Being Here, Being There

Recently, I learned that one of the symptoms of complex PTSD is a feeling of time wibbly-wobbliness. Well, of course that’s not what my psychiatrist said to me, but that’s my outside translation of our conversation. Complex trauma, often defined as repeated exposure to traumatic events, can make it difficult to be present. Many with the disorder describe a feeling of extreme vigilance that creates a split in our bodyminds–I am physically here, in my apartment as a thirty-three year old, and at the same time, I am four, and eight, and twelve. I am here and there.

As I get deeper into my preparation for pesach (which, no pressure, is 9 days from now), something new standing out to me about the Haggadah is its insistence on non-linear time. We begin the maggid, the storytelling portion of the seder, not only with an invitation to eat, but by throwing ourselves back in time.

הָא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא דִּי אֲכָלוּ אַבְהָתָנָא בְאַרְעָא דְמִצְרָיִם. כָּל דִכְפִין יֵיתֵי וְיֵיכֹל, כָּל דִצְרִיךְ יֵיתֵי וְיִפְסַח. הָשַּׁתָּא הָכָא, לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה בְּאַרְעָא דְיִשְׂרָאֵל. הָשַּׁתָּא עַבְדֵי, לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה בְּנֵי חוֹרִין.

leader: this is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in bondage. let all who are hungry come and eat. let all who are in need, come and share the passover meal. 

all: this year, we are here. next year, anywhere without walls and borders. this year, we are enslaved. next year, may our wrestling with the divine free us all.

(translation from להחזיר אותי: a liberation primer by Ari Monts)

We are here and we are enslaved. Each year, we are here but we are there. The invitation brings us into the rabbinic imaginary where the first night of pesach is both the night of our liberation, and also, not yet. Each year therefore becomes the promised “לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה” when will be free, while also being הָשַּׁתָּא” עַבְדֵי” where we are not free. 

Are we stuck? Am I stuck? Does experiencing complex trauma relegate us to a life of non-presence, of dissociating, of being here and there? Or is something else going on? Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has something to offer. He writes, “the rabbis seem to play with time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will . . . that acute biblical sense of time and place often gives way to rampant and seemingly unselfconscious anachronism.” The collapsing of now and then, here and there is one of the unique literary characteristics of rabbinic literature. For the Rabbis, touching the past is a key move to be able to navigate the present moment.

I hesitate to return to the past. It feels almost antithetical to the work of healing to keep placing yourself in that moment. Why be slaves each year if we are also finally free? Why the focus here instead of the moment of liberation, yetziat Mitzrayim, which is what the Torah commands of us?

לֹא־תֹאכַל עָלָיו חָמֵץ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תֹּאכַל־עָלָיו מַצּוֹת לֶחֶם עֹנִי כִּי בְחִפָּזוֹן יָצָאתָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לְמַעַן תִּזְכֹּר אֶת־יוֹם צֵאתְךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ׃

You will not each chametz for seven days, you will each matzah, lechem oni–bread of affliction–because in haste you left eretz Mitzrayim–the land of narrownesses–for the sake of remember the day y’all left eretz Mitzrayim all the days of your life. (Devarim 16:3)

The rabbinic move from תִּזְכֹּר, you will remember, to הָשַּׁתָּא עַבְדֵי is for me, a reminder that the body’s knowing musn’t be forgotten. If as Julia Watts Belser (one of SVARA’s 2024 Shaping Tradition honorees) argues, the destruction of the temple is the primal wound of the Jewish people, I think our enslavement in Mitzrayim is our collective complex trauma. And in their wisdom, chazal understood that those moments that created complex trauma must be returned to. We must go back to that moment, to work through them.

And since we have no time-traveling device (yet) we turn to ritual, to moments of suspended disbelief with one another. If we were all at Sinai together, then tonight, we will all be enslaved together. And the way that enslavement shows up in my body isn’t the same way it shows up in your body, but it does show up. And rather than resist, the Rabbis ask us to open ourselves up to the scary past.

It is a difficult job to hold the past inside of us. Remembering can feel less embodied, less in your face, but as Belser also says, “the rabbis grapple with theology in and through the flesh.” We are tasked not to take part in a theology of the mind, but a theology of the body, the flesh. We eat the bread of affliction to bring our bodies back to the moment of woundedness, the moments before freedom, and way before healing. 

And, the work is necessary. To be whole, we cannot leave parts of ourselves behind. We cannot abandon the frightened child we were, or the experience of enslavement and truly believe that we can heal. As pesach rapidly approaches and we each piece together how we might have a meaningful seder, may this be the year we commit to an experience of our painful past. Because, like the children’s nursery rhyme reminds us, some obstacles cannot be gone over, or under. We must go through them.