A Minyan of Women

Family Dynamics, Jewish Identity and Psychotherapy Practice

Beverly Greene, Dorith Brodbar, Beverly A. Greene, Dorith Brodbar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317985495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This book explores the diverse manner in which family dynamics shaped Jewish identities in ways that were unique and directly connected to their experiences within their families of origin. Highlighted is the diversity of experience of ethnic identity within members of a group of women who are similar in many respects and who belong to an ethnic group that is often invisible. Jewish people, like members of other ethnic groups are often treated as if their identities were homogeneous. However, gender, social class, sexual orientation, factors surrounding immigration status, proximity of family members to the holocaust or pogroms, the number of generations one's family has been in the US and other salient aspects of experience and identites transform and inform the meaning and experience by group members.

The book explores these diversities of experience and goes on to highlight the way in which the intermingling of family dynamics and subsequent Jewish identity in these women is manifested in the practice of psychotherapy.

In 2012, the book had been awarded the Jewish Women Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology Award for Scholarship, for that year.

This book was published as a special issue of Women and Therapy.

 

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Introduction

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A Minyan of Women: Family Dynamics, Jewish Identity and Psychotherapy Practice

 

First of all I'm Jewish,
The Rest is Commentary

-Adrienne Smith, 1991¹

In conservative and orthodox Judaism the quorum needed to recite important prayers is called a Minyan and traditionally consists of 10 men. This issue represents a collection of narratives, essays, and articles aimed at explicating the connections between family dynamics, the development and consolidation of an identity as a Jew, and the effects of Jewish identity on psychotherapy practice in a group of Jewish women who are psychotherapists. The narratives are followed by a series of commentaries by a diverse “minyan” of women who are also psychotherapists. While a traditional minyan is restricted in composition to 10 men, we have expanded that concept to include the multiple voices of the contributors to this volume and to those who discuss their work. Their numbers have illuminated a wider spectrum of ways of experiencing oneself as a Jew than non-Jews and perhaps many Jews might presume exist.

The contributors are psychotherapists with varying years of professional experience, from a range of backgrounds, socioeconomic class origins, sexual orientations, ages, and theoretical orientations. They range from those who come from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds to one author who grew up thinking her family was White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant only to find at the age of 30 that her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were Jewish. Each discusses, with the power that narratives beautifully capture, their own personal journey to the present understanding of who they are as Jewish women and what kinds of experiences were most salient in shaping those understandings. They explore their relationships with family members and how those relationships affected their sense of what it meant to be Jewish, whether or not their families accurately fit those definitions (by both the family definition as well as by how other Jews defined them), how they felt about the varying degree to which they “belonged” as Jews or did not, and their own conflicts about their Jewish identities.

While most of the contributors are or have been in independent practice, almost all have experience conducting psychotherapy in a range of settings and geographic locations, with a diverse range of clients. The editors maintain that our personal identities, regardless of our formal training or theoretical orientations, contribute greatly to who we are and how we use ourselves as therapeutic instruments in the consulting room as therapists. We also maintain that those personal identities of the people who trained us and supervised our clinical work—not merely the didactic instruction we receive—also affects the development of our professional therapeutic “style” in both our attraction and aversion to a range of ways of approaching and understanding the nature of the work we do as therapists. We believe that those variables we have mentioned helped to shape the personal identities of the contributors and that their personal identities in turn shape their desire to become psychotherapists. Those variables also shape the kinds of therapists they become and the theoretical orientations they are drawn to or value in their professional work and their relationships with their clients.

All of the narrative contributors are Jewish and live in a predominately Christian society. Being Jewish can mean that one has a particular cultural identity that differs from the dominant cultural narrative as well as from the narratives of members of other socially marginalized or persecuted groups. However, the narratives of our contributors highlight the reality that the experience of being Jewish is as diverse as the women who tell their stories. We are provided with powerful examples of the range of differences in the experience of a cultural identity, even in people who belong to the same cultural or religious group. Some group members may feel as different from one another as they do from members of the dominant culture. While they share a great deal and there is clear overlap in many of their experiences, their narratives are powerfully distinctive and speak to the uniqueness of human experience.

A distinguished and diverse group of authors provide us with their commentary on these essays. Each contributor attempts to explicate what the narrative elicited in them about their own struggles around identity and their practice, what it tells us (through the non-Jewish lens of many of them) about what it means to be Jewish, what it tells us about identity and its complexity more broadly, and what it contributes to our understanding of people as psychotherapists. The eclectic group of commentators was designed to provide us with a range of prisms through which to view these complex narratives and to discuss their meaning from those diverse perspectives. We are pleased to present them all to you in the hopes that they will help us better understand the complexity and intersectional nature of identity, the need to grasp any individual's subjective sense of identification/disidentification with a salient social group or groups they belong to and their relative importance, and how to identify some of the variables that are a part of the development of identities or lack thereof.

We would like to thank some of the individuals and institutions that made this volume possible. Beverly Greene would like to thank St. John's University for its generous granting of research reductions and research assistants, specifically Juliana Blitzer and Lisa Martin, without whom this undertaking would have been extremely difficult. Both editors would like to thank Dr. Sara Zarem for timely editorial assistance in the review of manuscripts submitted for the volume and Dr. Ellyn Kaschak for her invaluable assistance as midwife to the “birth” of this issue. We've had many important conversations with colleagues and friends that were relevant to shaping the ideas that contributed to the finished product. They are too numerous to mention, and we thank them all for their efforts.

Beverly Greene, PhD, ABPP
Dorith Brodbar, PhD
Guest Editors

1 Sang, B., Warshow, J. & Smith, A.J. (Eds.). (1991). Lesbians at Midlife: The Creative Transition. New York: Spinsters Ink.

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Narratives

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Sara, Without the “H”

SARA E. ZAREM

I was puzzled about why I was asked to participate on a panel of Jewish women discussing the different ways in which their Jewish identity affected their clinical work. I couldn't imagine that I had anything to contribute. I thought my being Jewish came up in my clinical work only reactively, when a client would bring it up through a comment or a query. I never imagined that my Jewish identity was so central to both my personal and professional life.¹

In taking up the challenge I wondered, what does it mean to me to be a Jew? What do I mean by my Jewish identity? I am a Jew by ethnic and cultural identification, not religious. Although I have a Jewish name, Sara, it is spelled in the non-Jewish way, without an “h.” On hearing my name, you wouldn't know this, because Sara spelled with or without the “h” sounds the same. When I speak to religious Jews, I feel very much Other. I cannot connect with their faith, their observance of the many rituals, their immersion in Jewish scripture, or their veneration of the Hebrew language. I sometimes wish I could believe; I can imagine the sense of community, continuity, and transcendence being a religious Jew might bring, but I cannot connect in this way. When I go to synagogue, I remain an outsider, neither comprehending the Hebrew that is being spoken or sung nor feeling a spiritual connection to God. If I feel anything, it is through the music, and the feeling is one of sadness and loss. I remember attending a recent bar mitzvah for a son of a close friend of mine. Listening to the music and incantations I suddenly felt profoundly sad. I realized that I was both yearning and mourning: yearning for a more spiritual connection to my Jewishness and mourning the dual loss of my mother and belongingness in a Jewish community.

So let me begin with my mother. I didn't know my mother well. She died of breast cancer when I was 19 and she was a private, secretive person. When I would be curious about her life, of her own growing up and life before her marriage to my father, and would ask her questions about her girlhood, she would stiffen, becoming visibly anxious and pained. I soon learned that these questions were not welcome and I stopped asking. I disconnected from my curiosity. My mother never, unbelievable as this sounds, mentioned her parents—not their names, snippets of memories about them, or made a passing comment about a mannerism, trait, or characteristic that either parent had. Her own background had, in a very real sense, vanished. It was an absence, a void. While I think her own past must have been much alive to her as she often drifted off, absorbed in her own thoughts, as though she were remembering another world. But for me, my grandparents, their lives, and my mother's own feelings about them were a void.

Yiddish was my mother's native language. She was, according to an aunt, born here, but her parents were immigrants from “the old country,” somewhere in Russia or Poland. Family rumor had it that my mother's parents were quite orthodox and that when they arrived here, they decided to become Americanized. This was much before the current interest in multiculturalism, when the goal was assimilation. I imagine that when my mother was growing up, to be an immigrant, a poor, non-English speaking Jew, was shameful. By the time I came along, in the 1950s, whatever pains my mother had suffered as a first generation American could not be spoken of, and she was determined that neither my sister nor I would suffer any taint of immigrant (read: different) status. She named me after my grandmother, Sarah, but left off the last “h,” which marked the name as Jewish.

I never learned Yiddish. My father didn't speak Yiddish. He grew up in a very nonreligious family where they were Jews in name only. Although he did have a bar mitzvah, he describes his family as very nonreligious, and there is a good deal of Jewish/Christian intermarriage among his siblings. My parents never went to temple and never celebrated the Jewish holidays in any serious way. We might have latkes on Chanukah and light a menorah, but there was no ceremony over lighting the candles, songs sung, or stories told. Rather, Chanukah was an excuse to get eight gifts. On the High Holy Days we visited with my mother's extended family, but nothing religious was ever mentioned or practiced. Rather, it was an excuse for a get-together and pot roast. My parents once sent me to religious school to learn Hebrew, but I felt uncomfortable being the sole emissary from the family to set foot inside a synagogue. Try as I might, I couldn't wrest meaning from the oddly shaped letters and sounds that were Hebrew. My attempts to learn Hebrew didn't last long. With hindsight I imagine that learning Hebrew was associated with unraveling secrets that I wasn't supposed to know, whether they were the secrets of the ancient language or secrets about my mother's family. Knowledge of Hebrew signified the forbidden. Despite the absence of religious ritual in our household, my mother strongly identified culturally and ethnically as Jewish. She joined and was active in Hadassah, a woman's organization that raised money for Israel. She spent hours on the phone doing the 1950s equivalent of telemarketing, and Hadassah meetings provided a social outlet as well as cultural connection for her. My mother never denied her Jewishness; she simply did not advertise or celebrate it. Jewishness was connected with survival and loss (Israel as post-Holocaust refugee), secular study, and learning and a love of the arts. My mother made us aware of the persecution the Jews had suffered over the years, although she never spoke of losing any of her own family in the Holocaust. Wary of non-Jews, she preferred for us to socialize with other Jewish children but did not insist on it since she was adamantly committed to liberal, humanistic values. Her goal for me was clear: a college education. And this, more than anything, is the sense of Jewishness I retain: a reverence for learning and education. Perhaps in my mother's family of origin, particularly if the rumor that they were orthodox was true, education was something reserved for boys, not girls. By the time my mother was of college age she had been orphaned and was living with her eldest sister and brother-in-law. As an outsider in that family, there was no money or support for a college education, and she went to work immediately after high school. My being a college graduate was the female version of the Jewish stereotype “my son, the doctor.” I did become a doctor, just not an MD.

I have always thought that there was a split in my mother about her Jewishness, part of her proud and part of her ashamed. This split was/is played out between my sister and me. I, like my mother, continued in the secular version of Jewishness, however my sister has rejected her Jewishness completely. Married to a Catholic man, raising her children as Catholic, she has dissociated herself from her Jewish roots. She did not convert to Catholicism yet she considers herself “not Jewish” and is offended when/if I wish her a Happy Jewish New Year. Her attitude toward being Jewish parallels my mother's discomfort in being from an immigrant family. It feels shameful and low class. My sister will easily tell you that she was raised by a Jewish family, that her birth certificate says she is Jewish, and she will proudly cook Jewish food that my mother made (mondel bread), but she'll say that she is not Jewish. She rejects any Jewish identity. It is a part of her to be buried, not spoken about.

For both my sister and I, Jewishness is connected to our mother. Since I knew so factually little about my about my mother, I cannot relinquish the importance of the Jewishness I perceived in her and feel connected to. To lose this is to lose an inextricable part of her. I was the studious child who would achieve my mother's dream of college and an education. I was symbolically the boy. My sister, who had more academic difficulty and was socially shy and inhibited, was the problematic daughter, the girl who would remind my mother of second class citizenship and outsiderness. My sister, in rejecting her Jewishness, is also rejecting this version of herself. When she thinks about Jewishness she connects it with class: for her being a Jew is to be lower class, which, for her, signifies vulgarity. She associates being Jewish with the working class status of mother's family and extended family, of the small, cramped, bare-bones homes of the family members, of incessant worry about money and having to put practicality before aesthetics, with body language that signaled a lack of refinement that she dismissively labels “ethnic.” This version—destructive, demoralizing, shameful, and ugly—must continue to be repudiated.

My Jewishness, which began as a form of ethnic identity, thus becomes part of a larger chain of signification including intense emotional ties to my mother and her lost worlds. It also resonates with issues of gender and class, within which nest themes of loss. Thus the ancient melodies in synagogue make me mourn not only for my own spiritual unrootedness and the loss of my mother but also for the losses of my mother and those of her parents, of generations of unspoken and unmourned loss, a lost sense of community and the world as you knew it, loss of your native language, loss of your parents, a sadness for which there are no words. It has implications for what I can and cannot know—Sara without the “h.”

I often find myself wondering what was lost. What were my grandparents like? What was their life like in the “Old Country?” Where exactly did they live? What did they do? Why did they leave? Poverty? Pogroms? Did they have memories of wonderful sights, smells, and joys that had to be left behind? Did they have relatives who they missed? What was the journey to the United States like? What did they imagine their life would be like here? Was coming to the United States worth giving up everything they knew? Were they here illegally? Did they arrive hopeful, only to become disillusioned and bitter? What were my grandparents like as people? What was my mother's early life like? How did my grandparents' Jewishness become experienced here? Was my mother's repudiation of her orthodox roots more than an immigrant child's discomfort with her greenhorn parents? Did she have to disconnect from her religious roots as a way not to miss her parents? Should I see my mother's need for self-creation, the ultimate ideology of being an “American” as a way for her to deny longing and loss. She did name me Sara, without an “h.” It sounds the same as Sarah with the “h,” but something is missing.

In Jewi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Ellyn Kaschak
• 1. Introduction
• Narratives
• Commentaries
• Epilogue
• Index