There is still time before the sun sets to engage in the Omer Day 12 practice of contemplating Hod sheh b'Gevurah, refining/incubating awareness/healing while being strongly held. In my twenties, in the greater Vineland, NJ area, I founded one of the early, small projects for interviewing survivors and Allied soldiers. There came a day when my soul was over-saturated with the stories being told. Praying for guidance each night before sleep, the answer came in a dream.
A voice told me to begin a painting in which I should place the faces of the murdered family members of those whom I'd interviewed. Faces? From interviews? For weeks the guidance incubated (Hod) within me.
Faces, recurrent faces filled my dreams for weeks thereafter. The interviews were oral histories, where had I seen these faces? Black and white images, some happy, others looking serene, some looking annoyed...all seemingly posed for portraits.
A survivor, a therapist, told me it must be that someone had showed me pictures they had managed to find after the war. She said I was repressing a lot because the listening itself was a second-hand trauma experience. That night it came to me-- there was one woman I'd interviewed who had ripped her family pictures from their frames as the residents on her block were being rounded up. She cut out just the faces, no hair, no hats, no bodies and wrapped them in a foil packet the size of a dime. Miraculously, she managed to keep it safely under her tongue during her time in the concentration camp. I wish I could remember her name, her lovely, kind face is also burned into my memory.
The painting process proved restorative as it moved through my full tree of life (a holographic fractal of the metaphor of the full Eitz Chayyim). Years later I would meet a great healer who lives in the Netherlands, Carola de Vries Roble. She is also a therapist, artist, spiritual guide and an ordinee of Reb Zalman. A picture from her website: "The Art of Living Soulfully" [3] . Available on her website is a DVD demonstrating she made documenting her beautiful, powerful process of combining art, psychotherapy and Jewish spiritual renewal to create healing for herself and others from the wounds of the Holocaust and growing up Jewish in its wake.
The Gevurah Carola's journey is wrapped in fills me with awe. Equally so the Hod, the incubation time of wrapping her healing process, which in the tree of her life, has resulted in her stunning (often colorful) art. Last year, much of Carola's body of work was accessioned by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
This has been Omer Day 12.
