Bi Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
What a wild ride the past week has been! There has been a collectively held tension in the air and while it does feel like an exhale for so many, there is also so much wounding left to attend to. The election statistics revealed beyond all doubts how deeply divided our nation has become. For many of us, this division is not held externally, but felt deeply within our own family systems. In a time of great physical isolation due to COVID-19, a sense of collective unity is even harder to tap into. So we sit here fragmented in ideology, separated physically and anxiety, despair and fear are at an all time high. Not a coincidence.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks passed away this weekend. He has been a profound leader for so many across varied religious ideology. This TED Talk was given in 2017 in reference to the 2016 election yet his words feel deeply relevant today. So many of us might not feel ready to move towards collective healing. So many of us have been actively harmed in real and deep ways by what we’d call the opposition and if that is you, then this is not your work right now.
But for anyone who feels able to look towards collective healing, this paints a beautiful pathway of how to begin walking towards that in our own hearts and minds. One of the most resonant themes in this talk is the shift from the ideology of the self to of the other. He urges a collective sense of responsibility for the other as a way of breaking through our isolation and hopelessness and uplifting ourselves as a whole. He points to the magical thinking in belief that a single elected leader can save a society and stresses the importance of unification from the ground up, “We the people,” being one of his favorite phrases.
So if you are feeling a spark of hope, or if you are feeling the deep wounds of division, or if you are feeling the heartbreak of loss, this may be a path forward. In therapy, our work is so often about the individual, but seeing our future as a collective humanity may just be the shift we all need right now.