Trauma and Holiness

Two themes have been on my mind this week - trauma and holiness - and I’ve been wondering whether they are linked. On the surface they seem quite distinct. But what we discover in life, perhaps, is that everything is connected to everything else: that’s one of the meanings of the Biblical and liturgical phrase Adonai Echad – “God is One” – that there is a fundamental unity to existence in which everything is linked in myriad ways to everything else; that there is a unity even if we only experience fragmentation.

Trauma – we know what that is, or think we know. How best to define it?  Severe emotional distress to psychologically shocking events? The kind of distress inside that lingers, over time - sometimes months, years, decades after the precipitating event or events. The kind of distress that causes a  sense of fracture in our worlds, affecting how we think, how we sleep, how we form relationships, whether we can find enjoyment in life. I know that the word is used colloquially and loosely these days - anything can be described as a trauma (getting a bad haircut, missing a bus, being ignored by a waiter, somebody not texting you back) but these irritations - slights to our innate wish for the world to go the way we want it to - aren’t what I’m talking about.

The kind of thing I’m reflecting on – and this is what prompted me to start thinking about it this week - is the experience of a seven year old German boy called Frank, who in April 1939 was sent by his parents Max, a lawyer, and Charlotte, an artist, on a train from Hamburg to England. Where he’s lived ever since, living and working in one room, in Camden, painting and drawing, obsessionally, every day of the year, year in year out, decade after decade, painting what he sees out the window, or in the streets around him, or painting a few people who sit for him, often for years, the same people, and he sits and paints, then scrapes off the paint, and paints again, more layers, building a portrait of an external scene, or of a living person whose life is what the artist seeks to capture, to present, to re-present, to make come alive.

Frank Auerbach never saw his parents again – another victory for Auschwitz – and as he turns 92, one can only wonder about the relationship between the UK’s greatest living artist’s way of living and working – solitary, monastic almost, devoted to making things live on an easel, on a canvas, to hold them, capture that aliveness – one can only wonder about how that unswerving endeavour is connected to what we can accurately describe as the trauma of his early life. Everything is connected to everything else.

I started thinking about Auerbach this week because I read a recent interview with him in which he said “…it’s possibly true that our deepest experiences are other people. And it seems the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences.”

“Our deepest experiences are other people” – is that the same as ‘Our deepest experiences are with other people’? I’m not sure. But the notion that “the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences” touched me in different ways. It touched me personally because when I write, or speak, I do think of it as a form of artistic endeavour – and I hope that doesn’t sound too grandiose, but I’m sharing my experience right now, how I think and feel about what I do, what I am doing right now. So it touched me personally,

But what he said also touched me because of what it made me think about his deepest experiences - of loss, of disjuncture, of rupture, of disorientation, of bereavement, of not being able to hold on to the living presence of others, his parents. And it left me wondering, as you can hear, about those deep experiences of his - that trauma, for want of a better word (though it suddenly sounds like an impoverished word to describe losing a world) and how it is related to his way of making art.

And it was interesting that he went on to say, “People say they are expressing themselves – but I’m not expressing myself at all. I’m trying to make an image”. That’s the conscious wish of course: to make an image, to capture something and keep it alive, for itself, and for the one who looks at it. But of course something else is going on, is always going on, because  he went on in the interview to add the comment that years later he might look at a work “and see how I felt at the time, but wasn’t aware of then”. So the unconscious is always in play. You think you are making an image - but you find later  that in doing so you are revealing a feeling. But you don’t notice that at the time.

So here I am, adding layer on layer to this portrait - in homage to Auerbach, as it were - adding, reflecting, scraping away, all in the name of speaking about trauma – which is all around us, all the time. I’ve just read that the oceans have had a sudden unprecedented rise in temperature in recent months, and scientists are baffled and extremely concerned (I want to say traumatised), about what the consequences will be for sea levels and the marine ecosystems and flooding, and everything is connected to everything, so this will affect us all, is affecting us all, the low level trauma we have to mange somehow in our daily lives, though it isn’t manageable and just seeps into the crevices of our souls.

So much for my first theme: trauma.

So what about holiness? The sedrah this week was Kedoshim. “You shall be holy…” (Leviticus 19)– it feels almost absurd to speak about that in the same breath as trauma. Are they linked? Can we link them? We know the themes of holiness – they are well rehearsed. The injunction at the heart of the Torah for the Israelites to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people”. This is the vision we have carried for millennia. In the midst of the Levitical chapters filled with all the details about ritual holiness, texts focused on the priests and the sacrificial cult, comes this startling code of moral and ethical conduct, a quite different definition and detailing of what holiness means.

For the Torah, of course, everything is connected to everything – so ritual purification (holiness) is integrated with, connected seamlessly to, the actions of every individual in everyday life (personal holiness): respect your parents; leave part of your harvest for the poor and the stranger (an early example of food banks); do not steal or embezzle or lie; don’t oppress each other (that one’s for Dominic Raab, amongst a million others); don’t delay payment to your employees and ensure they have reasonable hours; don’t curse the deaf or trip the blind; don’t pervert justice; don’t go around gossiping or bearing tales; don’t nurse a grievance, take revenge, or hold a grudge; respect your elders; protect the stranger; don’t cheat in business; and, a culminating way of being holy, almost a one line sound-bite to this guide to holiness: “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19:18) - that radical call to identify with the Other as if he or she is as valuable a human being as you are. And as deserving of care as you are.

And when we list these requirements, these imperatives, for holy living – the stuff of everyday life, valid for all people and for all societies, a timeless code that is millennia old, at the heart of our Jewish vision - maybe we can glimpse its relationship to trauma. Although some traumatic events are beyond human control, earthquakes for examples, many forms of trauma in the past and in the present are linked to failures to live attuned to this holiness code.

Whether it is the traumas of war, of rape, of slavery, of all the forms of abuse that people can inflict on each other, the psychological scars that are carried are a direct result of humanity’s inability to live in the light of holiness, to be guided personally, socially,  nationally, by holiness. When holiness fails, trauma comes into being. When holiness goes into eclipse, trauma creeps into view.  When holiness is abused or mocked, trauma seeps into the soul.

Kedoshim tihiyu says the Torah: ‘You will be holy’, ‘you must be holy’; but also we can hear in Kedoshim tihiyu : “you are made to be holy” – this is your purpose in life. Without that, expect only trauma, in all its endless varieties. If you spend seventy years in a room painting, drawing, sketching, you can make great art out of trauma. That is a kind of holy living, the holiness of the Zaddik, the saint, the mystic – but for the rest of us, we struggle towards holiness lest trauma overwhelms us.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 29th April 2023]