Episode #11: “There where the heart has its inception”: Rabbi Caryn Aviv on unlearning anxiety and learning to forgive
Julie talks with Rabbi Caryn Aviv of Denver’s Judaism Your Way. We read and discuss Nelly Sach’s poem “When Day Grows Empty,” talk about how our ancestors leave a “soul-trail” for us to follow, about Jewish Mysticism and Process Theology, about the philosophy of Judaism Your Way, and about Caryn’s book-in-progress Unlearning Jewish Anxiety. Caryn roots American Ashkenazi Jewish anxiety in the early 20th-century when many Jewish immigrants strived to assimilate to whiteness in a violently white-supremacist society, citing works by Jud Brewer, Eric Goldstein, Avery Gordon, and Resmaa Menakem. Caryn offers alternatives to the “persecuted-yet striving” “virtue narrative” in embodied Jewish practices. In a final question we talk about the difficulty of the High Holidays in this year of terrible violence and pain. Caryn emphasizes the need to take responsibility for harm and repair and the imperative that we learn how to forgive.
Because Caryn had to run off to officiate a wedding, we conducted our final question over zoom.
The closing music is Kol Nidre by Max Bruch, performed by Benjamin Roberts
Texts and authors mentioned and discussed:
Jud Brewer Unwinding Anxiety, 2022
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, 2008
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 1997, 2008
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, 2017
When day grows empty
When day grows empty
at dusk,
when the imageless time begins,
the lonely voices combine—
the animals are hunters only
or hunted—
the flowers mere fragrance—
when everything becomes nameless as at the beginning—
then you go beneath the catacombs of time
that open for those nearing the end—
there where the heart has its inception—
down into dark inwardness
you sink—
already past death
that is only a windy passage—
and freezing with exit
you open your eyes
in which a new star
already has left its reflection—
- Nelly Sachs, 1949
Rabbi Caryn Aviv
Rabbi Caryn Aviv (she/her/hers) serves as Rabbinic and Program Director at Judaism Your Way. Caryn loves to create and facilitate transformative Jewish experiences that spark joy and meaning for Jews and loved ones. Prior to becoming a rabbi, Caryn earned a PhD in sociology from Loyola University Chicago in 2002. She taught, mentored students, and published research in Jewish Studies and sociology at University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Denver from 2003-2013 before entering the ALEPH Ordination Program.
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