can enter into a conversation with ourselves and with God with better tools of telling our stories.
The Children of Israel, on the eve of entering the land of Israel, told the stories of their journey to be more whole. We, too, in these three weeks, sit in our trauma for the purpose of retelling, hoping for the promise of good to come. And as we begin the climb to Rosh Hashanah, I pray that we each tell our stories, with all the stops along the way, and in our retelling, find healing.
