Question

How do people in positions of power and authority learn and cultivate empathy?

What does one do after they perpetrate violence or trauma? Understanding the motivations, reactions, and comprehension of perpetrators is an essential element in mapping how people live after surviving trauma. Treating only the survivors in the aftermath of trauma does not address the source of the trauma. To do that, we must also look at perpetrators. We must understand how a person is lead to commit violence and develop ways of treating perpetrators holistically, moving beyond methods of punishment and into methods of rehabilitation which address the root cause for violence within the perpetrator.

No one wakes up with a spontaneous desire to do harm, or aims to be a bad person. This is the flip side, the preventative care side, to healing from trauma. Cultivating empathy even when we are in power. Learning how people do this. Learning to recognize when we are in power. Learning how to deal with the whirlwind of emotions that arise in our relationships with things like failure, rejection, disconnection, entitlement, isolation, and hatred.

Work

Many clients grappled with the desire to understand how someone could have this to me? Sometimes family members, clergy, teachers, police, people they trusted or even expected protection from were the ones who tortured them. Part of the trauma manifested as a fear - if that person could do that to me, what if there are others who could hurt me? If the people I trusted hurt me, how can I tell who I can truly trust in the future? Why am I hated? This kind of thinking can lead into even more dangerous territory: What did I do to deserve this? Why didn't I do (insert the blank) or not do not (X), if I had been better/smarter this would not have happened to me. The last thought in a series like this is often I need to stay vigilant so that this doesn't happen again.

Sometimes the response to these questions is a healthy indignant, an outrage, and also a world crumbling disbelief and disillusionment.

We as practitioners also need to genuinely understand - how could someone be capable of this violence? By only treating victims on case-by-case basis we do nothing to interrupt the cycles of violence. We must understand each source of violence in order to interrupt it at the actor as well as the survivor.

Work Map onto working with sex offenders who did not understand they had done harm

Question

Communal vs individual responsibility as well as trauma. If there can be a communal trauma, can there also be communal or collective responsibility?

(see Amnon's rape is orchestrated and encouraged by his cousin)

Order: Amnon raping Tamar/David murdering Uriel, Joseph and his brothers, zoom back to Cain, then reflect/map onto my own experiences, and the #MeToo movement (30-minutes teaching, 10-15 minutes questions, 10-15 minutes group discussion of how does this relate to my life?)

Is Jacob approaching so carefully as a way to apologize to his brother, to recognize the harm he caused Esau? Or out of fear for how Esau wanted to kill him? Maybe both. Here we see a model: it is scary to confront the harm you have done, and it is possible to face it humbly still. To hold one's own feelings and recognize the harm you caused the other is what opens the door for potential repair of relationship or healing for the person you harmed. Both weep! Both the perp and survivor in this case weep.

Really interesting that Joseph sees the reunion of Jacob and Esau as a child - how does this impact his own experience of brotherly reunion in the future?

foreshadowing the hardening of pharaoh's heart?

Joseph is disassociating? What's going on for him internally?

same word for crying used in the reunion of Jacob and Esau, which Joseph witnessed as a child, is used in his reunion with his brothers.

He needed to see the sorrow/regret/tshuva of his brothers just as Esau saw and took pity on Jacob's apology?

removed source: Bereshit 45:2 Joseph's initial weeping reunion with his brothers and that the Pharaoh could hear - process of healing impacting the backdrop of current life is a concern? could use that in the name change piece?

Joseph needed to see tshuva from his brothers so put them through the test with their younger brother Benjamin. Seeing how his brothers tried to protect Benjamin and their father Jacob from the pain of losing Benjamin, Joseph sees his brothers' repentance from his own trauma. His brothers have changed and he can forgive them, as he saw his Uncle Esau forgive his father Jacob.

Also his brothers couldn't interact with Joseph as their brother without this process - once Joseph tells them the story of what happened to him and also says what he wants to do from here (see his father, provide food for their family). In seeing Joseph while protecting Benjamin, his brothers are forced to contend with and fully understand their past violence to Joseph. Their failure to protect Joseph and their father is a painful contrast to their changed behavior with Benjamin. Also, they think they are going to die in the famine and are put into a test about their brother Benjamin, then realize the brother they betrayed is the one who will decide their fate. This must be frightening. Do they think they are going to die? Are they afraid?

There is something transformative in this type of weeping (same hebrew root used): Jacob and Esau reunite, Joseph and brothers reunite, Joseph and Benjamin meet, Joseph when Jacob dies. does this overlap with the trauma healing process that is grief, death of the old/birth of the new

different levels of tshuva for different brothers involved in the same crime? do we see any attempt from Simon and Levi to do tshuva? perhaps showing different routes post-crime: do tshuva and heal or don't and be cut out?

Do I want to explore/bring in Rambam's Mishneh Torah: is there such thing as beyond redemption? Unforgivable?

Talk about Pharaoh's heart being hardened by God - so how can he be responsible? Or is this metaphorical for how perpetration is possible?

Amnon's cousin encourages and helps devise a plan for the rape to happen. Why? What is his role in this rape?

Is his disgust a commentary on our lack of knowledge - what do we do when we have perpetrated violence? How do we deal with the aftermath of our own harm?

David, like his son Amnon in the future will, uses his position of power to rape a women he desires. He goes through steps to try to cover up the pregnancy but ultimately kills Uriel, Batsheva's husband.

What's the significance of David waiting for the mourning period to be over before taking Batsheva into his own house?

Why is it God who is displeased with David, and not David who feels any remorse during the murder or Uriel or the lamentations of his widow?

Why is David distressed when he hears this happened? He himself raped Batsheva and murdered her husband - does this remind him of his past actions, of God saying the sword will not lift from his generations

Mirroring: neither David nor Amnon are able to reflect on their own violent behavior. Both have a power figure (God to David, then David to Amnon) who reflects their actions back to them. Larger context on our responsibility to interrupt violence/abuse. Someone from outside the situation must interrupt it. Also larger responsibility is on us to learn from our own crimes/mistakes so that we can see them in others/the future.

is this why/reflective of the theme of younger sons overthrowing older sons? because older sons will beget injustice?

Cain was in the presence of the Lord! Even after committing murder

Sometimes after doing something you need to give space to those in the surviving area, and need a new place to transform yourself?

What does it mean that Enoch walked with God? He is a descendant of Cain

Again, NOAH IS FROM THE LINE OF CAIN AND UNDOES THE CURSE FINALLY very long view intergenerational healing

Is Noah living in the city Cain established after the murder?

How can someone from Cain's family be righteous among his generation?

Is Noah's righteousness relative to those he lives among (ie the rest of Cain's descendants are more severely living out the negative cycle of violence from their family history?)

Complicated: is Noah going to deal with living while he knows the world around him is dying, all the people he knows/sees/interacts with regularly will die. Noah's healing of Cain's history: healing is good and also carries responsibility within it. Not clear cut heal and move on. Heal for the possibility of a future.

God's regret for creating humanity is tied directly to Noah, Cain's descendant. What does it mean that humanity will survive through Noah?

How might the covenant offered to Noah mirror God's conversation with Cain after the murder?

Map onto my own experiences:

Growing up learning and living in racism in Westchester

Dad's role as bankruptcy lawyer in 2008 financial crash

Am I responsible for the family/ancestor's actions? Not yes but also not no. I benefit from them, I learn from them without realizing it and need to unlearn. Have responsibility to past and future generations to move the healing tick for myself and for those my family may have harmed.

Same for Israel and Jews - this question of who are we now that we are in power? How do we behave now that we have power?

Cain

- kills his brother (rejection proceeds murder)

- gets one on one conversation with God even after murdering his brother

- is told for seven generations his family will be cursed

- this is not punitive

- this is a guide for the future, way forward, acknowledging a complex reality

- mark/curse of Cain gives him and his future family a chance to due tshuva

- Cain cannot get out of dealing with his actions through death, nor through being so afraid of death that he does not focus on his own actions

- God is also going through regret of creating humanity and having to live with that - is God uncomfortable with how humanity is reflecting back God's own weaknesses, traumas, etc. ?

- reality of collective and individual responsibility!

Joseph

Is with Jacob when Jacob and Esau reunite/reconcile

Sees a model - Jacob as the perp, trying to face what he has done and the person he harmed (feels fear! feels like the victim even though he is not)

Also there is a limitation to their reconciliation - J/E?

Does Joseph take this model into his own reconciliation with his brothers in Egypt?

Shame and Masculinity

What if we accept that we come from trauma (certainly collectively at least as Jews) but also likely specific to our own family and what we are taught of how to be masculine/men

And that we have the potential to heal and the potential to do harm

That we need to learn when we are in a role of power

As men, we learn certain behaviors. In the MeToo movement, I wonder if instead of reacting with shock, fear, surprise, denial of the harm we do, we can acknowledge that we all learned this system. It is impossible that we didn't. It's impossible that we have never caused any harm to anyone as a result of what we were taught. Take away the shame. Acknowledge that we must have harmed others before and almost certainly will harm again. Acknowledge spectrum of harm. (Like Cain) Be open to seeing this not as a curse but as an opportunity for healing ourselves and doing tshuva. (obviously some perpetrations are way more aggregious than others)

I want to believe that trauma is not the only way to learn empathy. It was one way. Two routes post-trauma: harden or soften. Stoic exceptionalism of my survival or empathetic ability to see and care for others in their struggles.

I want to believe that no one is too far gone, either as a survivor or a perpetrator, to recover. Recovery meaning to connect with other human beings, to live embodied lives, to do tshuva, whether collective or individual.

Taking out a block of someone's mental janga: what support am I offering to put in the place of what I am trying to take out?

Healing - both in relationship and in individual process