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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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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 made manifest. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production. 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 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. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,