Journaling while in denial: a story

One of the saving graces as a Jewish education professional has been to recognize the role of addressing our own mental health needs so we can properly focus on providing the healthiest environment for our own students. As a mental health professional, in order to practice in the field, I am required to receive my own mental health supervision. As an educator, I find this type of support equally valuable, especially when our curriculum involves educating about an active war that affects our very core. As soon as the war started, I recognized that to be able to properly be there for my students, I had to take care of myself.

Therapist: “Have you tried journaling?”

Me: “no, I am terrible at it”
Therapist: “Why?”
Me: “Because why would I want to put into words the discomfort and go back and re-read it and sear it into my memory? What kind of masochist does that?”

Joke’s on me, journaling is now what I do for a living.

For the last 11 months, many of us have coped with the darkness of this war and the weight of interpersonal collateral damage through social media, blog posts, academic articles. We have heard over and over again how the best and most effective way to fight hate and anti-semitism is through education. 

A big part of Jewish education is about retelling history and applying its lessons to our lives. From Torah to historical challenges, we base our numerous curricula around this idea that our history has forever shaped our identity; that we are who we are because of what we have overcome as people and what we have learned from it. We have sat through, witnessed, held the recollections of dwindling numbers of Holocaust survivors, painfully aware that their first-hand accounts will go with them and that the responsibility of carrying their stories lies on our shoulders.

For the last 11 months, we have witnessed a borderline cataclysmic moment in history unfold all around us. We have documented every drop of grief, every sliver of hope, every changing narrative in an attempt to maintain the history of the moment alive. However, as I sit here writing yet another lesson on Israel for my students, I realize (without ignoring the irony of the moment) that what we have been doing is not documenting history, but journaling the play by play of the current moment. 

To really document the current moment, we must move past this idea that we are writing history. History is what those years from now will write based on our own recollection of the current moment. What we are writing right now is not history; what we are doing right now is, to my admitted dismay (though equally relevant increased sense of responsibility) , is journaling. We are writing, as if watching a sports game unfold, a play by play recollection of a fast moving story that tugs at our heartstrings and leaves us very little room for emotional processing.

Our recollections of the current moment will be all that will be left for future generations to carry the memory of the moment. All of those social media posts and blogs will become part of recorded history. Future generations will go back to our recollections of the world today as we go back in history as said on Deuteronomy 32:7: “Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.”

And because no article (or journal entry?) about memory is complete without Rabbi Sacks’ Z.L. wisdom, I leave you (and myself) with this reminder: “Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.”