Episode Seven Transcript: How Do We Grieve Collectively?
Rebecca Lehrer:
This is a project of The Mash-Up Americans.
Amy S. Choi:
Welcome to Grief, Collected where we explore how grief moves through our bodies, our families, and our communities, and why we need to feel it all in order to transform our future.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Today we are talking to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about some of the roots of our grief culture here in America and with that knowledge, what collective grief and healing can look like in our communities.
Amy S. Choi:
Hey, I'm Amy S. Choi.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And I'm Rebecca Lehrer and we are The Mash-Up Americans.
Amy S. Choi:
Rebecca, life has intervened in our grief show, or maybe better to say, I don't know, somehow evidence that grief is a part of life because we are now today grieving a new loss in our lives.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yes, so as we prepared for this conversation today, we had already interviewed Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg and we were preparing to do this introduction and my grandmother died as we were meant to record. So that happened yesterday and my grandmother, omi, that's what we called her, died yesterday, a week shy of 103.
Amy S. Choi:
Amazing.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Amazing and I think it's been incredible already to see how much of everything we're talking about is playing out in my family right now.
Amy S. Choi:
I had the privilege of meeting omi a couple of times and even my kids got to meet her, which is incredible. And I think her kind of life and the way that her family adores her is just truly a testament to her life. And I think something that you had said to me yesterday, which was so striking, especially we've been thinking about the conversation we had with Linda Thai constantly, since we had it, is that all of her children were delighted in.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, she and my grandfather delighted in their children. And so my dad and his siblings, that is who they are. And while they carry the grief of the stories of their parents' resilience and loss and immigration and persecution, they also are people who were loved and delighted in. It's pretty incredible. I look a lot like her, so I'm very lucky to carry her DNA and I was also very lucky after she died to be able to go visit her body in her home she'd lived in for 74 years and to be with her body and to touch her skin while it still had warmth. I think it felt very beautiful. And I think being in grief, being in grieving, reminds me that there is structure, that I have a structure, that I have shiva as we'll talk about a little bit today, which is the first, in the beginning, the seven days that you pray with the grieving parties.
We have rituals for burial and the ways that we want to do this and know to do it. We have a rabbi who my family, my dad and his siblings love and trust with guiding them through a service that would be meaningful that my grandmother... someone my grandmother knew very, very well and loved. And that is something that she created intentionally in family, sharing those values, but also comes from time immemorial in my heritage, in my family tradition, in Jewish tradition.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, I think something that is also amazing to observe and that is something that I wish that we all had is, I was about to say Jewish containers, that doesn't sound right, but these containers for-
Rebecca Lehrer:
Ancient technologies?
Amy S. Choi:
Ancient technologies, that there are rituals and structures and ways of being in this pivotal life moment that was going to happen one way or another. It's the one thing that we know will happen that we're able to... It surged up in you and in your family as an incredibly natural expression of who you are and it's deeply part of your Jewishness. These are Jewish traditions and Jewish rituals, but there was no question about what was going to happen. Obviously there's questions, when does shiva start? How many people are going to be at the funeral? So many questions.
Rebecca Lehrer:
What colors? Are we wearing masks inside the chapel? You know what I mean? It's a whole [foreign language 00:05:10].
Amy S. Choi:
But that there aren't questions about how you knew that you were going to be together.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Correct.
Amy S. Choi:
And I think that there's... that's amazing. I just think not everybody has a culture like that.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, I think that is a lot of what we have been exploring. What does it mean to be out of context?
Amy S. Choi:
Yeah. I would not describe myself as religious. I did not grow up in a religious tradition. And I think probably the most annoying aspect of me is that I would genuinely describe myself as a spiritual person or somebody who is seeking.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Why is that annoying?
Amy S. Choi:
I don't know. It's something about, to me it's always just very eat, pray, love that word.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You know what? The internet ruins everything, first of all.
Amy S. Choi:
The internet does ruin everything.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Eat, Pray, Love is a great book and a great movie featuring the inimitable Julia Roberts, first of all. Second of all, I do think it becomes a nothing burger and that's what you're, my guess, is reacting to but actually being spiritual, it's so beautiful. It's just acknowledging maybe there's something more than you can totally understand, something like that.
Amy S. Choi:
And that I do have faith in that. And so I think that's what the seeking is and when I think about it in relationship to grief, as I have tried to wrap my head around it as we've been in this work for the past couple years, is just the seeking probably also has a lot to do with seeking a ritual that makes sense for me and for my family. I believe very much in a connectedness and to a spirit world. I have done Buddhist pilgrimages, I've lit incense for people I'm grieving at Buddhist temples. I do believe that. And in some way this is very related to us, our understanding of grief as a part of life, life is suffering, which is a core Buddhist principle.
And I don't actually mean that to mean we're all suffering all the time, but that it's just these are facts, that these are parts of life that we can't ignore. And I think that grief is actually a core component of all of that. But if I think about rituals there, it's like a hodgepodge. It's just a mashup, which is very much me and my family that we've either taken on or done reinventions of things that make sense to us like going to temple, like we make ofrendas every year for Dia de los Muertos, like going to my grandmother's grave in Korea and drinking whiskey and making a picnic. These are all things that we do.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, whiskey.
Amy S. Choi:
Got to get that good duty free stuff.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, Johnny Walker at the duty free.
Amy S. Choi:
That huge bottle. Well, so I think taking that, our kind of the rootedness in tradition, which has always been part of being a Mash-up and also just how we blend that with what is American culture and then how we reshape American culture is a lot about what this conversation with Rabbi Danya is today, just how do we grieve collectively and what currently makes up our communal grief culture and how we might evolve that because that is helpful. So there are things that make up American culture that therefore shape our grief culture, which is [foreign language 00:08:59], individualism.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh wow.
Amy S. Choi:
Just-
Rebecca Lehrer:
We love an extreme individualism here, don't we?
Amy S. Choi:
We really do. And the whole kind of lone cowboy, I don't even know, bootstraps everything, all of the mythology about being an American is very much about being an individual.
Rebecca Lehrer:
So there's also religious influences and not, I mean as we've just discussed our own religious makeup, but we swim in American Protestantism and there's this sort of generalized Protestantism that infuses American culture. And over the course of a couple centuries has led to an emphasis, for example, on forgiveness, which is related to grief here in this idea of moving forward by forgiving. And that leads to glossing over harm rather than confronting something hard and focusing on some kind of accountability.
Amy S. Choi:
And especially when we think about how grief is experienced on a community level and harm and grief, that whole community suffer due to say racism or police violence or homophobia, that how if we have this culture of forgiveness, but without accountability, how do those grieving communities ever heal? How do we actually grapple with the grief that is at hand on a societal level? Or we're starting to understand better how grief plays out in our families and how grief plays out in ourselves, in our bodies as individuals. And I think now thinking about what grief looks like on a communal level and then also what healing looks like on a communal level is really important. And it's what we're going to try and muddle through today and muddle through all of our Americanness with Rabbi Danya. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is an award-winning feminist author and writer. Her newest book On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World provides a crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm. It helps us envision a new way forward for healing communal traumas and grief.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You sort of found a new path to your religious self, to religion, to Judaism when your mom died and in that grieving, and I would love to know more about what it was about the grieving rituals or grieving tradition itself that you felt you connected so deeply to or how it supported you.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So I think there were a few things happening on a few different levels. I was a religion major who got to study religion because I was interested in philosophy and religion was kind of that, but as an atheist. And then my mother got sick, she had cancer and then she died. And we did the funeral Jewishly because we were Jews and that's how we did that. And then we sat shiva we stayed home and people came to be with us because we're Jews and that's what we do. Except it was helpful when I was in shock and everything had just changed utterly to have people come. When a parent dies, you go to say the mourners' kaddish, the mourners' prayer for them for 11 months. And though I was not a religious person, I needed something to do. So every Friday night I went to do this and I would stand up to say the Kaddish so everybody in the synagogue could see that I was mourning.
I was forced to say words of praise at a time when I felt darkest, I was brought back to this place again and again and again. So I had something anchoring me even when I felt at my most rootless and I was in a community that was there and that was supporting me. And it wasn't a community I wanted to be in necessarily, but I was there and week after week after week, these people were there and they held me. And week after week I began to see that there was more to this prayer service than I had even thought. And once I began to attain what they call ritual mastery, it didn't feel so hard once I get to know it a little bit. And at the same time in grief, I was blown wide open. My defenses were pulled completely apart. It's a famous story that in grief people become open to religious or spiritual practice in a new way. And I think that's why, because the ritual can hold you and at this moment of liminality and emotional break, you're open to experiencing it in a new way.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I have a question about some of the ritual. This is very resonant for me on every layer, one of the questions I have, what did you say that was mastery of the ritual?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Ritual mastery, yeah. That's a phrase from Catherine Bell who's a religion scholar.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, it's so beautiful and that's so helpful. And I think one of the things we are saying, our hypothesis is that there's very little ritual mastery in so much of, at least in the communities we observe as Americans, they're not often not knowing what to do in situations or what to lean on. And just to step back a little in Jewish tradition, somebody told me something that I've never done after the seven day shiva, that there's some piece where you are meant to take the mourners, the community takes the mourner and takes them into the world in a different way. And can you tell us a little bit about that because I think one of the things we're wrapping our head about is what is community in this and what is the collective experience of this?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right. So after the burial, the mourner then spends seven days generally at home. Shiva means seven and it was a variation on the word seven. And so people come to them and take care of them and bring them food for seven days and they're in this enclosed space. It's like a womb space for them to grieve and be cared for and be loved on. But at a certain point you have to go back. You cannot stay in that deep grief enclosure for forever, even though grief is going to be ongoing and for most relatives, there's a sort of 30 day marker for the end of the formal mourning period, which isn't to say the grief won't continue and for parents it's 11 months.
But at the end of this intense seven day period, your people will come and walk you around the block at the end of the shiva period. And that's to symbolize, it's a way of ritualizing and symbolizing your return to the world and reintegration with who you have been in this grief space and the ways you've been transformed in this loss with who you are going to be now moving forward as you come back into the world and your people are there and they're with you and they have your back as you are doing this walk so you're not alone. And as you move back into the world, you're still not alone.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oops, already cried. (Singing).
Amy S. Choi:
Oh we're going to be doing the tear count?
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah. Tear count. Poo-poo.
Amy S. Choi:
I love that you make that metaphor of a womb because I think there's so much about this and we can see it in all different levels and in all different ways, similar to how there's no government sanctioned bereavement policy, there's no parental leave. And I think that there's something about tying those two monumental things together that our society is so bad at doing. And it makes me think in Korean culture, tradition is that for 40 days after you give birth, you're at home. And it's like, I remember giving birth nine, some years ago and being like, that's fucking crazy and why women don't have to stay home. And actually, I really could have used 40 days where I just perceived what new life was and then 40 days later somebody took me out and my baby into the world and introduced it.
But that aside, I think there's something so beautiful about that idea of the collective coming together to mourn a loss together. And so for me and for us, we think that's so beautiful, that connection to our community. But in a place like America, how do we take that need for connection and expand it out and across rather than what seems to happen, which is when there is some sort of collective loss or collective grief, people are like, it's less that they're connecting and more that they're retreating back into their corners?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right. Right. A, people retreat back into their corners and B, in this highly, highly individualistic culture with very, very low levels of empathy, I mean that people study ranking countries with levels of empathy and the United States always comes out very low on the list.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh, it's real sad.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
But it's true, countries with higher levels of collective sensibility rate higher on levels of empathy because there's that sense of us. And the US is so individualistic that when there's any kind of rupture of care or loss, we don't know what to do. We don't know how to take care of each other. And so often what comes up is so insufficient and so late and so doesn't do the job and is so missing things. COVID was this, still is this profound, profound unbelievable mass tragedy that we haven't figured out how to name or put our hands around and there was a televised thing for 10 minutes at some point early in the Biden administration. But look, what is that? Yeah, we don't know. We just haven't developed the collective language as Americans to find each other. And I don't know necessarily what that language is or what it has to be, but it can look a lot inviting each other into each other's spaces. The most beautiful moments happen when someone says we're doing this thing here, come with me. Join me. We are here. Come be with us in solidarity.
Amy S. Choi:
I think we're starting to edge toward this, but I wonder from your point of view as an expert in repair, as a rabbi, all of us here in this conversation as Mash-Ups, we come from communities where there has been so much shared loss and yet we move forward together. And so I think we can see the value of that, but can we define what is collective grief, and then from there start to look at then what collective healing and collective repair can look like?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I think when we talk about collective grief, we need to remember that they're not all the same, that people having para-social relationships with monarchs or rock stars... I was one of many, many people who had a feeling when Prince and Lou Reed died. I did. It's not the same as the collective grief of Mike Brown or George Floyd who were human beings who needed to be mourned in their own right and who also were related to much, much larger spaces of significant systemic oppression.
And that collective grief is different from the collective grief of COVID which feels very different when you think about the ways in which COVID impacted black and brown communities versus other communities and what messaging got put out when and by who, and the whole complexities of vaccines. And all of that is mushed in with the very, very, very real fact that people that were loved are not here anymore. And however many millions of people created in what I would say the image of God, whatever that means, are not here anymore and are missed and there's a hole in the universe as a result. I don't think there is a single definition of collective grief is kind of where I'm going.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I think one of the things you do so beautifully in your work, I'm not the only one to think this, this is how most people would describe your work, but one of the things you do most so beautifully is take specifically Jewish wisdom, understanding learning traditions and help apply it culturally because there's so much to learn from and grow with. And as we talked about shiva and then walking into the world, one of the things it feels like we're doing here is often we're not taking that period. We often just keep walking. We've not taken the shiva where we cover the mirrors and we sit in it.
And I think in some ways maybe the protests of May and June in 2020 had some feeling of that, like the really wrestling with the darkness of it and then what can come from that. But it feels like you were saying about COVID, you're like okay, we acknowledged it for five minutes.
Amy S. Choi:
We didn't even, no.
Rebecca Lehrer:
What is that? If it's millions of people and each one of those millions of people deserves seven days of that, what does that mean for all of our psyches and our souls? How could we maybe do it differently?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Especially because it's ongoing. There's a million people and at the end of today there will be another 500 in America. And how do we wrap our heads around that? And then what would we do about that are two very significant questions. But the facts of the matter is, I mean, we've got capitalism which says move forward, productivity, what are you doing? Come on. That pause, that stop and feel your feelings for a moment. Be in this enclosed space and rage and cry and be held thing, which I agree that the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 kind of were that. That was that space to rage and cry and scream collectively. And with COVID, we never got that. We had this sort of lockdown of fear, but it was almost as soon as we stopped, we were told that we needed to start again and be productive members of society. And the go, go, go aspect is just so deeply ingrained in our society that you only have value if you are making and doing and producing. What is a life worth?
Our society doesn't pause to make space for the dead because they are not producing and the mourners do not get that space because they could be producing. And it's the same reason we don't have maternity leave or parental leave, because you need to be producing. And that sense that you get to be a three dimensional human being who has feelings and emotional needs and that you are part of a collective and that we all have care and needs and we need to take care of each other is just... It's absent from the playbook because capitalism and individualism are what's driving the train.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, on that note-
Rebecca Lehrer:
We want to talk about your chapter on national repentance.
Amy S. Choi:
So I think Rebecca and I are very not silver lining people, which is funny or ironic because we're also deeply optimistic, hopeful people. But we're not into being like, well the upside of COVID is that maybe we'll do... There's no upside. There's no fucking upside. But so I think there's something that really struck us about this idea that collective grief can be... it's defined by some grief researchers as regenerative. And there's this quote from the grief researcher, Mary-Frances O'Connor, who says, "The act of resistance and thriving in the face of grief is functional and has both individual and community level assets." Which to me is her saying repentance and repair. And I wonder, can you define repentance and repair and also draw the line there, the link between that grief and then the repair work.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Okay. So the word that gets translated as repentance in English, because I don't know, it's close enough, in Hebrew is tshuva, which really means return. Like it's an answer to a question, it's a return ticket to your bus. It's coming back to where you were supposed to be before you did harm. It's returning to your integrity, it's returning to your intuition, to your best self, to your connection to the divine if that's how you see the world. It's about coming back to where you were supposed to be. But there's an assumption that there's been harm and there are steps to doing this repentance work. There's naming and owning and speaking the truth of the harm that you caused. There's beginning to do the work of change that you can't stay the same person as a harm doer. So is it therapy, is it rehab? Is it anti-racism or learning about trans-liberation? How are you going to change?
Then amends, reparations, right? Repair-arations, then something to not undo what was done because you can't do that, but to sew up that hole in the universe, some way to care for the person that was harmed. Apology, which is an acknowledgement of the pain that the harmed person experienced and sort of an open heart that gets that the person really, really deserved so much better than what they got. And then when the opportunity arises to make different choices, different choices get made. And so when we think about collective harm, we can think about the collective opportunity to name that harm. And so often our collective grieving is a space to name that harm and it is an opportunity to move forward into a new future.
And the murder of George Floyd for example, that's a space that is a crying out that is saying this is we need to hold each other. We are caring for each other, we are reaching out for each other and we are crying and saying that this is not okay. We are calling the ones who caused harm to own what they have done. This is an invitation to the work of repair and change. And in an ideal world, this is then the time when owning that harm caused and beginning that process can begin.
And unfortunately that work has not yet begun vis-a-vis white supremacy in the United States. We repeat the same harms again and again and again. And we see what's possible. Collective grieving can open us up into new spaces. I think about the work of the Land Back Movement, for example, as indigenous peoples have done so much work naming and articulating and claiming the harms that were done to them and pushing certain parts of those with power to see and name and own and take responsibility for what has been done. And some of those who have been in power have gone through processes of really getting it.
Amy S. Choi:
I do love that the people who are harmed are the ones that can name the harm and the grief and that can start the process.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right, so when we talk about collective grief, that can be a space for those who have been harmed to look at those in power and say, "Ouch." And sometimes there can be a process wherein those who have caused harm begin to get it little by little and are able to see the grief that has been in process all along. And we can't necessarily do the work of power for it, but collective grief, if we're talking about that can be a powerful, A, insistence on the truth. A, it's a way of us holding each other during the hard part. B, it's a way of us speaking the truth unblinkingly and C, it's a way of looking at power and saying this is what is and this is the opening and this is the open door. And that doesn't sort of auto-magically fix structural injustice, but it can be a necessary first step. And sometimes it's the linear process and often it's not. But that doesn't mean there isn't a process.
Rebecca Lehrer:
It sure feels messy to live in it. My God. Wow.
Amy S. Choi:
Is the challenge and the struggle of naming that tear and stepping into the opportunity that unfolds from it to do that repair work, is this a uniquely American situation where we're so bad at it?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I mean, I think we are bad at it for really specific reasons and I feel clear on-
Amy S. Choi:
Sort of capitalism and individuality?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Capitalism, individualism, white supremacy. I think it's not an accident that white northerners started preaching forgiveness as a really, really key tenet of Christianity right as the civil war ended. And they said, "Okay, great. Party's over, war's over, let's forgive our Southern buddies and now we're all friends again because Jesus said forgive," and guess who got screwed out of that process? White northerners and white southerners had a big hug and newly emancipated and already freed Black Americans got completely shafted in terms of developing rights and safety and everything. You had Frederick Douglas being like, "I will not. If Southerners want to repent, I will talk to them," but that you have enslavers who are not repenting and that are now supposed to be just forgiven. What is that? This is white supremacy is sort of at the root of this forgiveness doctrine.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I think you called it watered down Protestantism was the thing I saw beautifully in your-
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yeah, like Martin Luther who is not my best friend, he's not a huge fan of the Jews, but he was very clear that repentance was a big part of the deal. And the gospels, that whole forgive 70 times seven, Jesus actually has a community accountability process right there in that story. There's not something innate to Christianity that says no repentance. America decided that this was a thing.
Amy S. Choi:
America makes such some bad decisions.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yes, we do.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Classic.
Amy S. Choi:
Classic.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yeah, classic. I think this is a problem anywhere there's power really, because doing repentance work is always going to be threatening to those with power. Because if you say I caused harm, I need to change. Things are going to be different then there may be significant implications for those with power.
Amy S. Choi:
But I do think even though I just sank into a moment of darkness for a minute, is that what I do love about this conversation that we're having is that the opening... What did they say? The opening, it lets the light in. There is opportunity to step forward and to do work that makes us healthier and more truthful and happier, that grief actually does... It's the first step to allowing that process to begin.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
It's one more broken open.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Can you tell us a little more, I mean you talk about this in your chapter on national repentance a little bit and I'm wondering if you could give your ideas around what national repentance has looked like and what you think it could be as we're starting to visualize the hope for what we want from it.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
In the book, I looked at Canada, at South Africa, at Germany, and then I did a close look at the work of Land Back in Minnesota, in particular. And I keep coming back to the fact that the beginning of national repentance work has to start with truth telling. The TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was messy and complicated and fraught in terms of the decisions that were made about who and how the truth got told about what crimes against humanity were committed under apartheid and who testified and that people who testified got amnesty and which victims testified and how all that worked and it was complicated. And stories got told and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, then he's like, "Nobody now can claim that they didn't know. Now they know," because they were televised and everybody in the country was watching. And it's like nobody can pretend that they didn't know what was happening.
Everybody in the country now understands what apartheid was about. And what he had really hoped would happen would be that sort of everybody who benefited from apartheid, which is basically everybody who's white, would undergo this deep national repentance process and that there would be structural reforms and sort of a one-off tax on corporations that benefited from apartheid and all of these things and some systemic things that would be implemented. And for various reasons, the government basically didn't implement any of the follow-through or many of the follow-through recommendations of the TRC. There was the truth telling aspect and then there's a whole other committee working on developing recommendations for now what. And instead of ongoing payments to victims, it was a one time payment and it wasn't for everybody who was harmed systemically and so on and so forth. And the tax wasn't for just the white people, it was... The systems didn't change.
And as a result we basically got the truth without all of the other really necessary pieces of the process. And so the significant change that we needed in South Africa didn't happen. It was a little change but not as much as could be. We need the truth telling, but truth telling alone isn't enough. And in Germany I saw a lot of the steps of repentance, but they were way out of order. And it's like this whole dance of avoidance and engagement and then kind of facing the Holocaust and then ignoring the Holocaust and then denial and then dealing. And there were paid a bunch of money, billions of dollars in reparations except the new West German government right after World War II that paid all of this money, had a bunch of high ranking Nazis high up in the government and they were like trying to stop Eichmann from getting captured. It's like, okay guys, you're not really serious about this, are you?
And then a generation later there are student riots and the students are really mad because there are a lot of Nazis in the university, but the students are not going home and asking grandpa why grandpa was a Nazi. It's about them not us. And it's back and forth. And then the '80s this happened and bah, bah, bah, bah and little by little they got to a much better place. And Germany often gets cited as the country that did all of the work and it's like they did a bunch of the work, but I think that they did it not in order and that they did it in such a scrambled way I think is part of the problem. Also, it's really convenient for Germany that the people that they were making amends to were either dead or not in their country. So they didn't have to deal with the systemic implications whereas South Africa or you think about the United States, the questions about who holds power today now are real. So the questions about what needs to happen are different.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh wow, that's so interesting. I never thought, well, Rebecca's going to fix all that when she rethinks her German citizenship.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, I just learned I should maybe get German citizenship. But the funny part is, the reason we couldn't before is they told my uncle who did get it that he had to prove he spoke German and all these other hoops and whatever. They were like, because my grandparents on that side were there, then left to Latin America and they were like, "But you guys, they left too early," and we were joking, is it really? Can it be too early from the killing?
Amy S. Choi:
We're alive, motherfuckers!
Rebecca Lehrer:
Isn't it just on time or too late to leave Nazi Germany?
Amy S. Choi:
I'm sorry we didn't get put on one of the trains.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I'm so sorry. But luckily-
Amy S. Choi:
We weren't late enough.
Rebecca Lehrer:
... their connection to numbers is helpful. They're like, this is your great-grandfather's code. And you're like, okay. Well, thank you for that. Well, with that, just some Nazi humor, we're going to-
Amy S. Choi:
Just light Holocaust humor. We do.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We do. It's the only way. We're going to wrap this beautiful conversation. Although I could sit all day because all I really want to talk about is the world through this lens.
Amy S. Choi:
Thank you so much for today. This has been so moving and enlightening and challenging and just, we've learned a lot.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And you're bringing out my greatest academic self from schooling. I have written in every page on the sides. Oh and this one American Xianity, I just shortened it, intent over impact. There's just who is our we? This felt like America first. I mean, it's joyous and beautiful and congratulations on birthing this of your many books and many children into the world.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh my god, my notes are like Protestant ministers lead to blanket forgiveness, bad. That's what I've got here.
Rebecca Lehrer:
With that, thank you so much.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Thank you guys.
Amy S. Choi:
Thank you so much.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yay.
Amy S. Choi:
Bye. Oh wow, wow. I really do think that our truest selves are probably in the scribbled margin notes in the margins of all of our books.
Rebecca Lehrer:
First of all, we've always said we were good students. Nobody was ever fighting that. Second of all, this is the Kindle downfall because I like to highlight things in a Kindle, but I can't write on them. Third of all, this is why I never give away books and I'm sorry to this world, but I'm going to keep them in my house because I like to write in them.
Amy S. Choi:
I know and I like to review the notes and also it's kind of ghost from Christmases past, you're like, wow, that was the margin note that I wrote in 2014.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Or 2002, Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Do you know how many stickers I have in that? I still don't know what happened.
Amy S. Choi:
Wow. The amount of times that I tell my children that mommy needs a room of her own and they don't understand.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh wow. You know what? I don't want them to ever understand.
Amy S. Choi:
It's true. That's true.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And we did learn in study hall study skills that you do... It does help you remember when you write things down.
Amy S. Choi:
It's true.
Rebecca Lehrer:
But I do think that there was so much here, so much richness and that we still want to be able to metabolize further so that we can understand it for ourselves truly in our bones, these ideas of what does it mean to do the work even if it's for a future that you won't be in. So-
Amy S. Choi:
We're repairing. We're repairing the tear.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, we are repairing the tear, doing some repenting too.
Amy S. Choi:
That too. Well, if you want to take notes in your own books, we are going to have a bookshelf of all of these amazing authors and resources that we have been citing in the pod on the website, griefcollected.com, so definitely go check that out. There will be more from Danya on there as well. And in a few days, come back to the pod for a special reading on grief from one of our favorite writers. Just, it will sweep you away.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And next week we have our final episode in our grief series with adrienne maree brown, the thinker, organizer, author, and visionary of our future.
adrienne maree brown:
In my dream, dream world, it's like every year we would sit down and be like, what have we learned from our dead and our dying this year? What are we learning about the patterns of health and community and safety and distribution of material goods? What are we learning about ourselves from who's dying?
Amy S. Choi:
Rebecca's fan-girling through the whole episode.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You look, I think I was pretty calm in reaction to her, but in my soul, I levitated.
Amy S. Choi:
We can't wait. See you soon. Ciao.
Grief, Collected is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. Executive produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer, Senior Editor and producer is Sara Pellegrini, Development producer is Dupe Oyebolu, production manager, Shelby Sandlin. Original music composed by the Brothers Tang. Sound Design support by Pedro Raphael Rosado, website designed by Rebecca Parks Fernandez. Grief, Collected is supported in part by a grant from the Pop Culture Collaborative. Please make sure to follow and share this show with your friends. Ciao.