Embracing RAGE

WARNING! This post is graphic and potentially triggering. 

I dedicate this essay to all survivors who were sexually abused by a religious person they trusted. I would not be religious today if I hadn't written it.
Embrace your rage!  
Don't be afraid of it! 
The spiritual abuse, and damage we suffered is profound, but it IS possible to heal.  
Writing this essay helped me heal my relationship with the Torah and with my dead grandfather. I am surprised to be able to say, that I am no longer angry with him. Although he died many years ago, I feel him with me, encouraging and supporting me in my work.

I was seven. My sister was eight. We went to the yeshiva for shacharis with Tatty. Zaidy liked it when we came. After davening, he took us into his office. He put his hands under my clothes. His finger hurt me and I looked at him shocked.

“Don't look at me.” he said. “Look at the sefarim.”

I looked at the glass doors, behind them rows of meshnayos, shas, some of them too heavy to lift. I made my mind leave the rosh yeshiva's office so I wouldn't feel or know about his finger.

If I would have looked into his eyes, would he have seen my terror, my pain?

Would I have seen any shame or guilt in his?

But I was taught to listen, and so I looked at the sefarim, not at Zaidy. 

After he was done he asked,

“Do I need to get married again?”
He told us that he loved one of us more than the other. I knew it was my sister he loved more. 

Then, he took us to the toy store and told me to pick out a toy. Any toy.

My sister doesn't remember any of this.

She is the lucky one.

Black waves of rage

engulf me in a flood of intense fury,

crushing me,

drowning me.

I scream

a silent cry of despair

fists clenched

mind inflamed

a tense helpless agony

burns inside.

I know I can not escape it.

Instinctively

I dive head first

into the raging violence

shouting

screaming

against the terrible pressure

I pound, kick and

fight my way

down

  down

     down

through the terrifying anger

to the feelings beneath.

I lie exhausted

still

at the bottom.

My face is wet and

I'm shaking

and feeling

pain,grief, sadness, and hurt,

I had so carefully buried

deep under this turbulent sea of anger

I finally found the courage

to embrace.

I am an adult now.  
My grandfather is long dead. 

 It's time to face the anger that keeps me separated from my community.  I love, hate, and fear the community I grew up in, all at the same time.

Evil and holiness intertwined in my childhood in a knot almost too difficult to unravel.

As a child I couldn’t fight back, and I buried the rage. Now, an adult, I take myself back in time, feel the feelings, and to heal myself.

I never have to go far to find the parts of me that were hurt.  They are right behind my eyes,stuck at the age the abuse happened.

I visualize taking the younger part of me by the hand, and bringing her back to the yeshiva, into the office full of sefarim.  Back into the holy territory where she was violated.
She is not scared, because I'm with her.
She is enraged.
Zaidy sits on his rocking chair. A sefer Torah wrapped in a talis is on the shelf behind him. My young self opens one of the glass doors and takes out a tome of shas. She staggers under it's weight. It is Meseches Makos.

She is not scared. She knows I am now an adult, and I will protect her. She knows that he can not hurt her anymore.

She lifts the book and smashes the glass in the shelves. She snatches the sefarim throws them at Zaidy and onto the floor. She is furious. She opens the holy books and rips out the pages, crumples them up and throws them, stamps on them, stuffs them into his open shocked mouth.

Glass fragments and aleph bais rain down.  

I let her do this. 

She needs to do this.

She uses a sefer as a rock to smash his head again and again. He sits clutching the arms of the rocker.
We are both awed by the depth of her rage.

She takes a broken piece of glass and uses it like a knife to cut off the finger that hurt her. He starts to rise. I warn him with my eyes.

Touch her and you're finished. 

He sits back down.

She pulls down the sefer Torah wrapped in a talis on top of the shelf behind him. She unwraps it and pulls it open. Using a piece of broken glass as a knife she cuts a long piece; Long as an adult scarf.

Holding Parshas Vayerah she climbs up on his chair, wraps the Torah portion around Zaidy’s neck and squeezes it tightly. As tightly as she can.
Forgive me Hashem; please understand me. 

 I have to let her do this.

Zaidy’s face turns blue, scared eyes popping out on top of the words, “Sedom.” He stares pop-eyed at the words hanging down in front of his face. He stops breathing to Parshas Vayerah. 

 Strangled by the Torah and the child who he violated together in his office.

She looks at me.

“Are you done?”

Almost.

She goes over to his shtender and pushes it over. It falls onto his face knocking out his front teeth.
We survey the damage in silence.

The blood. The broken glass. The torn sefarim.  The wounded Torah. The dead rosh yeshiva.

We are satisfied. 

I take her hand and we leave together.

We both needed to do this.

My Favorite Parsha

 This past week's parsha, (parshat Vayigash) is my favorite.  One of the things I must do in order to heal my relationship with Torah, is to claim it as my own.  I have to find myself in the Torah, and find the Torah inside myself.    
I find myself in the story of Yosef and his brothers.  Like Yosef I have eleven siblings.  None of them have spoken to me in well over a decade.  I was not invited to their weddings. 

The ending of Parshat Vayigash gives me hope.  God must have caused this pain for a good reason.  I have heard from many survivors that my writing gives them hope.  Hope is the food of survival.  

Like Yosef,
I have eleven brothers.
They never wanted to hear what I had to say.
They called me a liar.
A dreamer.
They believed I was a threat to our family.
A threat to their destiny.
When I was young, "they threw me into a pit full of
snakes and scorpions."
Then they sold me down to Egypt."
They lied about what happened to me.
For many years, I suffered.
Then
 with the help of God
through miracles
I thrived.

I am still  in exile.
It's been many years since I was sold.
It's been many years since I saw my brothers.
There is a famine in the world.
People are coming to me for food.

I am preparing  food for my brothers as well.
They may need to eat at some point
and I, with the help of God, 
have food.

Mother

Do we ever fully recover from a mother's ongoing denial and rejection?  Do we ever get to a place where we can just let it go?

“Without you near me I'm like air.  I am nothing without you.”

My six year old said these words to me tonight, trying to convince me to lie next to her until she falls asleep.

Her words startled me.

Not just because of their profundity, coming from the mouth of a six year old, but because she knows and can express just how dependent she is on me. 

How dependent we all once were on our mothers, as young children, for our very existence.

We are made of mother.

physically and emotionally, she is our creator, our life force, and our life source.  We simply could not have been born, and could not exist today without her.

I haven't seen my mother in over sixteen years. My mother was in Israel recently for a wedding.  Over the past ten or so years I invited her to see me, and to meet her grandchildren three times, and each time she declined.  She said; 'We cause each other too much pain.'  Once her response was; 'I will wait and see you when Mashiach comes.

My aunt, my mother's sister, came to see us last week, and I asked her to invite my mother to come along. 

She didn't pass on the message, and my mother didn't contact me.

 As humans we regularly try to avoid that which is too painful to contemplate.  I suppose for my mother I am just that. 

Too painful to contemplate.

As an adult, I accept her decision, painful as it is.  I knew where she was staying, and I could have gone to see her myself, but I wasn't invited, and I didn't want to invite rejection face to face.

As an adult, I know my limitations.

I am also torn about my mother meeting my children.  How can they possibly feel about a grandmother who seems not to love them, or care one iota about their existence?  Why offer them a face to go with the rejection?

I know and trust that if I am supposed to see my mother again in this lifetime, I will. I know It can't be forced.

I pray that if and when that happens, it will be healing for both of us.

But...

To the child inside me, my mother's rejections hurt and shock deeply.

A part of me doubts I can, or ever did exist without her validation and love. As a child, she couldn't and didn't protect me.  She couldn't see that I was hurt, or know that I was being molested by her father, -my grandfather, and by my father, -her husband;  the two people she trusted and depended on the most.

 My inner child just doesn't get it.  Why didn't she see me?  Why didn't she protect me? Did I ever really exist?  She is my mother, for God sake, why doesn't she want to see me?  

I am a mother, and I just can not relate.  If my child was serving time in prison for murder, I don't think it would stop me from wanting to see him. My child is my child no matter what.  

  And I am not a murderer.

 As adults, we transfer our feelings of dependency to God.  ...We are like air without You.  We are nothing without You...   As adults, we know and realize that although we need God to exist, we can, and do exist without mother. 

As children we do not. 

Do you think you Can You Hold Me?

Do you think you can hold me?

Can you hold a child inside an adult body?
A little girl too scared to cry
A little girl too ashamed to let you come close?

Can you hold me?
Can you hold us?

Can you hold a small child who
does not know how to hold herself
because no one ever held her?

Can you hold a devastated, enraged, little girl who fights
you with every breath, with every beat of her
broken heart?

 Can you hold a child whose mind is on the verge of shattered?
A child so alone
she thinks she already died?
a child frozen in trauma she can't begin to comprehend

Can you hold a child who was raped?
A terrified, angry, writhing, banging, smashing, five-year-old
fighting to release herself from a body
that betrayed her
a body that is in too much pain to stay inside of
A body that only knows how to be hurt.

Can you really hold her
 inside this adult body? 

Can you really hold me?
Can you hold me, as I fight you
as I fight
all of the adults
from my past
who could not hold me
who could not see my pain.
who could not stay long enough for me to begin to trust them.

Do you really think you can hold me ?