October 18, 2025
Most of our trip through Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria, I did not write. Jed and I wrote back and forth in that new journal I bought in the paper shop on Winterfeldstrasse, but I did not do the kind of daily writing or writing for the world I usually do, and I did not do any writing towards Story Medicine, though I thought about it a lot. Right now, on the flight home, I am trying to remember as much as I can of the profound shifts that happened while I was away. I would call them grief – about my mother and about Jed and about Gaza and the whole sweep of human history that makes annihilating other humans possible.
Something shifted in me while we traveled and I’m trying to reconstruct it here in a way that might make sense to other people:
September 29
We flew to Berlin. I was extremely frightened, clinging to Jed in the airport as if I might lose him. As if he was a child who couldn’t care for himself. I slept on the plane, arrived a bit whippy from the time change but rested enough. We made it through immigration, got our luggage, and then a taxi, and headed to our rented apartment on the inviting, tree-lined street we call home in Berlin.
September 30
There is a thing happening across the colonial world, where Jews are being othered and targeted. At the same time, Israel – the Jewish state – is mass murdering Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. At that point of our trip, Trump had not yet forced the ceasefire through. I felt an exhaustion from the fighting; I was not able to awaken my own strong feelings. I could see them in Palestinian refugees in my community, and I could respond by tending them, but I was no longer feeling my normal outrage – or anything really – in my own body.
October 2
We went to Kol Nidre services at the Reform Synagogue in Berlin. I had a sense on the subway and as we walked through the air smelling of autumn that there was great danger in that choice. Jed and I looked at one another, as if he felt it too, and yet we walked in and listened to tunes that sounded just like my childhood synagogue, when my family went just a couple times a year and Kol Nidre was one of those times.
Kol Nidre is an odd service in so many ways – it has a completely unique hymn; the words are Aramaic, not Hebrew; and it is framed as a legal proclamation, as if you are sitting in court. Instead of English, there was German translation, but otherwise it was very much as I remembered Kol Nidre services as a child. Here we were in Berlin, on the holiest of Jewish days, praying with Jews in a place where the eradication of Jews had been attempted and a great deal of the plan acted out.
I had a very strong feeling of survival. I was crying, just behind my eyes, but the tears did not come out. I was remembering my father, my mother, my grandparents. This was not the Jewish congregation I would choose, if I were choosing from all the different places I’ve said Jewish prayers, but it moved me in a way I had not experienced in a very long time – a feeling I would describe as both longing and the absence of longing, a kind of multi-generational enduring I had not felt in exactly this way before.
The next day my son-in-law told us that it had been reported in the German news – though it didn’t make the news in the U.S. – that there had been a bomb threat that night, and security was high at all the Jewish sites throughout Germany. I had felt that, before he told us: the danger of congregating as Jews. And the next day a synagogue was targeted in Manchester, England and several people killed.
October Full Moon – Berlin
Jed and I did the full moon Movement for the Movement with Kerri Kelly, an online community exploration combining music, meditation, and dance. Jed said he experienced a lessening of his physical tightness and fear. The opening was palpable, and I flowed into that. Where, I wonder, can we find more of that for him, and for the two of us to do together? I remembered the time, dancing at a party in Jed’s fraternity when we were in college, where my entire life felt formulaic and contrived, like my heart could not dance. This is the top of Jed’s vision: things we dare to do because our choices are constrained and therefore limitless.
After Kerri’s community class, we went to the neighborhood Italian restaurant for dinner – and they remembered us. We split a mushroom pizza and half a liter of the house Primitivo and walked home in the moonlight.
Usually I am put off when authors use excerpts from their journals to describe their inner landscape – even Michelle Obama, in her otherwise delightful memoir Becoming, seemed unable to make that succeed. I’m wondering if I was able to get to something new – for anyone other than myself – in those journal snippets just above here?
I invite you to think of a day – or series of days – when your ordinary experience shifted to another plane. What shifted, specifically? What is a memory that suggests your default way of thinking before the shift? What is a simple daily detail that lets you know a shift has occurred?