Standing on earth

I have been thinking for some time about coming clean and writing what I am really thinking about on this blog.  It’s a hard thing to do because I think that some people, including people I love very much, think I am crazy.  On the other hand, I also think that my experience might help some people. 

When Lucas died two years ago in a car accident I went into a profound spiritual crisis.  After six months, my best friend told me that I had to do something.  Not wanting to go speak to a therapist, I chose to go to a cranial-sacral healer.

During the healing, I understood many things.  I understood that the car accident that killed Lucas also shocked me out of balance on earth.  The healer worked on grounding me and I understood that I had somehow, since the accident, been not grounded.

I understood that some part of me was jealous that Lucas got to leave the earth.  I understood that I knew Lucas and Sasha from a previous life, a life I had seen before.  I understood that Lucas was a very high soul, who had been a monk in that life. 

I understood what I have known for many years, that I was ambivalent (that’s too soft a word) about being alive.  Many years ago I came to understand my traumatic birth (I had the cord around me), as not wanting to be born.  I connected this with the fact that I died in the Holocaust in my last life.  I have seen these things since 1988.

After this healing, I became motivated to want to be here.  I understood that Lucas had left the earth and that I was still here.  I wanted to work on wanting to be here.

I went to another healer I see who understands these things.  We spent some sessions on this issue of “wanting to be here”.  While I was working on this, on January 9, 2012, I said, “I have to stop taking responsibility for other souls.”  I have to claim my journey.  Other people, even my own children, have their own journeys.  That was on Monday.

I was sick at the time.  I went home and came down with pneumonia.  On Thursday night I was lying in bed and I had a feeling.  I was about to go on a trip to California.  I had a feeling that an important message about my trip was about to arrive by email.  I kept getting up to check.  Around 10:30 pm a message came from the mother of a friend of mine.  I had been meant to see him, for the first time after 30 years, during my upcoming trip.  The message was that he had killed himself.  On January 9.

In the following days, I was sick in bed and thought only of him.  I began to see him in our last life, in the Holocaust.  He was my cousin.  I began to understand his story – how hard that life was for him and how that was behind much of what happened to him in this life.  How he was also someone like me who lived somehow not fully here.  How he had to leave.

What I see now, in these days when his image and life are coming back to me again, is how in this life we re-create scenes from past lives to re-do them.  Do-over. 

When Lucas died in March 2011, I was teaching Hallel in an online course.  In Psalm 115 it says, “Lo hametim yehallelu Y-h – The dead will not praise G-d”.    We had studied and discussed that phrase in class just before Lucas died.    A student of mine pointed us to a paper, which analyzed Yakov Gladstein’s 1946 poem, Dead Men’s Praise.  Since Lucas died, I have held that poem, taught that poem, and the words of Hallel together. 

In the poem, Gladstein describes the deaths at Maidenek as a reverse Sinai image – “we received the Torah at Sinai and at Lublin we gave it back.”  The central image in the poem is a Jewish child. 

This year another layer that has been added for me has to do with how we stand on the earth.  What does it mean to be “strangers and sojourners with G-d” on a land that belongs to G-d.  David said, “I am a stranger here on earth like my fathers before me, our lives are like a shadow and there is no hope.”   No hope, that is, of holding on to the things that we hold precious.  The word “shmor” – guard or take care of – keeps coming back in our songs and ceremonies.  I know that this is not promised in any literal way.  I believe that G-d is keeping Lucas’s soul – and my soul, and Sasha’s soul, and Gabi’s soul, and Alen’s soul.  But life on this earth is not guaranteed to us and nor is being able to protect our children.

Today, standing at Sasha’s kabbalat sefer Torah ceremony all this was with me – Sasha, Lucas, my friend Alan.  What it means to receive it all and to be standing here, on earth, in this moment, with my feet on the ground.