A Place for Private Light and Public Light

What do people think about wearing a kippa in public?

About lighting a Hanukkah menorah in the public square?

What do we feel about sharing our feelings for our loved ones publicly?

About doing acts of kindness, or advocating for justice, in public ways?

I suspect some of us think it’s a great idea to be public about all manner of observance and behavior, Jewish or general, and others think, not so much.  Or perhaps for most of us it depends on the issue at hand.

I want to reflect on the private/public dilemma of how we live our lives generally and how we navigate being Jewish.  What do we keep private?  What do we share publicly?

Joseph, Judah and Jerusalem: Confronting Intergenerational Baggage

When it comes to confronting deep-seated, challenging, multi-generational baggage, it helps to take small, thoughtful steps. How might this look in families and what it might mean for the recent announcement about Jerusalem?

Parents and children from "Hand in Hand" Center of Jewish-Arab Education in Israel

First, families.  I highly recommend a TV show about genealogy called Finding Your Roots.  The host, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., interviews several well-known people and presents them with research about their ancestors, often going back more than 10 generations.  The research includes ship records, census records and DNA.

The show is often fascinating.  It raises issues of race, ethnicity and socio-economics.  It raises questions about inherited traits, including personality.  Often the research reveals family secrets that were hidden for generations.  

The most recent episode featured the actor Gaby Hoffman, who starred in the Amazon TV series Transparent.

Gaby Hoffman was raised by her mother in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.  Her father left when she was a young child.

Hoffman saw her father occasionally as a preteen and teenager. She generally found him distant, formal and a bit angry.

The episode focused on her father’s side of the family going way back generations.

Hoffman wondered - why the anger?  Why the distance?  

His father, it turns out - her grandfather - was angry and even abusive.  Hoffman said that she and her sister always wondered if there was some reason why these two generations of men were so angry and what situations might have occurred in previous generations.

As the research was revealed to her by the host, she discovered that one of her great-grandfathers was raised by a different man than his biological father.  

Hoffman’s comment when she discovered this was telling.  She said, I'm paraphrasing, all this stuff somehow lasts a lot of generations.  The animosity, the anger, the secrecy - it has a conscious and subconscious effect that lasts. 

Painful emotional realities often last from one generation to the next. Mistrustful, hostile relationships get replayed over and over with different actors from one generation to another.  They don’t magically disappear.  

Unless - says the rabbi channeling his inner Lorax - unless courageous, pragmatic, thoughtful steps are taken.