A woman says:
“I just got a photo from a speeding camera through the mail. I sent it right back – way too expensive and really bad quality.”
A guy says: 8 p.m. I get an SMS from my girlfriend: Me or football?!
11 p.m. I SMS my girlfriend: You of course.
There is a fascinating and insightful Midrash on the opening of this week’s portion Noah. The Torah begins:
These are the generations of Noach, Noach was a righteous man he was perfect in his generations; Noach walked with God.
The Midrash, always sensitive to nuance, wonders why the single verse mentions Noach not once, not twice, but three times? The Midrash offers the following extraordinary insight.
The Torah is intimating that there was not one Noach; there were three Noach’s. There is Noach before the flood, during the flood, and after the flood.
Noach, explains the Midrash, was one of the few individuals in history who lived three lives, in three completely different worlds. First, Noach saw a settled, safe, and predictable world. That was #1. Then he saw his entire world destroyed by the flood. That was #2. And then he saw the world rebuilt and civilized after the flood. That was Noach #3.
To survive and thrive in each of the three eras, you need a completely different set of skills and resources. The first Noach grew up and came of age in a world he, his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were accustomed to. This was a world of predictability and consistency, where you work hard and achieve success.
But then Noach encounters a new reality—one that reduced the entire planet to an ocean, without a single survivor, not among humans, or animals, birds, insects, or even trees or bushes. Just imagine what that does to a person.
But then Noach was forced to reinvent himself yet a third time, as he was summoned to leave the Ark and rebuild the world; to get back into normal life. How do you do that after living on the edge in a world gone mad? How do return to civilization as a normal person?
Now you need a new set of skills—the ability to recover after such devastation; the power to smile again, rather the joy that comes from conviction and resolves to still believe in the possibility of love and happiness.
Indeed, for Noach himself, it was far from simple. The only story we know him exiting the ark is that he planted a vineyard and became inebriated. Did Noach suffer from PTSD? Did Noach feel he needed to numb his tremendous pain from all the devastation?
An entire generation of Jews understood this Midrashic insight all too well.
Many of our parents, grandparents or great grandparents, have grown up in pre-War Europe. Despite the many challenges facing many at the beginning of the 20th century, scores of them enjoyed a relatively calm and serene childhood. The world was not a perfect place, but it was a fine place, with many pleasant moments, experiences and joys.
And then, as Hitler took Europe by storm, their entire universe was shaken up and destroyed, horrific brutality against our people. 6 million vibrant lives were cut down through bullets, fire, gas, beatings, hanging, torture, or live burial.
Nobody prepared anybody for this harrowing experience. As I once heard from Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau, when he tried describing his experience in Buchenwald, at the age of 6: “I was surrounded by the staunch of death. I would compare myself to a cockroach or a little bug. They may not have large brains, but they have an instinct to do anything they can for survival. And that is what I also understood and did.”
Go explain that to us Americans who grew up in prosperity!
And then, the survivors had to yet reinvent themselves, a third time. Noach had to become a new person. The survivors of the War now faced the challenge of “normalcy.” Can you ever become normal again? Can you ever laugh again as though the world was a fine place? This was not easy—and will one day be recorded as one of the great miracles in human history. For the most part, the survivors recreated a new world for themselves and all of us, a world of generosity, love, blessing, love, and values.
Many of us, in our own little or big way, experience three worlds, demanding of us to reinvent ourselves again and again and yet again. We live not one life, but at least three lives.
Do you know who understood this best? 92-year-old Edith Eva Eger, who lives today in California, and one year ago published her memoir, The Choice.
Edith was born in Hungary, and as a teenager, in the 1940s she was a serious student of ballet and gymnast training for the next Olympics. It was an idyllic youth. She was in the state of the first “Noach,” prior to the flood.
And then one day, her world began to crumble.
Her dreams of winning a medal for her country were smashed when she was told that as a Jew, she was no longer qualified to be part of the Olympic team.
And then one terrifying night, when she is 16, armed soldiers herd her Hungarian family into a wagon full of Jews. They were crammed in a cattle car en route to Auschwitz.
In the dark train, her mother offers lifesaving, and later, life-changing, piece of wisdom. “Just remember,” she says, “no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
“We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind.”
While her mother was being sent to the gas chamber, camp doctor Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” would order Edith to dance for him. She closed her eyes, heard strains of Tchaikovsky and imagined she was dancing Romeo and Juliet in the Budapest Opera House. As she performed pirouettes, her mother’s last words echoed: “We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind.”
“The barracks floor becomes a stage at the Budapest opera house,” she imagines.
Over the next year, she endures relentless atrocities and witnesses others — a woman in labor with her legs bound shut; a young boy used for target practice.
Edith and her sister Magda would be part of the death march from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. As she recounts in her newly published memoir, out of the 2,000 people who marched, only 100 survived. Many fell into ditches along the way; others, too weak to keep moving, were shot on the spot.
The sisters would overcome even more remarkable odds. On May 4, 1945, after a year in the camps, Edith, her back broken—a cause of her lifelong scoliosis—and weighing just 70 pounds, was pulled from a pile of corpses by American soldiers. Few had made it to this day of liberation; of the 15,000 people deported from their hometown, Edith and Magda were among fewer than six dozen who survived.
Edith was free, but with a broken back and broken spirit. Now what? The “now what” is the crux of her book “The Choice.” Eger decides to use her trauma to help heal others as well. She becomes a psychologist and gets in the trenches with her patients and grants readers intimate access to her parallel quest to escape from the prison of her mind.
Who has Is it worse? She asks. Two patients go into their therapist’s office. The first woman is crying her heart out, over the fact that her son is dying from hemophilia.
The second woman comes in and is crying over the fact that her new Cadillac came in a different shade of color than she had anticipated.
No brainer you would think. Yet Edith Eva Eger in her book says both of them are suffering from some form of trauma. How it is manifesting is only what’s visible on the surface.
The woman crying over her dying son is in touch with what’s really bothering her. The woman crying over the color of her Cadillac is really crying about her lifeless marriage, and her having given up all of her dreams to be with her wealthy husband. And is learning that money is not making her happy, regardless of how many cars she buys.
“We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for,” she writes, “is up to us.”
“When you go to the bathroom in the morning you can look in the mirror and say, ‘It’s going to be another crappy day.’ Or, you can say, ‘I’m going to honor myself, treasure myself, cherish myself and I can make a difference today.’ Practicing love and kindness can be as simple as making eye contact when you go to the grocery store.”
“Suffering is universal,” Edith says. “Victimhood is optional.” We’ll all inevitably face some kind of affliction, calamity or abuse. We often have little or no control over these outside circumstances. But, she says, “Victimhood comes from the inside. We become victims not because of what happens to us, but when we choose to hold on to our victimization.” We develop, she says, a “victim’s mind”—thinking and actions that are rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past and unforgiving.
As for herself, Edith says, “I will not forget my time in Auschwitz, but I don’t live there. I call it my cherished wound because it’s a part of whom I’ve become today.”
Sadly, there is no one on this planet who has not experienced some form of trauma. Some tragically, genuine suffering of abuse, neglect or even a literal Holocaust, and some lesser disappointments. But we all have our individual losses.
In all circumstances and scenarios, we do have a choice. Will we remain stuck in the second Noach—or can we reinvent ourselves to become a third Noach, to live in a new world, post the flood.
“We don’t have a choice about our victimization,” Eger says to us, “but we do have a choice about our victimhood.“ Do we want to be defined by our traumas, or by our recovery?
Our portion grants us the underlying ingredient. G-d says to Noach, “go out of the ark,” and build a new world. And even when it raining outside, look up and you might see a rainbow, knowing that above the clouds, the sun is always shining. At every moment, you are a manifestation of the infinite light and love of the Divine. The clouds will pass, and your sunlight and sunshine will emerge.
We can all learn from this remarkable woman.
Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...