December 3, 2020 • 42 mins
David Ingber is a spiritual leader and father of three young kids, beloved by his large New York City Congregation. His wisdom and ability to comfort is sought after by thousands. In this episode, he learns that opening up and allowing himself to show his own vulnerability is part of his teaching and a great spiritual lesson.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
I look back, I see one through line from that
moment when I was seven, all the way from now,
which is my whole left goal is to create a
space that is safe enough to stay in the room.
It's uncomfortable, but like we are strong enough to hold it.
(00:24):
We're strong enough to hold this pain. We're strong up
to hold this truth, and that strength will set us free.
That's Rabbi David Inger, one of the most celebrated and
respected spiritual leaders in America. I know firsthand the way
David holds the pain and truth of others. He has
held mine more than once, and, as is so often
(00:48):
true of those who have open, empathic, compassionate hearts, those
hearts have been cracked wide open. As the man once said,
that's how the light gets in. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
(01:12):
this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
M hmm, Well, I'm the youngest of four children. The
youngest is kind of maybe funny. I'm have a twin brother,
(01:36):
but we're two minutes or so apart, at least that's
what they told us. Grew up in Great Nick, Long Island.
My father was a I guess a refugee kind of
came over from Germany and I think he was five
and he was born to an Orthodox Jewish family from
Berlin and made his way here and grew up in
(01:58):
Forest Hills in Queensland with his younger brother. And that
my mother. She was sixteen when they had and they
got married when she was seventeen and had my two
older sisters, beteen Enemar, and then we were born in
nineteen sixty nine, but moved to Great Neck in nineteen
seventy one, so I grew up in an affluent suburb
(02:20):
of New York. My father was a very well known
attorney and the real estate real estate attorney and well
respected member of our Jewish committee, one of the founders
and kind of engines behind the modern Orthodox Jewish family
that we had in the community that we lived in.
And my mom was worked at home. She was a homemaker.
(02:41):
Can you describe for listeners who don't know the distinctions
what it would have been like to grow up in
a modern Orthodox Jewish home it's a great question. I
think that modern Orthodoxy, as opposed to Orthodoxy in general,
kind of traditional Jewish observance generally tended to be slightly
and you know, have an antipathy, a kind of tension
(03:03):
with mcgernity. And so traditional Orthodoxy religion was paramount, and
religion was and religious observance was deeply insular and deeply
protective and purl kial right. And in the nineteen hundreds,
in nineties century rather in Germany, there was kind of
a movement to integrate both Magernity and science and all
(03:25):
of these features of the modern life in some way
with Orthodox Jewish life. And so modern Orthodoxy was decidedly
this hybrid between deeply engaged in Jewish life, people engaged
in what many would consider to be Orthodoxy and observance
and and all of the strictures and the rules and
all of the culture of zag but together with an
(03:48):
intention with and sometimes the tension, you know which one
in this tension modernity and kind of being a typical American,
so we grew up like that, we you know, on
the outside of dressed like the typical American and typical
kids who lived in the suburbs we didn't look any
on the outside. We didn't look any different than any
of the other kids that we're growing up with. But
(04:09):
we went to a school that had you know, Biblical
studies and Talmutic studies and all the religious studies. And
then we also ate Kosher and we kept shabat in
a very orthodox way, meaning no lights and no phones,
and you know, the prayers on Friday night and going
to Sending God and Saturday morning very very big deal,
and you know, all the holidays, and so we kind
(04:31):
of lived this dual life that sought synthesis but didn't
always achieve it. And that's kind of like what the
Orthodox min Orthodox really really I grew up with. You know,
we dated, but like we're not supposed to were sort
of you know, we dateated girls and you weren't supposed
touch them. That was considered to be you know, sherman
to get you know, allowed to touch someone that you're
not married to. And so you can imagine Danny and
(04:53):
you know that as well, like you can imagine the
tension between being you know, a kid who loved depeche
Mode and R. E. M And all the great music
and very involved in American cultural life, but also had
this weird double life of being an Orthodox Jew you
can't always work out. Yeah, it's so interesting hearing you
say all this, because we grew up similarly in that sense, um,
(05:15):
And I mean I felt that tension tremendously because there
wasn't a community around my parents and me who were
also modern Orthodox. We were sort of this modern Orthodox
family plunked into a neighborhood that was a mishmash of
many other faiths and ethnicities. And so I'm wondering where
that tension lived in you, because you know, I grew
(05:37):
up and rebelled and sort of moved pretty far away
from all that you grew up and ultimately became a rabbi. Well,
I had my rebellion. But I think that for me
as a kid, I was always very very connected spiritually
to God, to talk to God all the time, had
a running conversation with God. God was my best friend.
And especially because I experienced tremendous trauma in my first
(05:58):
ten years of life, I drew on that in a
very deep way, Like I very much turned to God
and prayed to God. Those were all true for me,
and what was also true for me in terms of
the tension was that I also was you know, I
was an athlete. I was an Abbot. Sports were like
you know, my other religion, Like I lived in in
breed sports together with my twin brother, we were always
(06:21):
out in the field and always playing after school and
playing in school is one of the ways that I
used sports to natigate socially, Like you know, I was
popular because I was a good athlete and so on.
So the world of sports was also very much a
part of that world, but also with girls and sexuality
and all manner of just growing up and being a
human being. I think that the tension, you know, came
(06:42):
to full full on a tension and rebellion of course,
around puberty and sexuality. But I also think that there
was also a lingering sense of guilt, because I think
it's a model that at you at least for me,
I never fully felt like we were as orthodox as
we should be or as secular as we should be,
Like it never nothing, nothing ever felt like it landed
(07:03):
Like you know, my cousins who were much more observed,
much more orthodox, felt like they had a less tense life,
and I was wondered if they were the real one
the real orthodox, the real observant ones. And then on
the other hand, I also, you know, I wasn't so
involved in Jewish life that I couldn't imagine falling in
love with a non Jewish girl and living a completely
(07:26):
non Jewish life in somewhere or non religious life. So
I think that those tensions we used to go on
Saturday afternoons, I think once I hit puberty, my best
friend Yets father was a guy in ecologist and their
home was like a like a five minute walking months
and on Saturday afternoon on Shabbat, on the Sabbath after
we had a religious lunch and sang our religious songs
(07:47):
and really pined and yearned with my dad for you know,
for God and for love and for spirituality. We would
walk over to his house where his parents were not home,
and we were introduced to the world of inappropriate movies
or in a magazines. You know, So that guilt of
like both, you know, the rebellion was there but also
(08:08):
was held intention with feeling like you were sinning when
you were just being an average young boy was always
there and so there was never like you know, remember
the song from Depeche Moden. I was a kid like,
you know, it's a it's a sin. I don't remember
that song. It goes something like, um, everything I've ever done,
everything I ever do, it's a sin. As I look
(08:30):
back up right, it's like as I look back upon
my life, it's always with a sense of shame. I've
always been the one to blame. So I kind of
feel like the religious patriarchy and some of the attitudes
of Orthodoxy that we're intention also we're deeply scarring, I
think for healthy development. And so those those are some
(08:51):
of the places that I remember everything you just said,
my mind is my mind is blown. You refer to
a childhood trauma. Can you talk about that? Sure? Um,
I was sexually molested in camp when I was seven
year old. I didn't remember it until I was in
(09:13):
my in my twenties, and I then was I had
a series of summers. It began with that summer, but
and then successive summers. I was physically abused by a
number of counselors in camp over the course of three summers.
Those experiences deeply, deeply affected me and left significant starring
(09:34):
that I then had to heal later on in my life.
And when I speak of my spiritual connection to God
or the spirit. That broken heartedness was a deep, a
deep imprint on me that then ultimately led me to
to where I became. But I became as an adult.
Was it the same camp all three summers? No, it wasn't.
(09:57):
What was remarkable, I mean, this is just basically I mean,
it's just like, so, there's a crazy thing. So so
I don't even remember half of the story in the
London in my in my twenties, right, and so I
remember when I remembered it. I was a long story, sure,
But when I was in my early twenties, I had
become a kind of fast ward with my story there
a little bit because after high school I went for
(10:19):
a year to Israel to study abroad. And that's kind
of de rigorous something that a lot of kids were
in the modern Orthodox world will go to for a
year seminary to Israel. It sounds much more like a
very serious year than what it really is. It's just
an exposure to being away from your family before you
go to college. And most parents hope that the kids
don't become too religious, and they just get religious enough
(10:40):
so that when they do go to college, they don't
you know, you don't marry somebody wasn't Jewish, and it's
just a chance to him to have an experience of
learning intensively. And I basically came back ultra Orthodox, like
I went as a modern Orthodox kid who was going
to go to college. And I come back after two
years in Israel, and I am like, full on looking
(11:01):
like my cousins. You know, when I was a kid,
my cousins with the long you know, dreadlocks and the
whole thing. I looked like a Hussad. And then I
go on this deeply religious trip for about five years,
and during that time I really have a break, like
I really have a break in reality. I go into
mystical states and I wind up getting completely lost in religion.
And I wake up five years into this, and I
(11:23):
realized that religion was essentially what I was using to
cover over some really really deep wounds in my heart
and in my psyche. And so I begin this journey
of healing. And the first thing I read and watch
is this John Bradshaw character from the nineties who is
the father of the Inner child work and the father
of homecoming and healing the shame that binds you. All
(11:44):
these really really vital works that exposed the American public to,
like for the first time, to these really profound notions
of pathology within the family and also how family systems
work and all this kind of business. And I just
get toned on and I wind up climbing like. One
of the only people doing Bradshaw's therapy in New York
at the time ninety three is a therapist out an
(12:09):
ice Lip, Long Island. It's about two hours from my
house in Great Night, Like I have to go to
the city. I'm going to go to Manhattan and to
go to ice Lip. It's a huge trip. And I
go out there and I'm in the therapist office and
I'm doing this kind of deep meditative work with with
this therapist, and all of a sudden, I retrieved this
memory of being a seven year old in a camp
(12:31):
called Camp Tagola and having a counselor, and this counselor
I remember him lesting me. Now, what I remembered before
that event was that I remember that I had been
beaten up so one evening. I don't remember being in it,
but I remember it from the outside as it were.
He was supposed to take me to the bathroom and
to go every night I to the bathroom, and instead
(12:55):
he winds up beating me up, and the lights go
on and the camp comes in and they stay me,
and he gets fired and they take him away. Right,
that's the part I remembered, But I didn't remember the
molestation until I was twenty three. I never ceased to
(13:16):
be amazed at what the psyche can handle, by which
I mean what our psyches can push down out of
reach until we're strong enough to handle whatever has been
buried there. It's like we have these different memory baskets.
David's memory of being beaten up is awful, but he's
able to retain it. He has a certain amount of
(13:38):
agency in that story. The counselor is fired, there are witnesses,
but the sexual molestation there are no witnesses, only a
potent residue of shame that pushes that memory into a
far distant basket where it remains for nearly two decades.
(14:02):
It was just so painful, and not just in terms
the social stigma, but it was just so painful, you know,
that level of violation. It was just so intimate and
so connected with the shame, the shame that children experience
in those moments, because it's also wrapped up with connection,
but it was like a connection, or at least the
way that these at least often play out is that
(14:23):
you're young and absolutely vulnerable and trusting and open. And
so it was a kind of a deep scar for me.
And what was most what was most remarkable to me
was that that in my family and I have a
very loving and courageous and strong family, there remarkable people,
and this never made its way into our collective identity
(14:46):
and memory, like it doesn't exist. Nobody wanted to talk
about it. There's no there was no room to talk
about it. Even when we do remember abuse and we
get to talk about it, often those who love us
find it hard to hear. And I think that is
also part of the way that the fear manifests to,
is that we're so afraid to talk about something that
(15:06):
makes us uncomfortable. We're so collectively averse to discomfort by nature.
It's remarkable, right well, And it's also then this kind
of merry go round of secrecy, silence, shame, secrecy, silence, shame,
Around and around we go and one feeds the other.
(15:29):
Right when I remembered it, it was deeply liberating for
me to have had that secret as it were surfaced
for me and to tell the truth about it. And
it was actually, you know, I want to get ahead
of myselfiters and how I became a rabbi ultimately, But
that that moment in my life, it was when I
left religion and then went on a journey for about
a decade or so healing that was catalyzed by my
(15:53):
deep desire to not use religion or anything else as
a way to cover over the necessary healing what what
young and others have called like you're legitimate suffering, like
a legitimate suffering that as a human being I needed
to experience and heal so that when I did come
(16:13):
essentially back to religion and back to some of these
other things, that I wouldn't use it as a way
to cover up secrets. Such a powerful notion. I mean,
we know that we use things to cover over what
David calls our necessary healing. Some of us use drugs, booze, sex,
(16:36):
the internet, dizziness, distraction, I could go on. But David
becomes aware that he's using religion as a means to
cover over, to avoid that necessary healing, and that awareness
takes him on a journey that ultimately brings him back
to God, but on very different terms. Can you talk
(16:58):
a little bit about that decade, Aid and what that
journey was and then the decision to go to rabbinic
school and become a rabbi. Sure, I know many of
your listeners and certainly you're familiar with Alice Miller's booth.
You know that was originally called Prisoners of Childhood, and
then it was the Drama of the Gifted Child. And
I think that my own journey over the course of
(17:20):
that decade was very much I was living as a
waiter in New York City. I kind of made a
living as a waiter. I kind of worked at night,
and during the day I was doing this deep work.
I got very involved in in yoga, I got very
involved in Eastern meditation and other modalities of healing. You know,
I just, you know, all of a sudden, it was
like I was in New York City. Is that the
(17:43):
cornucopia of life? Like I experienced aliveness and that was
like my number one desire during this ten years was
to really reconnect with the quality of aliveness that I
had known as a child, that I had lost to
some degree after these traumas and that I had lost
also in my teams, and that certainly would have came
a religious fanatic. For five years, I was completely in
the closet as a as a human and so here
(18:05):
I you know, I went through those ten years of
self exploration and travel, and you know, I became like
a bit of a spiritual dilettante. I sat meditation retreats,
I enrolled in massage school for ACU pressure, I was
a teacher of plotis. I did a lot of these
things over you know, I could go through a whole
list of them, but all of them were basically in
(18:27):
some way in service of self healing, self discovery, self empowerment, aliveness, UM.
And so that's essentially the decade. It was. It was
a lot of experiences and a lot of healing, but
one thing that I couldn't move away from was a
spiritual calling. And I felt like the spiritual calling in
(18:47):
everything that I was doing was calling me back to
my religious tradition, but to see it and feel it
in a way that was now informed by the things
that I had experienced in other places, you know, more meditation,
more aliveness, more embodied approach to sexuality into being a
human are just a much more liberal and open ended
(19:07):
way to be in Jewish life. That's essentially how it
came back. We'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. When David is just two years out of
(19:31):
rabbinical school in two thousand six, he creates a community
on the Upper West Side of New York City called
Roma MoU. Today, Roma MoU is one of the most
beloved institutions in contemporary Jewish culture, a welcoming, experiential, irreverently pious,
intergenerational Jewish community that elevates and transforms individuals and communities
(19:54):
into more compassionate human beings. Its stores are open to
spiritual seekers and skept dicks alike, sharing a path that
celebrates our wholeness and provides practical, grounded ways to heal
our brokenness. In other words, David builds a spiritual world
on his terms, one that rises up from his own trauma,
(20:16):
his stops and starts his healing journey. In Judaism, there
is a Hebrew phrase tikun olam, which translates into repair
the world. It's all we can try to do for me.
It was an amazing journey of retrieval. You know, we
(20:38):
often speak about in the healing word regression in service
of the ego, where you go back to bring something forward.
And I think that me going back to Judaism was
a desire to go back and take what was really
beautiful there and pull it through into my present reality.
And it wasn't easy because in my thirties I was
still in this kind of fantasy bond, which is what
some people call the way that we still look at
(21:00):
our parents as God's He can be in a fantasy
bond with your religious tradition, like I think, I was
still thinking the Judaism was perfect and God given him,
and I was to blame, right, it's all. You know.
I just had a ten years of walking away and
I was gonna heal myself. But then I was gonna
come back to the Orthodox again, and I almost got
caught in there. And thankfully I tried an Orthodox or
(21:20):
clinical school that was modern when I tried coming back
to Judaism in my early thirties, and luckily, I felt
like I had a size ten soul and its size
four religious tradition and it just didn't work. You know,
there were enough blisters on my soul. At that point,
I said, Nope, that's not working, and I left. And
I'm lucky to have met my teacher, whose name is
(21:40):
Rabbi Zalman Shakter. And when I met him, it was
like a chiropractic adjustment on my soul, like I just
I felt like I met somebody who was in it.
He was eighty years old when I met him, and
I was in my thirties, and he had already been
through a Hasidic ultra Orthodox jew who then found the
counterculture of the sixties and had had done all of
(22:02):
these things, but had created a very new age, open ended,
deeply spiritual, meditative, but liberal expression of Jewish life. And
when I met him in two thousand and four, he
ordained me. And two years later I started this community
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and that was it,
and kind of like you know, it's now fourteen years
(22:22):
since we started it, and as you know, it's it's
grown and we have more than one. We have one
in Brooklyn too, and we started our own seminary Shiva
to train people and to engage people in this kind
of more open hearted, embodied Jewish expression. So David build
and makes his own home, spiritually speaking, which becomes a
(22:44):
home to so many others. He marries his wife Ariel,
and they start a family. This might seem like an ending,
all wrapped up in a bow, but of course that
isn't how life unfolds, not for David, not for any
of us. We got married a dozen in dates, and
we had our first child and new dozen nine there.
(23:07):
And I think one of the most remarkable things is
that the thing about secrets, and the thing also about
karma or or whatever it is that we carry whatever
we want to call it, you know, our life pattern
or the patterns of previous lives, whatever your belief system is.
But like the structure of how experience imprints itself on
us and how we are, we are we're made by that,
(23:28):
and we also brings who we are before that. It's
like all of that stuff, Like that stuff doesn't actually
work itself out. Until it works itself out, we're not done.
The thing about secrets is that we think that that
not dealing with them is actually a useful way to
make the issue go away. If we don't see it,
it's you know, out of sight, out of mind, or
(23:49):
split off from us. It's shadow but as young said,
and others said, it lingers and someone heard once a
secret seat, you know, secret seat. And so the family
secrets that we carry and our own personal secrets that
we carry will work themselves out the more awake we
want to be. They'll just we'll find them in our lives.
We'll just see him kind of working themselves out in
(24:10):
our life. Meaning it'll show up. It'll keep showing up
as a pattern, will keep showing up. And I think
that when we had kids, when Orel and I had kids,
it wasn't surprising to me in certain ways that our
eldest kid was gonna have a lot of the energy
that I had as a kid, and that I would
have a chance to like try to meet that child
(24:31):
in a certain way describe there for me. So there
is them, our eldest child. He's now eleven years old.
He's um, charismatic, brilliant, highly verbal, what some people call
twice exceptional, meaning like he's off the charts in terms
of his intelligence, and he's also off the charts in
terms of his extreme sensitivity and emotional sensitivity. He has
(24:56):
a number of learning challenges that he's working with, it
are working with with him dyslexia and other things, and
he is He's there. Bear off the charts. Bear is
off the charts in ways that would be a huge
(25:16):
challenge to any parent. Bear is the oldest of three.
There are two even younger children at home. So one
of the last few years it's been like for you
as a family contending with embracing the challenges that Bear
has presented. They've been very, very difficult for us, you know,
(25:38):
from the last since since I guess two or two
or three years old, we are we realized that there
were some issues that were happening that had to do
with the impulse control and his own kind of emotional
regulation issues, frustration being very high, and frustration moving from
(26:00):
being frustrated or being sad or disappointed into anger. And UM,
I think that we as parents were so prepared and
so excited, and so I felt so blessed, and we
still do. But I think early on we were we
realized that we um, something wasn't working, and we were
completely in the dark, and we tried our best to
(26:24):
make sense of what some of the things that were happening,
and it was really really hard. Nobody really understood totally
what was going on. And we struggled. And I think
that someone once said that it was a struggle to
keep the house safe. And it was very hard to
get Bary to go to school in the morning. It
was we're hard to get into good a bed at night.
We were reading up on oppositional definance disorder and O
D D and and all the other there's you know, labels,
(26:47):
and nothing exactly fit. And and we were just beside
ourselves because this is our first child, and all parents,
you know, your your first child. You're just getting your
feet under you as a parent, so you just want
to feel like you know what you're doing. And and
we were working so hard. You know, we've had so
many books on it, and we've all done so much
working ourselves, and here we were really stymied by this
(27:08):
soul and trying to figure out how best to parent
and how best to be with him. And the number
of theories and the number of approaches were legion. I mean,
you know this too, right, And it's like everybody has
an idea on how to help and what the right approaches,
and you know, are you being too leaning or not
being leaning? En offer? And how do you make boundaries?
And you know, everybody's got an opinion about ary thing.
(27:29):
And we struggled. We were being shamed that many people.
People shamed us for and blamed us assume that it
was our fault, that we must have done something wrong
or we're not, you know, parenting appropriately. And so we
we struggled, and we couldn't really tell any when I
was very close group of people that we did tell
that we were struggling with. But it was that was
(27:50):
that compounded the problem because we didn't know what was
going on, and we couldn't share how confused we were
or that it was even happening for that matter, right,
and I meanwhile, you have too younger kids at home, right,
let me get two other kids exactly eventually. And you also,
it's coinciding with this astounding growth of Roma MoU and
(28:13):
you meaning more and more, two, more and more people
as a rabbi, as a pastoral rabbi, as a kind
of you're not going to like my saying this, but
like rock star kind of from the BMA, you know,
from the podium, Rabbi was incredible, powerful charisma and this
(28:34):
is happening in your home. How did you contend with that?
That sort of split between deeply private and very public.
It was how I mean, it was how I could
just say it was at the time in my life
and where I felt that I had spent so much
of my life's energies being able to trying to arrive
(28:57):
at a place in my in my life and in
my career where my desire to serve, my desire to shine,
my desire to give my gifts to the world or
and have them received. It was all happening. And leaving
the house every morning was my My whole nervous system
was completely shock like. Every day was three days. It
was the morning was one day, then there was my
work day, and then my evenings. That's three days. It
(29:21):
was a twenty one day week. And on top of that,
on top of that, my public life required me and
the people who listen to this notice of your clergy,
of your ministers in priests and got by the moment
so on that it required me in any given day
to be at the death bed, at the bedside of
somebody who's dying with cancer, who was in their prime,
the tragedy of that, To move from night into dealing
(29:43):
with the joy of a wedding couple, to move from
night into into the responsibility to write a stellar sermon
or something that involves really you know, analytic thinking and
eloquence and communication. Like, the responsibilities of my job were
immense on every level, intellectually, usually emotionally, physically, And I'll
talk about that to go home and I feel like
(30:04):
that it was almost impossible for for me and my
wife to create the home environment that was safe for everybody.
And we had little kids, and so people in the
community started to murmur, you know, why can't we why
aren't we being invited over the and you know, to
the rabbi's home. You know, what do we do? So
we were in a cash way too, because we couldn't
ask for the support of the community, because it's one
(30:27):
of those things that as a pastor, as you know,
as a therapist, like it's not a reciprocal we're not
even in relationship. It's not like you know, and when
it's happened, by the way, the community hasn't always received it.
The community looks up to you as a father figure,
a mother figure, an authority figure. There's all of this happening,
and so you don't tell them what's going on in
your private life and yet it can not impact your
(30:49):
public life, and then you can't even get the support
of the community that you found it, and I found
it because that's not the role that they play with me,
and it's part of the circle that's double bind. And
so it was depleting and exhausting and enervating. And those
are hard years. Those are hard years, very hard years.
(31:11):
So how did those hard years come to a head
or how did you come to you know, sort of
the next chapter in this story for you? I mean,
I think that the next chapter began when we acknowledged,
like like a good twelve step first step, we acknowledged
that there was a problem that we couldn't fix it
(31:32):
on our own. We started to talk about it and
we realized that it wasn't because we were bad parents,
and we didn't have to be ashamed. We could we
could seek help, and we did seek Helvin. I mean,
we worked hard on ourselves to learn how to be
the parents like he needed us to be because he's
so unusual, and we had to change and we had
(31:54):
to grow ourselves and we had to get a lot
of support and we were still figuring out, but we
are getting help. But even the things are at times
still very hard. We do definitely see things getting better.
I guess what's most important is that we talk about
it with each other and with others, and in our family.
We talked about the hard things and the big feelings,
(32:15):
and we work hard to make it safe to sit.
But what feels uncomfortable, we see that that's really where
the healing comes from. We'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. One of the things that I
(32:36):
think is so beautiful and remarkable is that journey from
I have to keep this a secret or I have
you know, I have this role in people's lives. Two
you're talking to me, you're talking to us to these listeners,
which means that you have spoken about this with your community.
(32:57):
You you did reach a point where are holding it close.
Keeping its secret was more painful then not. Was there
a turning point or was it a gradual thing? I
think that what happens, what happens in our intimate spaces,
(33:17):
what happens in our homes, right, what happens in our homes,
What happens in our in our own home, in our
own heart, what happens you know, when the lights are closed,
no one's watching is a real earmark. It's a real
it's an indicator for our our society at large. And
I know for myself, not just as a public figure,
but just as a human being. And I'm not advocating
(33:38):
for us to tell the whole world every secret that
we have. And there are things that are that are
obviously intimate, and there are things that should be shared
only with a group of people that are you know,
our intimate family or intimate friends and so on. But
the energy that it took for me to not acknowledge
the impact of something right, to not disclose and not tell,
(33:58):
to not share, and to be owner about like what
I was holding and how it was impacting me and
by extension out with impacting my community. It was too great.
It was too great to hold that, it was too much.
It was it was literally physically I could feel that
my body. I couldn't take it anymore, and it was
impacting everyone. So for example, a couple of you know,
(34:19):
this past year, Roman whom I'm very proud of this
in our Jewie community, Romo became the first synagode to
ever have a Shabbat of the child. And on the
Shabbat of the Child, which was co sponsored with the
Center for Child Abuse and for Domestic Abuse. I spoke
publicly for the second time, but really for the first
time in a real way about my own experiences as
a child, and the number of people that wrote to
me afterwards who shared with me their story was just
(34:42):
it was just, you know, it was unbelievable that I could,
in some way for them to hear me as a
rabbi speaking from the pulpit about my vulnerability, my wound,
that you know, for them to be able to say, yeah,
me too, like him too, he has it too, and
to become fluent in that way of airing the depth
of our power, which is also the depth of our wound. Right,
(35:05):
that that that wound was there and that I could
share it, I think that was for me a very
it was liberating for me. And also when it comes
to this family secret, as it were, that it was
very liberating to just to say, you know, this is
what it looks like in our home daily. You know,
I don't want your sympathy per sage and you know
how hard it is, and it invites a kind of
generosity like the danger, of course, is that it might
(35:25):
invite a scarcity, might to listen to somebody else a
feeling of awkwardness. As we said, they might shame us,
they might walk away, they might do whatever they can
do the things that they might say do some of
the things that we're most terrified they're going to do. Right,
But it also when we close ourselves off because of
that fear, we also close ourselves off to the generosity
that might come as a response as well, someone saying
(35:48):
you know, wow, that really touches me. I feel you
in a way that I never would have felt. You
your humanity and I identify with you right. I am
also struggling. I'm also strangling, and that's a very profound
gift to give to someone. When we share our stories,
they say, I can feel your humanity, and I feel
more connected to you. As we near the end of
(36:10):
David's story, I find myself thinking of one of Emily
Dickinson's sonnets, in which she writes, my life closed twice
before its close, which I take to mean we aren't
meted out a certain amount of difficulty in measured doses.
So I wonder how does David hold these two traumas,
(36:32):
the one that happened to him at age seven and
then the struggles of his firstborn son, who is so
like him in so many ways. I see them all
as one piece. The first thing I feel is that
seeing my son in a way and it struggles that
he's had opened me up too, was generous to my
(36:53):
own parents in a way that I never would have
had in any of that point in my life, because
I can see however I am, and I can look
back and say, wow, as I heard someone would say,
I might have had a ten gallant soul in a
you know, a couple of court family, you know, a
ten five family with a ten gallant soul. Like there's
(37:14):
things that I just know and connect with in terms
of who I was now in retrospect that I never
would have. And so when I look back, I see
one through line from that moment when I was seven,
all the way from now, which is my whole life's
goal is to create a space that is safe enough
to stay in the room. It's uncomfortable, but like we
(37:35):
are strong enough to hold it. We're strong enough to
hold this pain we're throwing up and to hold this truth,
and that strength will set us free. It's not just
that the truth will set us free. The truth and
our capacity to hold it right. And we can build
that capacity by returning to safety, returning to the messages
(37:57):
of love and compassion and goodness. All of those things
to me are part of one seamless line from when
I was seven until now, which is, you know, how
do we create an environment and a container where people
feel safe enough to be true, safe enough to be honest,
and safe enough to heal. That's what the Holy is
for me. That's what the Holy is for me. The
(38:21):
quality of that, you know, running conversation that you had
with God as a child. You know, God was your
best friend, that was when you turned to and then
you went through this whole journey of becoming ultra Orthodox,
and and then your decade long quest, is the quality
of your conversation with God today in a way similar
(38:47):
to what it was when you were a child, or
has it has it changed? You know? I sometimes wish
that I had that child like ease, and it's been
complicated over the years. I went through a period where
I was so angry at God that the only thing
I could say was I could only chris God out
for a while, and I allowed myself those feelings. And
(39:11):
I've gone through periods where I didn't believe in the
personal God or I still do. And you know, the
face of God has changed so much from me over
the years, but it hasn't eliminated that space. You know,
that space to me, and it's sophisticated as my belief
in God or you know, or my understanding what God
is has grown and sophisticated as it has been. You know,
(39:32):
there is still that simple place that when I closed
my eyes, it's not hard for me access, like the
heart of a longing that I think that was something
that I experienced as a child. I experienced it with
my father, with the way that he's sang and our
you know, on Shabbat, there was a pathos, a kind
(39:53):
of the childlike quality. Was not playful with God. It
wasn't like, oh God, let's go for a walk through
the park. You know that it's much later on, but
God was still the one that I turned to, especially
in moments of pain and moans of longing and alments
of yearning. And for me, it's not hard at all
when I closed my eyes in prayer to re access
that place. And it doesn't feel sad to me in
(40:16):
the way that's sad can be depressing. It feels alive
and invertent like. It feels like like when I'm in
that aliveness, which is a yearning, I feel very much
privileged to just to be, you know, just to be,
and it holds all of the hopes that I have
for myself and also the hopes that I have for
(40:36):
humanity and for the globe, and for a longing for
there to be peace and goodness. And so I saved
that place for myself when I closed my eyes. Between
me and my God, we meet there, exchanging glances over
a kind of see of of longing for a world,
but we only have glimpses of it that I pray
(41:00):
made manifest. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production.
(41:27):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight secret zero. That's secret and
(41:49):
then the number zero. You can also find us on
Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com,
slash Family secrets Pot, and Twitter at FAM secret Spot.
(42:22):
For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
I look back, I see one through line from that
moment when I was seven, all the way from now,
which is my whole left goal is to create a
space that is safe enough to stay in the room.
It's uncomfortable, but like we are strong enough to hold it.
(00:24):
We're strong enough to hold this pain. We're strong up
to hold this truth, and that strength will set us free.
That's Rabbi David Inger, one of the most celebrated and
respected spiritual leaders in America. I know firsthand the way
David holds the pain and truth of others. He has
held mine more than once, and, as is so often
(00:48):
true of those who have open, empathic, compassionate hearts, those
hearts have been cracked wide open. As the man once said,
that's how the light gets in. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
(01:12):
this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
M hmm, Well, I'm the youngest of four children. The
youngest is kind of maybe funny. I'm have a twin brother,
(01:36):
but we're two minutes or so apart, at least that's
what they told us. Grew up in Great Nick, Long Island.
My father was a I guess a refugee kind of
came over from Germany and I think he was five
and he was born to an Orthodox Jewish family from
Berlin and made his way here and grew up in
(01:58):
Forest Hills in Queensland with his younger brother. And that
my mother. She was sixteen when they had and they
got married when she was seventeen and had my two
older sisters, beteen Enemar, and then we were born in
nineteen sixty nine, but moved to Great Neck in nineteen
seventy one, so I grew up in an affluent suburb
(02:20):
of New York. My father was a very well known
attorney and the real estate real estate attorney and well
respected member of our Jewish committee, one of the founders
and kind of engines behind the modern Orthodox Jewish family
that we had in the community that we lived in.
And my mom was worked at home. She was a homemaker.
(02:41):
Can you describe for listeners who don't know the distinctions
what it would have been like to grow up in
a modern Orthodox Jewish home it's a great question. I
think that modern Orthodoxy, as opposed to Orthodoxy in general,
kind of traditional Jewish observance generally tended to be slightly
and you know, have an antipathy, a kind of tension
(03:03):
with mcgernity. And so traditional Orthodoxy religion was paramount, and
religion was and religious observance was deeply insular and deeply
protective and purl kial right. And in the nineteen hundreds,
in nineties century rather in Germany, there was kind of
a movement to integrate both Magernity and science and all
(03:25):
of these features of the modern life in some way
with Orthodox Jewish life. And so modern Orthodoxy was decidedly
this hybrid between deeply engaged in Jewish life, people engaged
in what many would consider to be Orthodoxy and observance
and and all of the strictures and the rules and
all of the culture of zag but together with an
(03:48):
intention with and sometimes the tension, you know which one
in this tension modernity and kind of being a typical American,
so we grew up like that, we you know, on
the outside of dressed like the typical American and typical
kids who lived in the suburbs we didn't look any
on the outside. We didn't look any different than any
of the other kids that we're growing up with. But
(04:09):
we went to a school that had you know, Biblical
studies and Talmutic studies and all the religious studies. And
then we also ate Kosher and we kept shabat in
a very orthodox way, meaning no lights and no phones,
and you know, the prayers on Friday night and going
to Sending God and Saturday morning very very big deal,
and you know, all the holidays, and so we kind
(04:31):
of lived this dual life that sought synthesis but didn't
always achieve it. And that's kind of like what the
Orthodox min Orthodox really really I grew up with. You know,
we dated, but like we're not supposed to were sort
of you know, we dateated girls and you weren't supposed
touch them. That was considered to be you know, sherman
to get you know, allowed to touch someone that you're
not married to. And so you can imagine Danny and
(04:53):
you know that as well, like you can imagine the
tension between being you know, a kid who loved depeche
Mode and R. E. M And all the great music
and very involved in American cultural life, but also had
this weird double life of being an Orthodox Jew you
can't always work out. Yeah, it's so interesting hearing you
say all this, because we grew up similarly in that sense, um,
(05:15):
And I mean I felt that tension tremendously because there
wasn't a community around my parents and me who were
also modern Orthodox. We were sort of this modern Orthodox
family plunked into a neighborhood that was a mishmash of
many other faiths and ethnicities. And so I'm wondering where
that tension lived in you, because you know, I grew
(05:37):
up and rebelled and sort of moved pretty far away
from all that you grew up and ultimately became a rabbi. Well,
I had my rebellion. But I think that for me
as a kid, I was always very very connected spiritually
to God, to talk to God all the time, had
a running conversation with God. God was my best friend.
And especially because I experienced tremendous trauma in my first
(05:58):
ten years of life, I drew on that in a
very deep way, Like I very much turned to God
and prayed to God. Those were all true for me,
and what was also true for me in terms of
the tension was that I also was you know, I
was an athlete. I was an Abbot. Sports were like
you know, my other religion, Like I lived in in
breed sports together with my twin brother, we were always
(06:21):
out in the field and always playing after school and
playing in school is one of the ways that I
used sports to natigate socially, Like you know, I was
popular because I was a good athlete and so on.
So the world of sports was also very much a
part of that world, but also with girls and sexuality
and all manner of just growing up and being a
human being. I think that the tension, you know, came
(06:42):
to full full on a tension and rebellion of course,
around puberty and sexuality. But I also think that there
was also a lingering sense of guilt, because I think
it's a model that at you at least for me,
I never fully felt like we were as orthodox as
we should be or as secular as we should be,
Like it never nothing, nothing ever felt like it landed
(07:03):
Like you know, my cousins who were much more observed,
much more orthodox, felt like they had a less tense life,
and I was wondered if they were the real one
the real orthodox, the real observant ones. And then on
the other hand, I also, you know, I wasn't so
involved in Jewish life that I couldn't imagine falling in
love with a non Jewish girl and living a completely
(07:26):
non Jewish life in somewhere or non religious life. So
I think that those tensions we used to go on
Saturday afternoons, I think once I hit puberty, my best
friend Yets father was a guy in ecologist and their
home was like a like a five minute walking months
and on Saturday afternoon on Shabbat, on the Sabbath after
we had a religious lunch and sang our religious songs
(07:47):
and really pined and yearned with my dad for you know,
for God and for love and for spirituality. We would
walk over to his house where his parents were not home,
and we were introduced to the world of inappropriate movies
or in a magazines. You know, So that guilt of
like both, you know, the rebellion was there but also
(08:08):
was held intention with feeling like you were sinning when
you were just being an average young boy was always
there and so there was never like you know, remember
the song from Depeche Moden. I was a kid like,
you know, it's a it's a sin. I don't remember
that song. It goes something like, um, everything I've ever done,
everything I ever do, it's a sin. As I look
(08:30):
back up right, it's like as I look back upon
my life, it's always with a sense of shame. I've
always been the one to blame. So I kind of
feel like the religious patriarchy and some of the attitudes
of Orthodoxy that we're intention also we're deeply scarring, I
think for healthy development. And so those those are some
(08:51):
of the places that I remember everything you just said,
my mind is my mind is blown. You refer to
a childhood trauma. Can you talk about that? Sure? Um,
I was sexually molested in camp when I was seven
year old. I didn't remember it until I was in
(09:13):
my in my twenties, and I then was I had
a series of summers. It began with that summer, but
and then successive summers. I was physically abused by a
number of counselors in camp over the course of three summers.
Those experiences deeply, deeply affected me and left significant starring
(09:34):
that I then had to heal later on in my life.
And when I speak of my spiritual connection to God
or the spirit. That broken heartedness was a deep, a
deep imprint on me that then ultimately led me to
to where I became. But I became as an adult.
Was it the same camp all three summers? No, it wasn't.
(09:57):
What was remarkable, I mean, this is just basically I mean,
it's just like, so, there's a crazy thing. So so
I don't even remember half of the story in the
London in my in my twenties, right, and so I
remember when I remembered it. I was a long story, sure,
But when I was in my early twenties, I had
become a kind of fast ward with my story there
a little bit because after high school I went for
(10:19):
a year to Israel to study abroad. And that's kind
of de rigorous something that a lot of kids were
in the modern Orthodox world will go to for a
year seminary to Israel. It sounds much more like a
very serious year than what it really is. It's just
an exposure to being away from your family before you
go to college. And most parents hope that the kids
don't become too religious, and they just get religious enough
(10:40):
so that when they do go to college, they don't
you know, you don't marry somebody wasn't Jewish, and it's
just a chance to him to have an experience of
learning intensively. And I basically came back ultra Orthodox, like
I went as a modern Orthodox kid who was going
to go to college. And I come back after two
years in Israel, and I am like, full on looking
(11:01):
like my cousins. You know, when I was a kid,
my cousins with the long you know, dreadlocks and the
whole thing. I looked like a Hussad. And then I
go on this deeply religious trip for about five years,
and during that time I really have a break, like
I really have a break in reality. I go into
mystical states and I wind up getting completely lost in religion.
And I wake up five years into this, and I
(11:23):
realized that religion was essentially what I was using to
cover over some really really deep wounds in my heart
and in my psyche. And so I begin this journey
of healing. And the first thing I read and watch
is this John Bradshaw character from the nineties who is
the father of the Inner child work and the father
of homecoming and healing the shame that binds you. All
(11:44):
these really really vital works that exposed the American public to,
like for the first time, to these really profound notions
of pathology within the family and also how family systems
work and all this kind of business. And I just
get toned on and I wind up climbing like. One
of the only people doing Bradshaw's therapy in New York
at the time ninety three is a therapist out an
(12:09):
ice Lip, Long Island. It's about two hours from my
house in Great Night, Like I have to go to
the city. I'm going to go to Manhattan and to
go to ice Lip. It's a huge trip. And I
go out there and I'm in the therapist office and
I'm doing this kind of deep meditative work with with
this therapist, and all of a sudden, I retrieved this
memory of being a seven year old in a camp
(12:31):
called Camp Tagola and having a counselor, and this counselor
I remember him lesting me. Now, what I remembered before
that event was that I remember that I had been
beaten up so one evening. I don't remember being in it,
but I remember it from the outside as it were.
He was supposed to take me to the bathroom and
to go every night I to the bathroom, and instead
(12:55):
he winds up beating me up, and the lights go
on and the camp comes in and they stay me,
and he gets fired and they take him away. Right,
that's the part I remembered, But I didn't remember the
molestation until I was twenty three. I never ceased to
(13:16):
be amazed at what the psyche can handle, by which
I mean what our psyches can push down out of
reach until we're strong enough to handle whatever has been
buried there. It's like we have these different memory baskets.
David's memory of being beaten up is awful, but he's
able to retain it. He has a certain amount of
(13:38):
agency in that story. The counselor is fired, there are witnesses,
but the sexual molestation there are no witnesses, only a
potent residue of shame that pushes that memory into a
far distant basket where it remains for nearly two decades.
(14:02):
It was just so painful, and not just in terms
the social stigma, but it was just so painful, you know,
that level of violation. It was just so intimate and
so connected with the shame, the shame that children experience
in those moments, because it's also wrapped up with connection,
but it was like a connection, or at least the
way that these at least often play out is that
(14:23):
you're young and absolutely vulnerable and trusting and open. And
so it was a kind of a deep scar for me.
And what was most what was most remarkable to me
was that that in my family and I have a
very loving and courageous and strong family, there remarkable people,
and this never made its way into our collective identity
(14:46):
and memory, like it doesn't exist. Nobody wanted to talk
about it. There's no there was no room to talk
about it. Even when we do remember abuse and we
get to talk about it, often those who love us
find it hard to hear. And I think that is
also part of the way that the fear manifests to,
is that we're so afraid to talk about something that
(15:06):
makes us uncomfortable. We're so collectively averse to discomfort by nature.
It's remarkable, right well, And it's also then this kind
of merry go round of secrecy, silence, shame, secrecy, silence, shame,
Around and around we go and one feeds the other.
(15:29):
Right when I remembered it, it was deeply liberating for
me to have had that secret as it were surfaced
for me and to tell the truth about it. And
it was actually, you know, I want to get ahead
of myselfiters and how I became a rabbi ultimately, But
that that moment in my life, it was when I
left religion and then went on a journey for about
a decade or so healing that was catalyzed by my
(15:53):
deep desire to not use religion or anything else as
a way to cover over the necessary healing what what
young and others have called like you're legitimate suffering, like
a legitimate suffering that as a human being I needed
to experience and heal so that when I did come
(16:13):
essentially back to religion and back to some of these
other things, that I wouldn't use it as a way
to cover up secrets. Such a powerful notion. I mean,
we know that we use things to cover over what
David calls our necessary healing. Some of us use drugs, booze, sex,
(16:36):
the internet, dizziness, distraction, I could go on. But David
becomes aware that he's using religion as a means to
cover over, to avoid that necessary healing, and that awareness
takes him on a journey that ultimately brings him back
to God, but on very different terms. Can you talk
(16:58):
a little bit about that decade, Aid and what that
journey was and then the decision to go to rabbinic
school and become a rabbi. Sure, I know many of
your listeners and certainly you're familiar with Alice Miller's booth.
You know that was originally called Prisoners of Childhood, and
then it was the Drama of the Gifted Child. And
I think that my own journey over the course of
(17:20):
that decade was very much I was living as a
waiter in New York City. I kind of made a
living as a waiter. I kind of worked at night,
and during the day I was doing this deep work.
I got very involved in in yoga, I got very
involved in Eastern meditation and other modalities of healing. You know,
I just, you know, all of a sudden, it was
like I was in New York City. Is that the
(17:43):
cornucopia of life? Like I experienced aliveness and that was
like my number one desire during this ten years was
to really reconnect with the quality of aliveness that I
had known as a child, that I had lost to
some degree after these traumas and that I had lost
also in my teams, and that certainly would have came
a religious fanatic. For five years, I was completely in
the closet as a as a human and so here
(18:05):
I you know, I went through those ten years of
self exploration and travel, and you know, I became like
a bit of a spiritual dilettante. I sat meditation retreats,
I enrolled in massage school for ACU pressure, I was
a teacher of plotis. I did a lot of these
things over you know, I could go through a whole
list of them, but all of them were basically in
(18:27):
some way in service of self healing, self discovery, self empowerment, aliveness, UM.
And so that's essentially the decade. It was. It was
a lot of experiences and a lot of healing, but
one thing that I couldn't move away from was a
spiritual calling. And I felt like the spiritual calling in
(18:47):
everything that I was doing was calling me back to
my religious tradition, but to see it and feel it
in a way that was now informed by the things
that I had experienced in other places, you know, more meditation,
more aliveness, more embodied approach to sexuality into being a
human are just a much more liberal and open ended
(19:07):
way to be in Jewish life. That's essentially how it
came back. We'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. When David is just two years out of
(19:31):
rabbinical school in two thousand six, he creates a community
on the Upper West Side of New York City called
Roma MoU. Today, Roma MoU is one of the most
beloved institutions in contemporary Jewish culture, a welcoming, experiential, irreverently pious,
intergenerational Jewish community that elevates and transforms individuals and communities
(19:54):
into more compassionate human beings. Its stores are open to
spiritual seekers and skept dicks alike, sharing a path that
celebrates our wholeness and provides practical, grounded ways to heal
our brokenness. In other words, David builds a spiritual world
on his terms, one that rises up from his own trauma,
(20:16):
his stops and starts his healing journey. In Judaism, there
is a Hebrew phrase tikun olam, which translates into repair
the world. It's all we can try to do for me.
It was an amazing journey of retrieval. You know, we
(20:38):
often speak about in the healing word regression in service
of the ego, where you go back to bring something forward.
And I think that me going back to Judaism was
a desire to go back and take what was really
beautiful there and pull it through into my present reality.
And it wasn't easy because in my thirties I was
still in this kind of fantasy bond, which is what
some people call the way that we still look at
(21:00):
our parents as God's He can be in a fantasy
bond with your religious tradition, like I think, I was
still thinking the Judaism was perfect and God given him,
and I was to blame, right, it's all. You know.
I just had a ten years of walking away and
I was gonna heal myself. But then I was gonna
come back to the Orthodox again, and I almost got
caught in there. And thankfully I tried an Orthodox or
(21:20):
clinical school that was modern when I tried coming back
to Judaism in my early thirties, and luckily, I felt
like I had a size ten soul and its size
four religious tradition and it just didn't work. You know,
there were enough blisters on my soul. At that point,
I said, Nope, that's not working, and I left. And
I'm lucky to have met my teacher, whose name is
(21:40):
Rabbi Zalman Shakter. And when I met him, it was
like a chiropractic adjustment on my soul, like I just
I felt like I met somebody who was in it.
He was eighty years old when I met him, and
I was in my thirties, and he had already been
through a Hasidic ultra Orthodox jew who then found the
counterculture of the sixties and had had done all of
(22:02):
these things, but had created a very new age, open ended,
deeply spiritual, meditative, but liberal expression of Jewish life. And
when I met him in two thousand and four, he
ordained me. And two years later I started this community
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and that was it,
and kind of like you know, it's now fourteen years
(22:22):
since we started it, and as you know, it's it's
grown and we have more than one. We have one
in Brooklyn too, and we started our own seminary Shiva
to train people and to engage people in this kind
of more open hearted, embodied Jewish expression. So David build
and makes his own home, spiritually speaking, which becomes a
(22:44):
home to so many others. He marries his wife Ariel,
and they start a family. This might seem like an ending,
all wrapped up in a bow, but of course that
isn't how life unfolds, not for David, not for any
of us. We got married a dozen in dates, and
we had our first child and new dozen nine there.
(23:07):
And I think one of the most remarkable things is
that the thing about secrets, and the thing also about
karma or or whatever it is that we carry whatever
we want to call it, you know, our life pattern
or the patterns of previous lives, whatever your belief system is.
But like the structure of how experience imprints itself on
us and how we are, we are we're made by that,
(23:28):
and we also brings who we are before that. It's
like all of that stuff, Like that stuff doesn't actually
work itself out. Until it works itself out, we're not done.
The thing about secrets is that we think that that
not dealing with them is actually a useful way to
make the issue go away. If we don't see it,
it's you know, out of sight, out of mind, or
(23:49):
split off from us. It's shadow but as young said,
and others said, it lingers and someone heard once a
secret seat, you know, secret seat. And so the family
secrets that we carry and our own personal secrets that
we carry will work themselves out the more awake we
want to be. They'll just we'll find them in our lives.
We'll just see him kind of working themselves out in
(24:10):
our life. Meaning it'll show up. It'll keep showing up
as a pattern, will keep showing up. And I think
that when we had kids, when Orel and I had kids,
it wasn't surprising to me in certain ways that our
eldest kid was gonna have a lot of the energy
that I had as a kid, and that I would
have a chance to like try to meet that child
(24:31):
in a certain way describe there for me. So there
is them, our eldest child. He's now eleven years old.
He's um, charismatic, brilliant, highly verbal, what some people call
twice exceptional, meaning like he's off the charts in terms
of his intelligence, and he's also off the charts in
terms of his extreme sensitivity and emotional sensitivity. He has
(24:56):
a number of learning challenges that he's working with, it
are working with with him dyslexia and other things, and
he is He's there. Bear off the charts. Bear is
off the charts in ways that would be a huge
(25:16):
challenge to any parent. Bear is the oldest of three.
There are two even younger children at home. So one
of the last few years it's been like for you
as a family contending with embracing the challenges that Bear
has presented. They've been very, very difficult for us, you know,
(25:38):
from the last since since I guess two or two
or three years old, we are we realized that there
were some issues that were happening that had to do
with the impulse control and his own kind of emotional
regulation issues, frustration being very high, and frustration moving from
(26:00):
being frustrated or being sad or disappointed into anger. And UM,
I think that we as parents were so prepared and
so excited, and so I felt so blessed, and we
still do. But I think early on we were we
realized that we um, something wasn't working, and we were
completely in the dark, and we tried our best to
(26:24):
make sense of what some of the things that were happening,
and it was really really hard. Nobody really understood totally
what was going on. And we struggled. And I think
that someone once said that it was a struggle to
keep the house safe. And it was very hard to
get Bary to go to school in the morning. It
was we're hard to get into good a bed at night.
We were reading up on oppositional definance disorder and O
D D and and all the other there's you know, labels,
(26:47):
and nothing exactly fit. And and we were just beside
ourselves because this is our first child, and all parents,
you know, your your first child. You're just getting your
feet under you as a parent, so you just want
to feel like you know what you're doing. And and
we were working so hard. You know, we've had so
many books on it, and we've all done so much
working ourselves, and here we were really stymied by this
(27:08):
soul and trying to figure out how best to parent
and how best to be with him. And the number
of theories and the number of approaches were legion. I mean,
you know this too, right, And it's like everybody has
an idea on how to help and what the right approaches,
and you know, are you being too leaning or not
being leaning? En offer? And how do you make boundaries?
And you know, everybody's got an opinion about ary thing.
(27:29):
And we struggled. We were being shamed that many people.
People shamed us for and blamed us assume that it
was our fault, that we must have done something wrong
or we're not, you know, parenting appropriately. And so we
we struggled, and we couldn't really tell any when I
was very close group of people that we did tell
that we were struggling with. But it was that was
(27:50):
that compounded the problem because we didn't know what was
going on, and we couldn't share how confused we were
or that it was even happening for that matter, right,
and I meanwhile, you have too younger kids at home, right,
let me get two other kids exactly eventually. And you also,
it's coinciding with this astounding growth of Roma MoU and
(28:13):
you meaning more and more, two, more and more people
as a rabbi, as a pastoral rabbi, as a kind
of you're not going to like my saying this, but
like rock star kind of from the BMA, you know,
from the podium, Rabbi was incredible, powerful charisma and this
(28:34):
is happening in your home. How did you contend with that?
That sort of split between deeply private and very public.
It was how I mean, it was how I could
just say it was at the time in my life
and where I felt that I had spent so much
of my life's energies being able to trying to arrive
(28:57):
at a place in my in my life and in
my career where my desire to serve, my desire to shine,
my desire to give my gifts to the world or
and have them received. It was all happening. And leaving
the house every morning was my My whole nervous system
was completely shock like. Every day was three days. It
was the morning was one day, then there was my
work day, and then my evenings. That's three days. It
(29:21):
was a twenty one day week. And on top of that,
on top of that, my public life required me and
the people who listen to this notice of your clergy,
of your ministers in priests and got by the moment
so on that it required me in any given day
to be at the death bed, at the bedside of
somebody who's dying with cancer, who was in their prime,
the tragedy of that, To move from night into dealing
(29:43):
with the joy of a wedding couple, to move from
night into into the responsibility to write a stellar sermon
or something that involves really you know, analytic thinking and
eloquence and communication. Like, the responsibilities of my job were
immense on every level, intellectually, usually emotionally, physically, And I'll
talk about that to go home and I feel like
(30:04):
that it was almost impossible for for me and my
wife to create the home environment that was safe for everybody.
And we had little kids, and so people in the
community started to murmur, you know, why can't we why
aren't we being invited over the and you know, to
the rabbi's home. You know, what do we do? So
we were in a cash way too, because we couldn't
ask for the support of the community, because it's one
(30:27):
of those things that as a pastor, as you know,
as a therapist, like it's not a reciprocal we're not
even in relationship. It's not like you know, and when
it's happened, by the way, the community hasn't always received it.
The community looks up to you as a father figure,
a mother figure, an authority figure. There's all of this happening,
and so you don't tell them what's going on in
your private life and yet it can not impact your
(30:49):
public life, and then you can't even get the support
of the community that you found it, and I found
it because that's not the role that they play with me,
and it's part of the circle that's double bind. And
so it was depleting and exhausting and enervating. And those
are hard years. Those are hard years, very hard years.
(31:11):
So how did those hard years come to a head
or how did you come to you know, sort of
the next chapter in this story for you? I mean,
I think that the next chapter began when we acknowledged,
like like a good twelve step first step, we acknowledged
that there was a problem that we couldn't fix it
(31:32):
on our own. We started to talk about it and
we realized that it wasn't because we were bad parents,
and we didn't have to be ashamed. We could we
could seek help, and we did seek Helvin. I mean,
we worked hard on ourselves to learn how to be
the parents like he needed us to be because he's
so unusual, and we had to change and we had
(31:54):
to grow ourselves and we had to get a lot
of support and we were still figuring out, but we
are getting help. But even the things are at times
still very hard. We do definitely see things getting better.
I guess what's most important is that we talk about
it with each other and with others, and in our family.
We talked about the hard things and the big feelings,
(32:15):
and we work hard to make it safe to sit.
But what feels uncomfortable, we see that that's really where
the healing comes from. We'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. One of the things that I
(32:36):
think is so beautiful and remarkable is that journey from
I have to keep this a secret or I have
you know, I have this role in people's lives. Two
you're talking to me, you're talking to us to these listeners,
which means that you have spoken about this with your community.
(32:57):
You you did reach a point where are holding it close.
Keeping its secret was more painful then not. Was there
a turning point or was it a gradual thing? I
think that what happens, what happens in our intimate spaces,
(33:17):
what happens in our homes, right, what happens in our homes,
What happens in our in our own home, in our
own heart, what happens you know, when the lights are closed,
no one's watching is a real earmark. It's a real
it's an indicator for our our society at large. And
I know for myself, not just as a public figure,
but just as a human being. And I'm not advocating
(33:38):
for us to tell the whole world every secret that
we have. And there are things that are that are
obviously intimate, and there are things that should be shared
only with a group of people that are you know,
our intimate family or intimate friends and so on. But
the energy that it took for me to not acknowledge
the impact of something right, to not disclose and not tell,
(33:58):
to not share, and to be owner about like what
I was holding and how it was impacting me and
by extension out with impacting my community. It was too great.
It was too great to hold that, it was too much.
It was it was literally physically I could feel that
my body. I couldn't take it anymore, and it was
impacting everyone. So for example, a couple of you know,
(34:19):
this past year, Roman whom I'm very proud of this
in our Jewie community, Romo became the first synagode to
ever have a Shabbat of the child. And on the
Shabbat of the Child, which was co sponsored with the
Center for Child Abuse and for Domestic Abuse. I spoke
publicly for the second time, but really for the first
time in a real way about my own experiences as
a child, and the number of people that wrote to
me afterwards who shared with me their story was just
(34:42):
it was just, you know, it was unbelievable that I could,
in some way for them to hear me as a
rabbi speaking from the pulpit about my vulnerability, my wound,
that you know, for them to be able to say, yeah,
me too, like him too, he has it too, and
to become fluent in that way of airing the depth
of our power, which is also the depth of our wound. Right,
(35:05):
that that that wound was there and that I could
share it, I think that was for me a very
it was liberating for me. And also when it comes
to this family secret, as it were, that it was
very liberating to just to say, you know, this is
what it looks like in our home daily. You know,
I don't want your sympathy per sage and you know
how hard it is, and it invites a kind of
generosity like the danger, of course, is that it might
(35:25):
invite a scarcity, might to listen to somebody else a
feeling of awkwardness. As we said, they might shame us,
they might walk away, they might do whatever they can
do the things that they might say do some of
the things that we're most terrified they're going to do. Right,
But it also when we close ourselves off because of
that fear, we also close ourselves off to the generosity
that might come as a response as well, someone saying
(35:48):
you know, wow, that really touches me. I feel you
in a way that I never would have felt. You
your humanity and I identify with you right. I am
also struggling. I'm also strangling, and that's a very profound
gift to give to someone. When we share our stories,
they say, I can feel your humanity, and I feel
more connected to you. As we near the end of
(36:10):
David's story, I find myself thinking of one of Emily
Dickinson's sonnets, in which she writes, my life closed twice
before its close, which I take to mean we aren't
meted out a certain amount of difficulty in measured doses.
So I wonder how does David hold these two traumas,
(36:32):
the one that happened to him at age seven and
then the struggles of his firstborn son, who is so
like him in so many ways. I see them all
as one piece. The first thing I feel is that
seeing my son in a way and it struggles that
he's had opened me up too, was generous to my
(36:53):
own parents in a way that I never would have
had in any of that point in my life, because
I can see however I am, and I can look
back and say, wow, as I heard someone would say,
I might have had a ten gallant soul in a
you know, a couple of court family, you know, a
ten five family with a ten gallant soul. Like there's
(37:14):
things that I just know and connect with in terms
of who I was now in retrospect that I never
would have. And so when I look back, I see
one through line from that moment when I was seven,
all the way from now, which is my whole life's
goal is to create a space that is safe enough
to stay in the room. It's uncomfortable, but like we
(37:35):
are strong enough to hold it. We're strong enough to
hold this pain we're throwing up and to hold this truth,
and that strength will set us free. It's not just
that the truth will set us free. The truth and
our capacity to hold it right. And we can build
that capacity by returning to safety, returning to the messages
(37:57):
of love and compassion and goodness. All of those things
to me are part of one seamless line from when
I was seven until now, which is, you know, how
do we create an environment and a container where people
feel safe enough to be true, safe enough to be honest,
and safe enough to heal. That's what the Holy is
for me. That's what the Holy is for me. The
(38:21):
quality of that, you know, running conversation that you had
with God as a child. You know, God was your
best friend, that was when you turned to and then
you went through this whole journey of becoming ultra Orthodox,
and and then your decade long quest, is the quality
of your conversation with God today in a way similar
(38:47):
to what it was when you were a child, or
has it has it changed? You know? I sometimes wish
that I had that child like ease, and it's been
complicated over the years. I went through a period where
I was so angry at God that the only thing
I could say was I could only chris God out
for a while, and I allowed myself those feelings. And
(39:11):
I've gone through periods where I didn't believe in the
personal God or I still do. And you know, the
face of God has changed so much from me over
the years, but it hasn't eliminated that space. You know,
that space to me, and it's sophisticated as my belief
in God or you know, or my understanding what God
is has grown and sophisticated as it has been. You know,
(39:32):
there is still that simple place that when I closed
my eyes, it's not hard for me access, like the
heart of a longing that I think that was something
that I experienced as a child. I experienced it with
my father, with the way that he's sang and our
you know, on Shabbat, there was a pathos, a kind
(39:53):
of the childlike quality. Was not playful with God. It
wasn't like, oh God, let's go for a walk through
the park. You know that it's much later on, but
God was still the one that I turned to, especially
in moments of pain and moans of longing and alments
of yearning. And for me, it's not hard at all
when I closed my eyes in prayer to re access
that place. And it doesn't feel sad to me in
(40:16):
the way that's sad can be depressing. It feels alive
and invertent like. It feels like like when I'm in
that aliveness, which is a yearning, I feel very much
privileged to just to be, you know, just to be,
and it holds all of the hopes that I have
for myself and also the hopes that I have for
(40:36):
humanity and for the globe, and for a longing for
there to be peace and goodness. And so I saved
that place for myself when I closed my eyes. Between
me and my God, we meet there, exchanging glances over
a kind of see of of longing for a world,
but we only have glimpses of it that I pray
(41:00):
made manifest. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production.
(41:27):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight secret zero. That's secret and
(41:49):
then the number zero. You can also find us on
Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com,
slash Family secrets Pot, and Twitter at FAM secret Spot.
(42:22):
For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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