Nisan - How to Honor Our Ancestors’ Grief, and Their Gifts
For years, I lived in terrible fear of ending up like my biological father. As much pain and sadness his ending his shared custody of me with my mother caused me, I had convinced myself that his genetic imprint was so thorough and so terminal that the greatest betrayal was only yet to come. Somehow, I would end up embodying and exacting everything I perceived as his own failings as a person through my own life. In light of the healing I have been able to do in the last few years, I could see how this idea became a belief, how that belief became a pattern, and how that pattern determined my actions until I actively chose to end it. Yet, in working persistently to heal from all of this long-standing bitterness, I may have missed some of the signs pointing me to some sweeter gifts my ancestors left for me along the way.
When I first started learning and falling in love with the Hebrew Bible, I became intrigued by a concept referred to as "maaseh avos siman le’banim,” that the deeds of the ancestors are a sign for their descendants, most notably explored by Nachmanides the 13th Century Biblical and Talmudic exegetical genius. When reading the book of Bereishit, Nachmanides formalized the notion that the sacred narratives of our progenitors, every blessing, every famine, every tension between siblings, every well dug in a desert, is a sign of what is to come for all of the Jewish people, for all time. Then what exactly is the Torah? Some sort of mythological determinism? Or a helping, friendly guidebook to navigate human ascent and descent? Is this our ancient way of talking about intergenerational trauma? How do we work with the maaseh avos, the deeds of our ancestors—or good and for ill—which have bequeathed to us, through our genes, our memories, our earliest and most formative educations as humans?
Ramban suggests there are three options: The first is that these deeds are instructive—they teach us how to act in this world by example, and perhaps in spite of their example. This might mean that we are obligated to bring a spirit of curiosity, openness, and compassion to the past, to understand our ancestors’ motivations in context, and to expand our understanding of how these actions and choices directly affected us. My father was raised by harsh and hostile people, he had no model for being a parent that transcended his own fear and pain for the sake of his son. It couldn’t have been any other way for him at that time, beautifully and brutally. Yet, all that expanded awareness of his own human predicament on my part doesn’t imply that he escapes accountability. The hurt was real, and it happened. But if I am to truly learn from his deeds, I am learning how to fully feel the anger and betrayal I experienced as a child, to take responsibility for my own healing, for the sake of myself and my own descendants, and forgive him (slowly, carefully, consciously, for my benefit as much as his). My sense is that my own lineage lacked any sort of grace—perhaps by embracing it, for him, I’m changing the whole story.
The second possible meaning for these maasim to be simanim is that the past is predictive, that the actions of my forebearers have left indelible traces upon me. The field of epigenetics has made that quite clear, and the research about our ability to change the genetic biomarkers through psychedelics and other interventions is promising, yet still in its infancy, as is my own self-experimentation in this regard. My own work has led to an incredible amount of insight and behavior change, in a relatively short amount of time, but sometimes I feel like I have only moved the smallest of pebbles and stones, and the bigger boulders will only come down, one handful of sand at a time—I’m still circling a renewed relationship with my body and caring for it in different ways, and my fear around almost everything to do with money may be for my next life. What has been completely surprising about this journey is how it has brought me into a new relationship with the past in that I have found the ability to not merely be mercilessly subject to it, but to have the agency to interpret what the past meant now that I am standing where I am. My commitment to myself, my family, and my community is directly influenced by the choices of my grandparents and my parents, but also by mine. Being a good descendant means being a good ancestor for what is to come.
And the third, is that the Mysterious Force that Lovingly Guides All Things has set the continuum of experience of all generations for all time, and that we’re all living the same human drama set to a Divine symphony. While I have struggled and bristled with this theological thread in the past, my psychedelic work has made much more space for it as I am learning how to surrender to What Is. Nothing could be any different than it is, everything is happening for an infinite number of reasons, including my choices to do so much differently than my family of origin, and as one of God’s imaginary friends, I am here to feel what it is like to make those choices which preserve and honor human dignity, to bring more love and compassion and celebration into the world, to feel like I’m not working hard enough and feel what it’s like to return to my breath, to be angry and to forgive, to be hypocritical and shortsighted and ok with being a work in progress, all the Dading and the Zacing. To feel it all, as fully as possible.
May this Nisan, during this beautiful and brutal moment in Jewish self-awareness and collective anxiety about the future, bring us to the eternal waves of awareness of “enslavement to freedom, mourning to celebration, dusk to dawn, subjugation to redemption,” in ourselves, our ancestors, and for our children and children’s children.
Z
PS—While learning again about maaseh avos siman l’banim and writing this blog, I wrote my father, told him how much pain he caused me, how I’m doing things differently for myself, my wife and my kids, and that I forgive him. Thank you, dear reader, for allowing me the space to return to myself.
