Heart-Earned Wisdom: Who we are

You may know that six years ago our 13-year-old son Koby was murdered by terrorists. The life experience of those who have not lost a child is so different from ours that communication at its deepest level is difficult. The distance is so vast that the most we can do is to open a small window into our world.  This blog will attempt to traverse that distance, opening the door a crack into the unique perspective given by life's most profound loss.

Don't be  afraid. Stay with us. We might or might not make you cry, but we promise to make you think and also laugh.

There's nothing so whole as a broken heart, says Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, and  psychological studies have shown that people who suffer a traumatic loss, a parent losing a child in a violent murder, for example, find the ordinary devices of everyday life-- their everyday personality stripped away. The usual human defenses are swept away and you are left with a deeper truth. That clarity changes you.

You view the world and its actors from a new and different perspective. What is real and important--your family, your community, your purpose in the world-- become of utmost importance as the dross of life--the petty responses to insult, the self importance of accomplishment, the accumulation of the material-- become peripheral.

In meeting with hundreds of survivors of the scourge of terror, parents and brothers and sisters of those murdered on the altar of Islamic fanaticism, we find a deep soulful connection beyond social class, occupation, native land, and religious observance. We find tremendous pain, but little despair, indescribable sorrow and determination to go onliving, but almost no hatred of the other. 

We have been "lucky" in our tragedy because we have been able to create from the pain, establishing camps for 500 terror survivors, and camps for American teenagers, not terror victims, who come work with us at our camps. We also run women's retreats, as well as support groups for spiritual healing for couples and widows who have experienced terror. We've met with 9/11 survivors, spoke in Hong Kong, England, and across America. Our loss has enlarged us. Perhaps this is the compassion of God, the ability to transform pain into greater meaning and connection.

Terror, murder, death, trauma, post-traumatic stress. These are not words that we thought would be part of our life. But other words are also part of our life-happiness, camp, tsedakah, therapy, healing. And so are these words-dishes, laundry, and middle age. The perspective of loss informs our views but does not limit it.

Let's face it: Israel is based on loss, the ghost of all of the Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust, and the establishment of Israel following that great loss. All of the soldiers and children and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers who have died defending this country or merely going about their everyday routines. We are all part of Israel's transcendent birth.

Click here for the original Jerusalem Post article.