Angelika;
I am being deeply moved by what you have willing shared. Thank you so much. I
resonate so with (my truth) of it all. I too shed deep painful tears(even as I
write) for the history of separation that we humans seem to consistenly incur
on one another through the victim/perpetrator identites. WE have opportunity
every day to continue to bridge these seemingly polar opposites, and you shared
beautifully how this can be accomplished. In being willing to feel both sides
of these identities, we return to flow. YOu wrote it so well and I thank you
for this. I return to the deep feel and experience of universal pain of
separatio, and grateful for another day to ride the wave of GRACE....Rita
Warm Regards,
Rita Ann Martino
awakeningfamilyconstellations.com
________________________________
From: angelika schenk <angelika.schenk@xxxxxxxxx>
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 6:30:04 AM
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] Israel and Gaza
Encouraged by other's very personal contribution, here is a short account of
how the present events in Israel affect me personally, in constellation
terms.
Watching the news, the children of Gaza, the smashed buildings, the people's
despair, I could not stop myself sobbing. But why did it hit me so much more
personally than other war scenes, and it seems the same has happened to
quite a few people who talk on CT.
I was aware how hard it is for me to see the Jews in this position as the
ones who are doing this. The Jews that I want to defend so fiercely, sending
the blame on to the Nazi perpetrators, and earlier and other persecutors. I
cringe when people say: "But look what the Jews are doing now!"
This morning it overwhelmed me again. Somehow, I had to sit in it, I mean
the war scene, calmly, empty, amidst fire, destruction, despair. It came to
a point of no blame, just great sadness, and awe. Awe about the fate of the
chosen people, still chosen to play a major role in history, again, and
again, for better, for worse. Ghettoed in, more comfortably than at other
times, but threatened still, and threatened again, and threatened anew. And
in some way used as a base, as gun fodder of the West amongst the Muslim
neighbours. Not by their own choice, but by their history, by the larger
political balances and imbalances of power.
As I kept on sitting in stillness, another image returned. For me it is only
an inner one, but for one side of my family it was real. It was 1942 in a
little Polish town that had been flattened by the Nazis at the beginning of
their invasion, and now it was time to march more than a third of its
population away. My mother told me how the rest were lining the main road,
crying and screaming, unable to protect or save them. This scene has been in
me even before I was told and read up on the internet. It has always been
easy for me to walk among the ones who were marched. I had never walked
amongst those who marched the others. I only got as far as looking at them,
or even representing one myself who was simply frozen in autism - which I
had felt for a long time, is the feeling of a perpetrator that believes
there can be no pardon ever from anybody.
All of sudden, in my meditation I found myself marching with the ones who
marched the others. The feeling was nearly ripe to burst open, I could sense
it, but it could not quite happen as yet.
In Stalingrad I had experienced these feelings breaking out with power, the
howling and gnashing of teeth, and burying of heads in the sand of the Volga
banks.
It was easier in Stalingrad than on the marching roads. The sides involved
were more equal, and they have long since, and even there and then, made up,
seeing each other as brothers. Love flows freely. In the museum in
Stalingrad they tell people that many of the dead were found as German
Russian pairs embracing deeply in the hour of death. The freezing
temperature alone and the rest of the circumstances did not allow for
separating them. And obviously the dead did not want it. So Stalingrad
became a holy city of a Russian German holocaust where both sides see
themselves and each other as those who had to do it and to suffer it, with
very little feeling of animosity between them, rather directed to those who
forced them. Dying together brought them together fully. My own father
nearly died this way, too.
Could we imagine, in our wildest dreams, that both the slayers and slain of
the Nazi Holocaust could find their rest side by side, arm in arm?
Descendents have married and befriended each other, can we allow the same to
the ones who really went through it? Only a courageous few have gone this
way.
For it is so much harder in the Jewish situation. There was no equality, no
perception of brotherhood at a deeper level at that time. And yet, how can
we know it is not there.
I got a little glimpse of this at the Cologne conference 2005 where Bert and
Haim Dasberg invited to a talk. At one point Haim Dasberg said: " If only
the Germans knew how much we miss Germany, but they don't miss us at all."
All my childhood I heard a voice in my head: " Oh how empty the streets are
without our Jews." The voice was so strong and clear, it could have been
mine. At the end of the talk I went to Haim Dasberg and knelt in front of
him, putting my hands on his knees and said: " You said the Germans don't
miss you, but that is not true. Because we belong together after all." He
looked at me and said in beautiful German: " I am not questioning that!"
I feel, deep regret has happened in Germany, after years of stunned
disbelief, being frozen in such shame and guilt that reaching out was
impossible for the majority, but the howling and gnashing of teeth that was
possible in Stalingrad has not happened, there is still much deeper frozen
pain, on both sides.
So returning to my inner mediation, it was clear to me I had to march with
those who marched the others for a little longer, feeling their pain as my
pain, the same as I have felt the Jewish pain as my pain for as long as I
can think back. It is time for me to own both sides of an utterly tragically
broken whole equally. As I now stay with those who marched the others, I
begin to feel their pain, their deep pain. Not only do they have to face
what they have done, but also what they have set in motion further down the
line. This place seems by far the most uncomfortable one of all. Hollowing
them out, maybe not unlike how Alison sees it in those who are still alive
with a number on their arm, like I also recognize those instantly, with a
longing to run to them and take them to safety, like my mother and her
relatives and most of the people of the little town would have loved to do
when they were taken. After a sufficient number of constellations I conclude
that the Alzheimer in my family is the frozenness, the unbearable pain of
those who survived what they could not stop.
It is so easy to cry seeing the Jews being pushed into a pushing role, my
heart stays open in grief. But like Bert says, how do we know what it will
bring?
Now a little removed from my more personal images, I imagine the marchers
and the marched, beginning to face each other, in a recognition that they
share a huge pain, a pain that always consists of two sides, or more. Then,
German and Jewish, and somehow only very partially comparable, now Jewish
and Palestinian, in both cases these events are set in a context without
which they would not have happened, other powers that have played their part
in producing a contracted heated situation. All of those could join in, too.
Can we, when we see the scenes on TV or inside of us, just be there with
them all and with the whole situation as it is, with all who played a part
in it, in the presence of the powers that hold the script, and appear to
offer a new one, already in the ethers, can we just sit or stand and bear it
and stay, as Bert puts it, in the great love, in special love for all whose
fate it is to act out and be acted upon, parts of the bigger thread of
history and our evolution, so painful, so against our instinctual and
emotional existence, and yet lived by the greatest of all Jews- in silence,
and in awe, really, in awe of what we cannot make sense of, and if we can
find it within, even in some trust?
Thank you Dan, Joe, Alison, and all others
Angelika
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