Dear Maria
It was good to hear a voice from beyond the European and Jewish psyche which is
at present preoccupied with the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So many of us in
this group are still engaged in our efforts to deal with the past of the second
world war and the Holocaust, with the psychological shadow land that is our
legacy of trans-generational trauma and this is currently inevitably being
played out in this particular arena.
I do not know nearly so much about Latin American or Brazilian history as I do
of my own cultural background but as you remind us, your country and your
people also know trauma and dictatorship and there are "second generation"
children of victims and perpetrators in Brazil who are facing the same
challenges as we are. As Eva Hoffman in her wonderful book "Beyond Such
Knowledge" says:
"The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation, in which
the meaning of awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of
trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the
world and new understandings."
I am always grateful that constellation work has offered us an enormous helping
hand in this uphill struggle. Not the solution I think but certainly a
stepping stone.
So I am glad to be reminded by you that there are many other people wresting
with similar issues to mine although played out in different cultures, in
different settings. I was always bewildered by the acute contradiction in Pope
John Paul 11. On the one hand he was clearly a political priest and played a
critical role in the defeat of Communism in his Polish homeland. On the other
hand he seemed blind to the contradiction in himself when he openly criticised
the political priests of Latin American and their battles against the
oppression of their people. So am I glad you have opened up the scene for us
so I don't get lost in my personal history and struggle to the exclusion of
others. I hope to hear more from you
Barbara S
Barbara Stones
stonesbarbara@xxxxxxxxxxx
59 Englewood Road
London SW12 9PB
020 8673 2508
________________________________
From: Maria Luíza Tepedino <tepedinoml@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, 9 January, 2009 18:57:26
Subject: Re: [ConstellationTalk] Re: [Constellation Talk] My Disloyalty to the
Tribe
To all,
I'll try to express my feelings....
I'm feeling very unease about these discussuion and coments about war,
palestinians, jews, nazi and so on...
So I thought I'm far from all that, but...as I read Brazilian newspaper or
wacht tv I see every day pictures of dead people, specialy young children in
Gaza. I also see dead people in Brazil from car accidents and murdered by drug
dealers.....
We are out of a dictatorial military goverment that lasted 20 years......
I rememeber my grandfather ( a brazilian, son of Italians parents) saying that
he was hostilized by teatchers and colleagues in school during the war....
So all these violence and killings have to do with me.....
We are all humans, we belong to the same kind: human kind for better or for
worse....
Lest's hope one day we learn to do to our neighbur as we would like to be done
to us....
I feel very bad about al those things
Maria Luiza
Brasilia - Brazil
----- Original Message -----
From: Barbara Eggenberger
To: ConstellationTalk@ yahoogroups. com
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 4:30 PM
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] Re: [Constellation Talk] My Disloyalty to the Tribe
Dear Dan,
Please never stop writing! Just as you had the wisdom to make new choices for
yourself even while being cooked in a traditional Jewish-family soup, I have
faith that others will too. Even now with the current conflict, the soup is
being stirred anew creating the space for new responses. You hold the light to
a valuable choice. Let it shine so bright, it blinds us to everything else. I
for one need that light to see a new path out of the glory of false innocence.
Deep love and respect for your journey,
Barb Eggenberger
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
-----Original Message-----
From: "Dan Booth Cohen" <danbcohen@rcn. com>
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:17:42
To: <ConstellationTalk@ yahoogroups. com>
Subject: [ConstellationTalk] My Disloyalty to the Tribe
As a child, a dominant quality of my family was nobody got along. My father
was especially mean to me, full of criticism and attack. He was hostile to
my sister, my mother, his brother and sister, his mother and father, all his
bosses, and so on. My mother loathed my father, didn't like her sister, and
complained bitterly about her mother and father. And so on.
I knew about friendly people through television. The iconic father for an
entire generation of American boys born in the 1950s was "Ward Cleaver,"
played on TV by the actor Hugh Beaumont. He was the ideal; the father who
was friendly, understanding, and protective.
Then there was my Jewish identity. To be Jewish meant two things. Our team
had the best players measured by intellectual and cultural achievement.
Einstein, Marx (Groucho and Karl), and Freud were the brightest stars in
20th century intellectualism, surrounded by countless other Jewish achievers
in all fields. The second characteristic of our team was that the other,
bigger teams wanted to slaughter us - each and every one of us. The blood
was still wet from the Nazi Holocaust and the murdered 6 million. They were
the latest victims of 2,000 years of persecution and genocide. Now it was
the Arabs who wanted to drive us in to the sea. Every Jewish holiday
conveyed the same message: "They tried to kill all the Jews. We survived.
Let's eat."
My father brought us to the Jewish museum to see the photo exhibition on
Auschwitz. When read the Diary of Ann Frank. We watch the movies and
documentaries. We heard the stories.
One year, the Kol Nidre service contained a story about a group of Jews in
York, England in 1190 who holed up in a castle and committed mass suicide
rather than convert to Christianity. It was a quick reference in a long and
beautiful service, presented as an example of pious people who lived and
died by their loyalty to the Covenant.
This is the foundation of Judaism. If we Jews allow ourselves to be
absorbed, we evaporate into history with the nameless, forgotten sects that
emerged, flourished, and dispersed. To maintain our identity as Jews, we
necessarily hold ourselves apart. If we cannot separate ourselves, we
cannot be Jews; if we cannot be Jews, we might as well be dead. The price
of separation in every generation is Jews have enemies that want to kill us.
As an adult, I was determined to apply my birthright of Jewish achievement
to overcome the threat of annihilation at the hands of enemies who despised
my very existence. I have been on this road for 30 years. First, I repaired
my relationships to my family. My sister and I are close and loving. We
take good care of our aging mother and honor our deceased father. My wife
and I are best friends. Our daughters are well cared for.
I took many trips to Germany as a leader of teenage peace exchanges. I
walked across the West Bank with the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrims and rented a
room in Bethlehem, where I lived as a Jewish peacemaker. I am business
partners with a Palestinian restaurateur.
The core of my learning is that our fierce loyalty to the Tribe of the
Covenant cannot be separated from our rejection of our neighbors. This is
why they hate us. The Jews of York did not commit mass suicide. The
fathers slit the throats of their sons and daughters, then their wives, then
each other. Only the last survivors killed themselves. This event, told on
the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, was a mass murder of the worst kind,
committed in good conscience, as the worst atrocities always are. It is no
wonder that the Christian villagers, who themselves had only recently become
converts to the Emperor's religion, were horrified.
This is not some obscure Talmudic argument. It is bleeding through today's
headlines. Why do we exalt Abraham, a father who willingly puts a knife to
his son's throat, and most importantly, does so without permission of the
boy's mother? Why, on the holiest day of the year, do we praise our
ancestors who committed this ultimate sacrifice rather than adapt to the
ways of their neighbors? Why, having found prosperity and acceptance in
America, do we provide the military, financial and political resources for
our Israelis cousins to erect the castle of their destruction?
Central to my work as a Jewish peacemaker is fierce disloyalty to the
leaders who murder in good conscience. I honor and follow the teachings of
the sages, but reject the core premise that I need to be enemies with my
neighbors to maintain Jewish identity. My prayer is L'chaim. After Hitler,
after Oppenheimer, I am disloyal the Laws of separation. I keep a bad
conscience towards everything in Judaism that breeds hatred against us.
I was drawn to Bert Hellinger and Constellations through my work as
peacemaker. His understanding of the limits of conscience and the
destructive consequences of loyalty were revelations. Hellinger's
phenomenological stance radically rejects blind loyalty to the group
conscience. Hellinger commented that the commandment to love thy neighbor
has been distorted by the portrayal of the God who commands this love as the
exclusive deity of a particular sect or religious group. In this
interpretation, the neighbor is only the neighbor who belongs to the group.
If God shifted from the exclusive deity of an in-group to an inclusive
God-of-all, with everything connected, everyone belonging, and no one
claiming God as their exclusive deity, the Commandment would be understood
as "And thou shalt love thy neighboring country like your own and the
religion of your neighbors like your own."
This is my loyalty to my ancestors who were murdered for being Jewish. To
create safety in the world for Jews, I say: Palestinians have the same
dignity, the same honor, and the same rights as the Israelis. A Palestinian
life is exactly equal in value to a Jewish life. The tears of Palestinians
and Israelis carry the exact same measures of grief. Their mothers love
their children as much. Their fathers want only what other fathers want.
Their children are just as frightened.
Dan
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