Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
Speaker 1: I look back, I see one through line from that
Speaker 1: moment when I was seven, all the way from now,
Speaker 1: which is my whole left goal is to create a
Speaker 1: space that is safe enough to stay in the room.
Speaker 1: It's uncomfortable, but like we are strong enough to hold it.
Speaker 1: We're strong enough to hold this pain. We're strong up
Speaker 1: to hold this truth, and that strength will set us free.
Speaker 1: That's Rabbi David Inger, one of the most celebrated and
Speaker 1: respected spiritual leaders in America. I know firsthand the way
Speaker 1: David holds the pain and truth of others. He has
Speaker 1: held mine more than once, and, as is so often
Speaker 1: true of those who have open, empathic, compassionate hearts, those
Speaker 1: hearts have been cracked wide open. As the man once said,
Speaker 1: that's how the light gets in. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
Speaker 1: this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Speaker 1: M hmm, Well, I'm the youngest of four children. The
Speaker 1: youngest is kind of maybe funny. I'm have a twin brother,
Speaker 1: but we're two minutes or so apart, at least that's
Speaker 1: what they told us. Grew up in Great Nick, Long Island.
Speaker 1: My father was a I guess a refugee kind of
Speaker 1: came over from Germany and I think he was five
Speaker 1: and he was born to an Orthodox Jewish family from
Speaker 1: Berlin and made his way here and grew up in
Speaker 1: Forest Hills in Queensland with his younger brother. And that
Speaker 1: my mother. She was sixteen when they had and they
Speaker 1: got married when she was seventeen and had my two
Speaker 1: older sisters, beteen Enemar, and then we were born in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, but moved to Great Neck in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, so I grew up in an affluent suburb
Speaker 1: of New York. My father was a very well known
Speaker 1: attorney and the real estate real estate attorney and well
Speaker 1: respected member of our Jewish committee, one of the founders
Speaker 1: and kind of engines behind the modern Orthodox Jewish family
Speaker 1: that we had in the community that we lived in.
Speaker 1: And my mom was worked at home. She was a homemaker.
Speaker 1: Can you describe for listeners who don't know the distinctions
Speaker 1: what it would have been like to grow up in
Speaker 1: a modern Orthodox Jewish home it's a great question. I
Speaker 1: think that modern Orthodoxy, as opposed to Orthodoxy in general,
Speaker 1: kind of traditional Jewish observance generally tended to be slightly
Speaker 1: and you know, have an antipathy, a kind of tension
Speaker 1: with mcgernity. And so traditional Orthodoxy religion was paramount, and
Speaker 1: religion was and religious observance was deeply insular and deeply
Speaker 1: protective and purl kial right. And in the nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: in nineties century rather in Germany, there was kind of
Speaker 1: a movement to integrate both Magernity and science and all
Speaker 1: of these features of the modern life in some way
Speaker 1: with Orthodox Jewish life. And so modern Orthodoxy was decidedly
Speaker 1: this hybrid between deeply engaged in Jewish life, people engaged
Speaker 1: in what many would consider to be Orthodoxy and observance
Speaker 1: and and all of the strictures and the rules and
Speaker 1: all of the culture of zag but together with an
Speaker 1: intention with and sometimes the tension, you know which one
Speaker 1: in this tension modernity and kind of being a typical American,
Speaker 1: so we grew up like that, we you know, on
Speaker 1: the outside of dressed like the typical American and typical
Speaker 1: kids who lived in the suburbs we didn't look any
Speaker 1: on the outside. We didn't look any different than any
Speaker 1: of the other kids that we're growing up with. But
Speaker 1: we went to a school that had you know, Biblical
Speaker 1: studies and Talmutic studies and all the religious studies. And
Speaker 1: then we also ate Kosher and we kept shabat in
Speaker 1: a very orthodox way, meaning no lights and no phones,
Speaker 1: and you know, the prayers on Friday night and going
Speaker 1: to Sending God and Saturday morning very very big deal,
Speaker 1: and you know, all the holidays, and so we kind
Speaker 1: of lived this dual life that sought synthesis but didn't
Speaker 1: always achieve it. And that's kind of like what the
Speaker 1: Orthodox min Orthodox really really I grew up with. You know,
Speaker 1: we dated, but like we're not supposed to were sort
Speaker 1: of you know, we dateated girls and you weren't supposed
Speaker 1: touch them. That was considered to be you know, sherman
Speaker 1: to get you know, allowed to touch someone that you're
Speaker 1: not married to. And so you can imagine Danny and
Speaker 1: you know that as well, like you can imagine the
Speaker 1: tension between being you know, a kid who loved depeche
Speaker 1: Mode and R. E. M And all the great music
Speaker 1: and very involved in American cultural life, but also had
Speaker 1: this weird double life of being an Orthodox Jew you
Speaker 1: can't always work out. Yeah, it's so interesting hearing you
Speaker 1: say all this, because we grew up similarly in that sense, um,
Speaker 1: And I mean I felt that tension tremendously because there
Speaker 1: wasn't a community around my parents and me who were
Speaker 1: also modern Orthodox. We were sort of this modern Orthodox
Speaker 1: family plunked into a neighborhood that was a mishmash of
Speaker 1: many other faiths and ethnicities. And so I'm wondering where
Speaker 1: that tension lived in you, because you know, I grew
Speaker 1: up and rebelled and sort of moved pretty far away
Speaker 1: from all that you grew up and ultimately became a rabbi. Well,
Speaker 1: I had my rebellion. But I think that for me
Speaker 1: as a kid, I was always very very connected spiritually
Speaker 1: to God, to talk to God all the time, had
Speaker 1: a running conversation with God. God was my best friend.
Speaker 1: And especially because I experienced tremendous trauma in my first
Speaker 1: ten years of life, I drew on that in a
Speaker 1: very deep way, Like I very much turned to God
Speaker 1: and prayed to God. Those were all true for me,
Speaker 1: and what was also true for me in terms of
Speaker 1: the tension was that I also was you know, I
Speaker 1: was an athlete. I was an Abbot. Sports were like
Speaker 1: you know, my other religion, Like I lived in in
Speaker 1: breed sports together with my twin brother, we were always
Speaker 1: out in the field and always playing after school and
Speaker 1: playing in school is one of the ways that I
Speaker 1: used sports to natigate socially, Like you know, I was
Speaker 1: popular because I was a good athlete and so on.
Speaker 1: So the world of sports was also very much a
Speaker 1: part of that world, but also with girls and sexuality
Speaker 1: and all manner of just growing up and being a
Speaker 1: human being. I think that the tension, you know, came
Speaker 1: to full full on a tension and rebellion of course,
Speaker 1: around puberty and sexuality. But I also think that there
Speaker 1: was also a lingering sense of guilt, because I think
Speaker 1: it's a model that at you at least for me,
Speaker 1: I never fully felt like we were as orthodox as
Speaker 1: we should be or as secular as we should be,
Speaker 1: Like it never nothing, nothing ever felt like it landed
Speaker 1: Like you know, my cousins who were much more observed,
Speaker 1: much more orthodox, felt like they had a less tense life,
Speaker 1: and I was wondered if they were the real one
Speaker 1: the real orthodox, the real observant ones. And then on
Speaker 1: the other hand, I also, you know, I wasn't so
Speaker 1: involved in Jewish life that I couldn't imagine falling in
Speaker 1: love with a non Jewish girl and living a completely
Speaker 1: non Jewish life in somewhere or non religious life. So
Speaker 1: I think that those tensions we used to go on
Speaker 1: Saturday afternoons, I think once I hit puberty, my best
Speaker 1: friend Yets father was a guy in ecologist and their
Speaker 1: home was like a like a five minute walking months
Speaker 1: and on Saturday afternoon on Shabbat, on the Sabbath after
Speaker 1: we had a religious lunch and sang our religious songs
Speaker 1: and really pined and yearned with my dad for you know,
Speaker 1: for God and for love and for spirituality. We would
Speaker 1: walk over to his house where his parents were not home,
Speaker 1: and we were introduced to the world of inappropriate movies
Speaker 1: or in a magazines. You know, So that guilt of
Speaker 1: like both, you know, the rebellion was there but also
Speaker 1: was held intention with feeling like you were sinning when
Speaker 1: you were just being an average young boy was always
Speaker 1: there and so there was never like you know, remember
Speaker 1: the song from Depeche Moden. I was a kid like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a it's a sin. I don't remember
Speaker 1: that song. It goes something like, um, everything I've ever done,
Speaker 1: everything I ever do, it's a sin. As I look
Speaker 1: back up right, it's like as I look back upon
Speaker 1: my life, it's always with a sense of shame. I've
Speaker 1: always been the one to blame. So I kind of
Speaker 1: feel like the religious patriarchy and some of the attitudes
Speaker 1: of Orthodoxy that we're intention also we're deeply scarring, I
Speaker 1: think for healthy development. And so those those are some
Speaker 1: of the places that I remember everything you just said,
Speaker 1: my mind is my mind is blown. You refer to
Speaker 1: a childhood trauma. Can you talk about that? Sure? Um,
Speaker 1: I was sexually molested in camp when I was seven
Speaker 1: year old. I didn't remember it until I was in
Speaker 1: my in my twenties, and I then was I had
Speaker 1: a series of summers. It began with that summer, but
Speaker 1: and then successive summers. I was physically abused by a
Speaker 1: number of counselors in camp over the course of three summers.
Speaker 1: Those experiences deeply, deeply affected me and left significant starring
Speaker 1: that I then had to heal later on in my life.
Speaker 1: And when I speak of my spiritual connection to God
Speaker 1: or the spirit. That broken heartedness was a deep, a
Speaker 1: deep imprint on me that then ultimately led me to
Speaker 1: to where I became. But I became as an adult.
Speaker 1: Was it the same camp all three summers? No, it wasn't.
Speaker 1: What was remarkable, I mean, this is just basically I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just like, so, there's a crazy thing. So so
Speaker 1: I don't even remember half of the story in the
Speaker 1: London in my in my twenties, right, and so I
Speaker 1: remember when I remembered it. I was a long story, sure,
Speaker 1: But when I was in my early twenties, I had
Speaker 1: become a kind of fast ward with my story there
Speaker 1: a little bit because after high school I went for
Speaker 1: a year to Israel to study abroad. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of de rigorous something that a lot of kids were
Speaker 1: in the modern Orthodox world will go to for a
Speaker 1: year seminary to Israel. It sounds much more like a
Speaker 1: very serious year than what it really is. It's just
Speaker 1: an exposure to being away from your family before you
Speaker 1: go to college. And most parents hope that the kids
Speaker 1: don't become too religious, and they just get religious enough
Speaker 1: so that when they do go to college, they don't
Speaker 1: you know, you don't marry somebody wasn't Jewish, and it's
Speaker 1: just a chance to him to have an experience of
Speaker 1: learning intensively. And I basically came back ultra Orthodox, like
Speaker 1: I went as a modern Orthodox kid who was going
Speaker 1: to go to college. And I come back after two
Speaker 1: years in Israel, and I am like, full on looking
Speaker 1: like my cousins. You know, when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: my cousins with the long you know, dreadlocks and the
Speaker 1: whole thing. I looked like a Hussad. And then I
Speaker 1: go on this deeply religious trip for about five years,
Speaker 1: and during that time I really have a break, like
Speaker 1: I really have a break in reality. I go into
Speaker 1: mystical states and I wind up getting completely lost in religion.
Speaker 1: And I wake up five years into this, and I
Speaker 1: realized that religion was essentially what I was using to
Speaker 1: cover over some really really deep wounds in my heart
Speaker 1: and in my psyche. And so I begin this journey
Speaker 1: of healing. And the first thing I read and watch
Speaker 1: is this John Bradshaw character from the nineties who is
Speaker 1: the father of the Inner child work and the father
Speaker 1: of homecoming and healing the shame that binds you. All
Speaker 1: these really really vital works that exposed the American public to,
Speaker 1: like for the first time, to these really profound notions
Speaker 1: of pathology within the family and also how family systems
Speaker 1: work and all this kind of business. And I just
Speaker 1: get toned on and I wind up climbing like. One
Speaker 1: of the only people doing Bradshaw's therapy in New York
Speaker 1: at the time ninety three is a therapist out an
Speaker 1: ice Lip, Long Island. It's about two hours from my
Speaker 1: house in Great Night, Like I have to go to
Speaker 1: the city. I'm going to go to Manhattan and to
Speaker 1: go to ice Lip. It's a huge trip. And I
Speaker 1: go out there and I'm in the therapist office and
Speaker 1: I'm doing this kind of deep meditative work with with
Speaker 1: this therapist, and all of a sudden, I retrieved this
Speaker 1: memory of being a seven year old in a camp
Speaker 1: called Camp Tagola and having a counselor, and this counselor
Speaker 1: I remember him lesting me. Now, what I remembered before
Speaker 1: that event was that I remember that I had been
Speaker 1: beaten up so one evening. I don't remember being in it,
Speaker 1: but I remember it from the outside as it were.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to take me to the bathroom and
Speaker 1: to go every night I to the bathroom, and instead
Speaker 1: he winds up beating me up, and the lights go
Speaker 1: on and the camp comes in and they stay me,
Speaker 1: and he gets fired and they take him away. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the part I remembered, But I didn't remember the
Speaker 1: molestation until I was twenty three. I never ceased to
Speaker 1: be amazed at what the psyche can handle, by which
Speaker 1: I mean what our psyches can push down out of
Speaker 1: reach until we're strong enough to handle whatever has been
Speaker 1: buried there. It's like we have these different memory baskets.
Speaker 1: David's memory of being beaten up is awful, but he's
Speaker 1: able to retain it. He has a certain amount of
Speaker 1: agency in that story. The counselor is fired, there are witnesses,
Speaker 1: but the sexual molestation there are no witnesses, only a
Speaker 1: potent residue of shame that pushes that memory into a
Speaker 1: far distant basket where it remains for nearly two decades.
Speaker 1: It was just so painful, and not just in terms
Speaker 1: the social stigma, but it was just so painful, you know,
Speaker 1: that level of violation. It was just so intimate and
Speaker 1: so connected with the shame, the shame that children experience
Speaker 1: in those moments, because it's also wrapped up with connection,
Speaker 1: but it was like a connection, or at least the
Speaker 1: way that these at least often play out is that
Speaker 1: you're young and absolutely vulnerable and trusting and open. And
Speaker 1: so it was a kind of a deep scar for me.
Speaker 1: And what was most what was most remarkable to me
Speaker 1: was that that in my family and I have a
Speaker 1: very loving and courageous and strong family, there remarkable people,
Speaker 1: and this never made its way into our collective identity
Speaker 1: and memory, like it doesn't exist. Nobody wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about it. There's no there was no room to talk
Speaker 1: about it. Even when we do remember abuse and we
Speaker 1: get to talk about it, often those who love us
Speaker 1: find it hard to hear. And I think that is
Speaker 1: also part of the way that the fear manifests to,
Speaker 1: is that we're so afraid to talk about something that
Speaker 1: makes us uncomfortable. We're so collectively averse to discomfort by nature.
Speaker 1: It's remarkable, right well, And it's also then this kind
Speaker 1: of merry go round of secrecy, silence, shame, secrecy, silence, shame,
Speaker 1: Around and around we go and one feeds the other.
Speaker 1: Right when I remembered it, it was deeply liberating for
Speaker 1: me to have had that secret as it were surfaced
Speaker 1: for me and to tell the truth about it. And
Speaker 1: it was actually, you know, I want to get ahead
Speaker 1: of myselfiters and how I became a rabbi ultimately, But
Speaker 1: that that moment in my life, it was when I
Speaker 1: left religion and then went on a journey for about
Speaker 1: a decade or so healing that was catalyzed by my
Speaker 1: deep desire to not use religion or anything else as
Speaker 1: a way to cover over the necessary healing what what
Speaker 1: young and others have called like you're legitimate suffering, like
Speaker 1: a legitimate suffering that as a human being I needed
Speaker 1: to experience and heal so that when I did come
Speaker 1: essentially back to religion and back to some of these
Speaker 1: other things, that I wouldn't use it as a way
Speaker 1: to cover up secrets. Such a powerful notion. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that we use things to cover over what
Speaker 1: David calls our necessary healing. Some of us use drugs, booze, sex,
Speaker 1: the internet, dizziness, distraction, I could go on. But David
Speaker 1: becomes aware that he's using religion as a means to
Speaker 1: cover over, to avoid that necessary healing, and that awareness
Speaker 1: takes him on a journey that ultimately brings him back
Speaker 1: to God, but on very different terms. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about that decade, Aid and what that
Speaker 1: journey was and then the decision to go to rabbinic
Speaker 1: school and become a rabbi. Sure, I know many of
Speaker 1: your listeners and certainly you're familiar with Alice Miller's booth.
Speaker 1: You know that was originally called Prisoners of Childhood, and
Speaker 1: then it was the Drama of the Gifted Child. And
Speaker 1: I think that my own journey over the course of
Speaker 1: that decade was very much I was living as a
Speaker 1: waiter in New York City. I kind of made a
Speaker 1: living as a waiter. I kind of worked at night,
Speaker 1: and during the day I was doing this deep work.
Speaker 1: I got very involved in in yoga, I got very
Speaker 1: involved in Eastern meditation and other modalities of healing. You know,
Speaker 1: I just, you know, all of a sudden, it was
Speaker 1: like I was in New York City. Is that the
Speaker 1: cornucopia of life? Like I experienced aliveness and that was
Speaker 1: like my number one desire during this ten years was
Speaker 1: to really reconnect with the quality of aliveness that I
Speaker 1: had known as a child, that I had lost to
Speaker 1: some degree after these traumas and that I had lost
Speaker 1: also in my teams, and that certainly would have came
Speaker 1: a religious fanatic. For five years, I was completely in
Speaker 1: the closet as a as a human and so here
Speaker 1: I you know, I went through those ten years of
Speaker 1: self exploration and travel, and you know, I became like
Speaker 1: a bit of a spiritual dilettante. I sat meditation retreats,
Speaker 1: I enrolled in massage school for ACU pressure, I was
Speaker 1: a teacher of plotis. I did a lot of these
Speaker 1: things over you know, I could go through a whole
Speaker 1: list of them, but all of them were basically in
Speaker 1: some way in service of self healing, self discovery, self empowerment, aliveness, UM.
Speaker 1: And so that's essentially the decade. It was. It was
Speaker 1: a lot of experiences and a lot of healing, but
Speaker 1: one thing that I couldn't move away from was a
Speaker 1: spiritual calling. And I felt like the spiritual calling in
Speaker 1: everything that I was doing was calling me back to
Speaker 1: my religious tradition, but to see it and feel it
Speaker 1: in a way that was now informed by the things
Speaker 1: that I had experienced in other places, you know, more meditation,
Speaker 1: more aliveness, more embodied approach to sexuality into being a
Speaker 1: human are just a much more liberal and open ended
Speaker 1: way to be in Jewish life. That's essentially how it
Speaker 1: came back. We'll be back in a moment with more
Speaker 1: family secrets. When David is just two years out of
Speaker 1: rabbinical school in two thousand six, he creates a community
Speaker 1: on the Upper West Side of New York City called
Speaker 1: Roma MoU. Today, Roma MoU is one of the most
Speaker 1: beloved institutions in contemporary Jewish culture, a welcoming, experiential, irreverently pious,
Speaker 1: intergenerational Jewish community that elevates and transforms individuals and communities
Speaker 1: into more compassionate human beings. Its stores are open to
Speaker 1: spiritual seekers and skept dicks alike, sharing a path that
Speaker 1: celebrates our wholeness and provides practical, grounded ways to heal
Speaker 1: our brokenness. In other words, David builds a spiritual world
Speaker 1: on his terms, one that rises up from his own trauma,
Speaker 1: his stops and starts his healing journey. In Judaism, there
Speaker 1: is a Hebrew phrase tikun olam, which translates into repair
Speaker 1: the world. It's all we can try to do for me.
Speaker 1: It was an amazing journey of retrieval. You know, we
Speaker 1: often speak about in the healing word regression in service
Speaker 1: of the ego, where you go back to bring something forward.
Speaker 1: And I think that me going back to Judaism was
Speaker 1: a desire to go back and take what was really
Speaker 1: beautiful there and pull it through into my present reality.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't easy because in my thirties I was
Speaker 1: still in this kind of fantasy bond, which is what
Speaker 1: some people call the way that we still look at
Speaker 1: our parents as God's He can be in a fantasy
Speaker 1: bond with your religious tradition, like I think, I was
Speaker 1: still thinking the Judaism was perfect and God given him,
Speaker 1: and I was to blame, right, it's all. You know.
Speaker 1: I just had a ten years of walking away and
Speaker 1: I was gonna heal myself. But then I was gonna
Speaker 1: come back to the Orthodox again, and I almost got
Speaker 1: caught in there. And thankfully I tried an Orthodox or
Speaker 1: clinical school that was modern when I tried coming back
Speaker 1: to Judaism in my early thirties, and luckily, I felt
Speaker 1: like I had a size ten soul and its size
Speaker 1: four religious tradition and it just didn't work. You know,
Speaker 1: there were enough blisters on my soul. At that point,
Speaker 1: I said, Nope, that's not working, and I left. And
Speaker 1: I'm lucky to have met my teacher, whose name is
Speaker 1: Rabbi Zalman Shakter. And when I met him, it was
Speaker 1: like a chiropractic adjustment on my soul, like I just
Speaker 1: I felt like I met somebody who was in it.
Speaker 1: He was eighty years old when I met him, and
Speaker 1: I was in my thirties, and he had already been
Speaker 1: through a Hasidic ultra Orthodox jew who then found the
Speaker 1: counterculture of the sixties and had had done all of
Speaker 1: these things, but had created a very new age, open ended,
Speaker 1: deeply spiritual, meditative, but liberal expression of Jewish life. And
Speaker 1: when I met him in two thousand and four, he
Speaker 1: ordained me. And two years later I started this community
Speaker 1: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and that was it,
Speaker 1: and kind of like you know, it's now fourteen years
Speaker 1: since we started it, and as you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: grown and we have more than one. We have one
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn too, and we started our own seminary Shiva
Speaker 1: to train people and to engage people in this kind
Speaker 1: of more open hearted, embodied Jewish expression. So David build
Speaker 1: and makes his own home, spiritually speaking, which becomes a
Speaker 1: home to so many others. He marries his wife Ariel,
Speaker 1: and they start a family. This might seem like an ending,
Speaker 1: all wrapped up in a bow, but of course that
Speaker 1: isn't how life unfolds, not for David, not for any
Speaker 1: of us. We got married a dozen in dates, and
Speaker 1: we had our first child and new dozen nine there.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the most remarkable things is
Speaker 1: that the thing about secrets, and the thing also about
Speaker 1: karma or or whatever it is that we carry whatever
Speaker 1: we want to call it, you know, our life pattern
Speaker 1: or the patterns of previous lives, whatever your belief system is.
Speaker 1: But like the structure of how experience imprints itself on
Speaker 1: us and how we are, we are we're made by that,
Speaker 1: and we also brings who we are before that. It's
Speaker 1: like all of that stuff, Like that stuff doesn't actually
Speaker 1: work itself out. Until it works itself out, we're not done.
Speaker 1: The thing about secrets is that we think that that
Speaker 1: not dealing with them is actually a useful way to
Speaker 1: make the issue go away. If we don't see it,
Speaker 1: it's you know, out of sight, out of mind, or
Speaker 1: split off from us. It's shadow but as young said,
Speaker 1: and others said, it lingers and someone heard once a
Speaker 1: secret seat, you know, secret seat. And so the family
Speaker 1: secrets that we carry and our own personal secrets that
Speaker 1: we carry will work themselves out the more awake we
Speaker 1: want to be. They'll just we'll find them in our lives.
Speaker 1: We'll just see him kind of working themselves out in
Speaker 1: our life. Meaning it'll show up. It'll keep showing up
Speaker 1: as a pattern, will keep showing up. And I think
Speaker 1: that when we had kids, when Orel and I had kids,
Speaker 1: it wasn't surprising to me in certain ways that our
Speaker 1: eldest kid was gonna have a lot of the energy
Speaker 1: that I had as a kid, and that I would
Speaker 1: have a chance to like try to meet that child
Speaker 1: in a certain way describe there for me. So there
Speaker 1: is them, our eldest child. He's now eleven years old.
Speaker 1: He's um, charismatic, brilliant, highly verbal, what some people call
Speaker 1: twice exceptional, meaning like he's off the charts in terms
Speaker 1: of his intelligence, and he's also off the charts in
Speaker 1: terms of his extreme sensitivity and emotional sensitivity. He has
Speaker 1: a number of learning challenges that he's working with, it
Speaker 1: are working with with him dyslexia and other things, and
Speaker 1: he is He's there. Bear off the charts. Bear is
Speaker 1: off the charts in ways that would be a huge
Speaker 1: challenge to any parent. Bear is the oldest of three.
Speaker 1: There are two even younger children at home. So one
Speaker 1: of the last few years it's been like for you
Speaker 1: as a family contending with embracing the challenges that Bear
Speaker 1: has presented. They've been very, very difficult for us, you know,
Speaker 1: from the last since since I guess two or two
Speaker 1: or three years old, we are we realized that there
Speaker 1: were some issues that were happening that had to do
Speaker 1: with the impulse control and his own kind of emotional
Speaker 1: regulation issues, frustration being very high, and frustration moving from
Speaker 1: being frustrated or being sad or disappointed into anger. And UM,
Speaker 1: I think that we as parents were so prepared and
Speaker 1: so excited, and so I felt so blessed, and we
Speaker 1: still do. But I think early on we were we
Speaker 1: realized that we um, something wasn't working, and we were
Speaker 1: completely in the dark, and we tried our best to
Speaker 1: make sense of what some of the things that were happening,
Speaker 1: and it was really really hard. Nobody really understood totally
Speaker 1: what was going on. And we struggled. And I think
Speaker 1: that someone once said that it was a struggle to
Speaker 1: keep the house safe. And it was very hard to
Speaker 1: get Bary to go to school in the morning. It
Speaker 1: was we're hard to get into good a bed at night.
Speaker 1: We were reading up on oppositional definance disorder and O
Speaker 1: D D and and all the other there's you know, labels,
Speaker 1: and nothing exactly fit. And and we were just beside
Speaker 1: ourselves because this is our first child, and all parents,
Speaker 1: you know, your your first child. You're just getting your
Speaker 1: feet under you as a parent, so you just want
Speaker 1: to feel like you know what you're doing. And and
Speaker 1: we were working so hard. You know, we've had so
Speaker 1: many books on it, and we've all done so much
Speaker 1: working ourselves, and here we were really stymied by this
Speaker 1: soul and trying to figure out how best to parent
Speaker 1: and how best to be with him. And the number
Speaker 1: of theories and the number of approaches were legion. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know this too, right, And it's like everybody has
Speaker 1: an idea on how to help and what the right approaches,
Speaker 1: and you know, are you being too leaning or not
Speaker 1: being leaning? En offer? And how do you make boundaries?
Speaker 1: And you know, everybody's got an opinion about ary thing.
Speaker 1: And we struggled. We were being shamed that many people.
Speaker 1: People shamed us for and blamed us assume that it
Speaker 1: was our fault, that we must have done something wrong
Speaker 1: or we're not, you know, parenting appropriately. And so we
Speaker 1: we struggled, and we couldn't really tell any when I
Speaker 1: was very close group of people that we did tell
Speaker 1: that we were struggling with. But it was that was
Speaker 1: that compounded the problem because we didn't know what was
Speaker 1: going on, and we couldn't share how confused we were
Speaker 1: or that it was even happening for that matter, right,
Speaker 1: and I meanwhile, you have too younger kids at home, right,
Speaker 1: let me get two other kids exactly eventually. And you also,
Speaker 1: it's coinciding with this astounding growth of Roma MoU and
Speaker 1: you meaning more and more, two, more and more people
Speaker 1: as a rabbi, as a pastoral rabbi, as a kind
Speaker 1: of you're not going to like my saying this, but
Speaker 1: like rock star kind of from the BMA, you know,
Speaker 1: from the podium, Rabbi was incredible, powerful charisma and this
Speaker 1: is happening in your home. How did you contend with that?
Speaker 1: That sort of split between deeply private and very public.
Speaker 1: It was how I mean, it was how I could
Speaker 1: just say it was at the time in my life
Speaker 1: and where I felt that I had spent so much
Speaker 1: of my life's energies being able to trying to arrive
Speaker 1: at a place in my in my life and in
Speaker 1: my career where my desire to serve, my desire to shine,
Speaker 1: my desire to give my gifts to the world or
Speaker 1: and have them received. It was all happening. And leaving
Speaker 1: the house every morning was my My whole nervous system
Speaker 1: was completely shock like. Every day was three days. It
Speaker 1: was the morning was one day, then there was my
Speaker 1: work day, and then my evenings. That's three days. It
Speaker 1: was a twenty one day week. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: on top of that, my public life required me and
Speaker 1: the people who listen to this notice of your clergy,
Speaker 1: of your ministers in priests and got by the moment
Speaker 1: so on that it required me in any given day
Speaker 1: to be at the death bed, at the bedside of
Speaker 1: somebody who's dying with cancer, who was in their prime,
Speaker 1: the tragedy of that, To move from night into dealing
Speaker 1: with the joy of a wedding couple, to move from
Speaker 1: night into into the responsibility to write a stellar sermon
Speaker 1: or something that involves really you know, analytic thinking and
Speaker 1: eloquence and communication. Like, the responsibilities of my job were
Speaker 1: immense on every level, intellectually, usually emotionally, physically, And I'll
Speaker 1: talk about that to go home and I feel like
Speaker 1: that it was almost impossible for for me and my
Speaker 1: wife to create the home environment that was safe for everybody.
Speaker 1: And we had little kids, and so people in the
Speaker 1: community started to murmur, you know, why can't we why
Speaker 1: aren't we being invited over the and you know, to
Speaker 1: the rabbi's home. You know, what do we do? So
Speaker 1: we were in a cash way too, because we couldn't
Speaker 1: ask for the support of the community, because it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that as a pastor, as you know,
Speaker 1: as a therapist, like it's not a reciprocal we're not
Speaker 1: even in relationship. It's not like you know, and when
Speaker 1: it's happened, by the way, the community hasn't always received it.
Speaker 1: The community looks up to you as a father figure,
Speaker 1: a mother figure, an authority figure. There's all of this happening,
Speaker 1: and so you don't tell them what's going on in
Speaker 1: your private life and yet it can not impact your
Speaker 1: public life, and then you can't even get the support
Speaker 1: of the community that you found it, and I found
Speaker 1: it because that's not the role that they play with me,
Speaker 1: and it's part of the circle that's double bind. And
Speaker 1: so it was depleting and exhausting and enervating. And those
Speaker 1: are hard years. Those are hard years, very hard years.
Speaker 1: So how did those hard years come to a head
Speaker 1: or how did you come to you know, sort of
Speaker 1: the next chapter in this story for you? I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that the next chapter began when we acknowledged,
Speaker 1: like like a good twelve step first step, we acknowledged
Speaker 1: that there was a problem that we couldn't fix it
Speaker 1: on our own. We started to talk about it and
Speaker 1: we realized that it wasn't because we were bad parents,
Speaker 1: and we didn't have to be ashamed. We could we
Speaker 1: could seek help, and we did seek Helvin. I mean,
Speaker 1: we worked hard on ourselves to learn how to be
Speaker 1: the parents like he needed us to be because he's
Speaker 1: so unusual, and we had to change and we had
Speaker 1: to grow ourselves and we had to get a lot
Speaker 1: of support and we were still figuring out, but we
Speaker 1: are getting help. But even the things are at times
Speaker 1: still very hard. We do definitely see things getting better.
Speaker 1: I guess what's most important is that we talk about
Speaker 1: it with each other and with others, and in our family.
Speaker 1: We talked about the hard things and the big feelings,
Speaker 1: and we work hard to make it safe to sit.
Speaker 1: But what feels uncomfortable, we see that that's really where
Speaker 1: the healing comes from. We'll be back in a moment
Speaker 1: with more family secrets. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: think is so beautiful and remarkable is that journey from
Speaker 1: I have to keep this a secret or I have
Speaker 1: you know, I have this role in people's lives. Two
Speaker 1: you're talking to me, you're talking to us to these listeners,
Speaker 1: which means that you have spoken about this with your community.
Speaker 1: You you did reach a point where are holding it close.
Speaker 1: Keeping its secret was more painful then not. Was there
Speaker 1: a turning point or was it a gradual thing? I
Speaker 1: think that what happens, what happens in our intimate spaces,
Speaker 1: what happens in our homes, right, what happens in our homes,
Speaker 1: What happens in our in our own home, in our
Speaker 1: own heart, what happens you know, when the lights are closed,
Speaker 1: no one's watching is a real earmark. It's a real
Speaker 1: it's an indicator for our our society at large. And
Speaker 1: I know for myself, not just as a public figure,
Speaker 1: but just as a human being. And I'm not advocating
Speaker 1: for us to tell the whole world every secret that
Speaker 1: we have. And there are things that are that are
Speaker 1: obviously intimate, and there are things that should be shared
Speaker 1: only with a group of people that are you know,
Speaker 1: our intimate family or intimate friends and so on. But
Speaker 1: the energy that it took for me to not acknowledge
Speaker 1: the impact of something right, to not disclose and not tell,
Speaker 1: to not share, and to be owner about like what
Speaker 1: I was holding and how it was impacting me and
Speaker 1: by extension out with impacting my community. It was too great.
Speaker 1: It was too great to hold that, it was too much.
Speaker 1: It was it was literally physically I could feel that
Speaker 1: my body. I couldn't take it anymore, and it was
Speaker 1: impacting everyone. So for example, a couple of you know,
Speaker 1: this past year, Roman whom I'm very proud of this
Speaker 1: in our Jewie community, Romo became the first synagode to
Speaker 1: ever have a Shabbat of the child. And on the
Speaker 1: Shabbat of the Child, which was co sponsored with the
Speaker 1: Center for Child Abuse and for Domestic Abuse. I spoke
Speaker 1: publicly for the second time, but really for the first
Speaker 1: time in a real way about my own experiences as
Speaker 1: a child, and the number of people that wrote to
Speaker 1: me afterwards who shared with me their story was just
Speaker 1: it was just, you know, it was unbelievable that I could,
Speaker 1: in some way for them to hear me as a
Speaker 1: rabbi speaking from the pulpit about my vulnerability, my wound,
Speaker 1: that you know, for them to be able to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: me too, like him too, he has it too, and
Speaker 1: to become fluent in that way of airing the depth
Speaker 1: of our power, which is also the depth of our wound. Right,
Speaker 1: that that that wound was there and that I could
Speaker 1: share it, I think that was for me a very
Speaker 1: it was liberating for me. And also when it comes
Speaker 1: to this family secret, as it were, that it was
Speaker 1: very liberating to just to say, you know, this is
Speaker 1: what it looks like in our home daily. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't want your sympathy per sage and you know
Speaker 1: how hard it is, and it invites a kind of
Speaker 1: generosity like the danger, of course, is that it might
Speaker 1: invite a scarcity, might to listen to somebody else a
Speaker 1: feeling of awkwardness. As we said, they might shame us,
Speaker 1: they might walk away, they might do whatever they can
Speaker 1: do the things that they might say do some of
Speaker 1: the things that we're most terrified they're going to do. Right,
Speaker 1: But it also when we close ourselves off because of
Speaker 1: that fear, we also close ourselves off to the generosity
Speaker 1: that might come as a response as well, someone saying
Speaker 1: you know, wow, that really touches me. I feel you
Speaker 1: in a way that I never would have felt. You
Speaker 1: your humanity and I identify with you right. I am
Speaker 1: also struggling. I'm also strangling, and that's a very profound
Speaker 1: gift to give to someone. When we share our stories,
Speaker 1: they say, I can feel your humanity, and I feel
Speaker 1: more connected to you. As we near the end of
Speaker 1: David's story, I find myself thinking of one of Emily
Speaker 1: Dickinson's sonnets, in which she writes, my life closed twice
Speaker 1: before its close, which I take to mean we aren't
Speaker 1: meted out a certain amount of difficulty in measured doses.
Speaker 1: So I wonder how does David hold these two traumas,
Speaker 1: the one that happened to him at age seven and
Speaker 1: then the struggles of his firstborn son, who is so
Speaker 1: like him in so many ways. I see them all
Speaker 1: as one piece. The first thing I feel is that
Speaker 1: seeing my son in a way and it struggles that
Speaker 1: he's had opened me up too, was generous to my
Speaker 1: own parents in a way that I never would have
Speaker 1: had in any of that point in my life, because
Speaker 1: I can see however I am, and I can look
Speaker 1: back and say, wow, as I heard someone would say,
Speaker 1: I might have had a ten gallant soul in a
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of court family, you know, a
Speaker 1: ten five family with a ten gallant soul. Like there's
Speaker 1: things that I just know and connect with in terms
Speaker 1: of who I was now in retrospect that I never
Speaker 1: would have. And so when I look back, I see
Speaker 1: one through line from that moment when I was seven,
Speaker 1: all the way from now, which is my whole life's
Speaker 1: goal is to create a space that is safe enough
Speaker 1: to stay in the room. It's uncomfortable, but like we
Speaker 1: are strong enough to hold it. We're strong enough to
Speaker 1: hold this pain we're throwing up and to hold this truth,
Speaker 1: and that strength will set us free. It's not just
Speaker 1: that the truth will set us free. The truth and
Speaker 1: our capacity to hold it right. And we can build
Speaker 1: that capacity by returning to safety, returning to the messages
Speaker 1: of love and compassion and goodness. All of those things
Speaker 1: to me are part of one seamless line from when
Speaker 1: I was seven until now, which is, you know, how
Speaker 1: do we create an environment and a container where people
Speaker 1: feel safe enough to be true, safe enough to be honest,
Speaker 1: and safe enough to heal. That's what the Holy is
Speaker 1: for me. That's what the Holy is for me. The
Speaker 1: quality of that, you know, running conversation that you had
Speaker 1: with God as a child. You know, God was your
Speaker 1: best friend, that was when you turned to and then
Speaker 1: you went through this whole journey of becoming ultra Orthodox,
Speaker 1: and and then your decade long quest, is the quality
Speaker 1: of your conversation with God today in a way similar
Speaker 1: to what it was when you were a child, or
Speaker 1: has it has it changed? You know? I sometimes wish
Speaker 1: that I had that child like ease, and it's been
Speaker 1: complicated over the years. I went through a period where
Speaker 1: I was so angry at God that the only thing
Speaker 1: I could say was I could only chris God out
Speaker 1: for a while, and I allowed myself those feelings. And
Speaker 1: I've gone through periods where I didn't believe in the
Speaker 1: personal God or I still do. And you know, the
Speaker 1: face of God has changed so much from me over
Speaker 1: the years, but it hasn't eliminated that space. You know,
Speaker 1: that space to me, and it's sophisticated as my belief
Speaker 1: in God or you know, or my understanding what God
Speaker 1: is has grown and sophisticated as it has been. You know,
Speaker 1: there is still that simple place that when I closed
Speaker 1: my eyes, it's not hard for me access, like the
Speaker 1: heart of a longing that I think that was something
Speaker 1: that I experienced as a child. I experienced it with
Speaker 1: my father, with the way that he's sang and our
Speaker 1: you know, on Shabbat, there was a pathos, a kind
Speaker 1: of the childlike quality. Was not playful with God. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like, oh God, let's go for a walk through
Speaker 1: the park. You know that it's much later on, but
Speaker 1: God was still the one that I turned to, especially
Speaker 1: in moments of pain and moans of longing and alments
Speaker 1: of yearning. And for me, it's not hard at all
Speaker 1: when I closed my eyes in prayer to re access
Speaker 1: that place. And it doesn't feel sad to me in
Speaker 1: the way that's sad can be depressing. It feels alive
Speaker 1: and invertent like. It feels like like when I'm in
Speaker 1: that aliveness, which is a yearning, I feel very much
Speaker 1: privileged to just to be, you know, just to be,
Speaker 1: and it holds all of the hopes that I have
Speaker 1: for myself and also the hopes that I have for
Speaker 1: humanity and for the globe, and for a longing for
Speaker 1: there to be peace and goodness. And so I saved
Speaker 1: that place for myself when I closed my eyes. Between
Speaker 1: me and my God, we meet there, exchanging glances over
Speaker 1: a kind of see of of longing for a world,
Speaker 1: but we only have glimpses of it that I pray
Speaker 1: made manifest. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production.
Speaker 1: Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
Speaker 1: thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
Speaker 1: a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
Speaker 1: voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Speaker 1: Our number is one eight secret zero. That's secret and
Speaker 1: then the number zero. You can also find us on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com,
Speaker 1: slash Family secrets Pot, and Twitter at FAM secret Spot.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows,