The Beginning of a “Revolutionary Relationship”
(Note: Felix gave me permission to include information about him and his session in this article.)
I attended the November Allies to Muslims Zoom Workshop led by Azi Khalili (International Liberation Reference Person for South, Central, and West Asian-Heritage People) and Dvora Slavin (Regional Reference Person for South King County, Washington, and Hawaii, USA). The workshop zeroed in on [focused on] what is human about each of us and allowed us to discharge on hurts that separate us from Muslims and other people as well.
I found myself in a mini-session with a lovely German man, Felix. He went first and discharged on his goodness as a white Protestant German man. It was easy for me to counsel him and affirm his complete goodness as he discharged hard.
Then it was my turn. I told him I was Jewish and asked if it would be okay for me to counsel on my feelings about Germans and he said it would. His attention was a big contradiction to my distress. I discharged hard in places where I had not been able to discharge before. I remembered all the things my mother had told me about German people—how they wanted to kill us and were our enemies. I’ve had many sessions on the Holocaust, but this was a different kind of session with a unique contradiction. It shifted things for me in a different way.
Later Felix and I had another mini-session. He asked if he could discharge more about being German. I was happy to listen. He told me what had happened when he was a child and had learned about the Holocaust and what the Germans had done to the Jews. He’d been very confused; no one had explained to him how it could happen. He had been frightened to consider that Germans were bad.
I could see that it would be traumatic for a young child to learn such things about his people. It’s a big hurt to think that one’s people are bad. The adults would have needed a lot of attention to talk about it in a way that could be understood. They would have needed to be able to talk about distress and the goodness of humans.
My experience with Felix was a big highlight of the workshop. It helped lay the groundwork for me to work on the early misinformation I had received about Muslims.
Azi’s talk, “No Human Enemies” [see page 64 of the January 2021 Present Time and <www.rc.org/publication/present_time/pt202/pt202_064_ak>], and Dvora’s talk on the complete goodness of every human, had made the session possible. Azi and Dvora also talked about “revolutionary relationships” in which love and connection are stronger than any distress or oppression. Felix and I agreed that we had a revolutionary relationship.
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 203, April 2021)