We’ve had two warm summer days. Some colors have returned, some haven’t.

What’s one of the hardest things I do? Holding different truths at the same time.

What’s the most healing thing I can do, for myself and others? Holding different truths at the same time.

I am always reconnecting with Bernie’s dictum: ”It’s just your opinion, man!” Bernie had a way of teaching in a deceptively humorous, clowning way that sometimes made his words sound easy, even lightweight. I sometimes think that his teaching that there are no truths, just opinions, is one of those that people like to repeat but don’t appreciate. Lately, there isn’t a day those words don’t come up for me.

On Monday, while continuing to bomb Lebanon, attack Palestinians and Bedouins in the West Bank (I know, I know, it’s just a tiny group of young extremists), and continue to dominate Gaza, Israel marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. In addition to formal public ceremonies, individuals, community centers and synagogues around the country host private events where the fewer and fewer remaining Holocaust survivors are invited to tell their stories, to testify.

My mother frequently did this before she died four years ago. This time, my one remaining uncle, the last of his generation in the family, testified. He had always been way more reluctant to talk about this. They videoed the session and put it on YouTube.

At first, I was not going to watch. I’d heard these stories from my mother since I was 2 or 3, he wasn’t going to say anything I hadn’t known for a long time. But a quiet voice told me to watch and listen. It’s another truth, the voice said, and even though you’ve heard it all before, watch and listen.

He sat in a chair and spoke into a microphone while they showed photos behind him that the YouTube video didn’t show. His voice trembled at times, he had to pause; perhaps he wept, I couldn’t tell.

This morning a therapist told me that for some people, describing trauma is healing while for others it retraumatizes them again and again. I always felt that the last describes what happened to my mother, and I believe this was also happening to him. And indeed, my uncle said that during all the decades that he pushed the memories away and didn’t bring them up, he was fine. When he began to bring them into consciousness and even to tell his family, that was when his nightmares began.

The pain is so alive, the horror of being a child having to hide underground, warned about danger everywhere. He still remembered how proud he was of himself for not crying when Nazi soldiers shone flashlights through the slats of a wooden wall behind which the family was hiding. He recalled the terror of those heavy boots stomping outside and up the stairs.

When someone from the audience at the end asked him what his strongest memory was of being a child, he immediately said: “No birthday gifts.” They were too poor. “In my childhood I knew not to bother the grown-ups. If I was hungry, I was aware at a very early age not to speak of it because I already knew that they’d given me all they had. If my shoes felt tight on my feet, squeezed them hard, I knew not to speak of it because they had already done whatever they could.”

He’s a wealthy man now, with a family trust that supplies the financial needs of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, giving them an early life he couldn’t even imagine.

But trauma, as I wrote in a past post, is really a two-way street. There’s what happened, and how you react. There are people like Victor Frankl and other, lesser-known survivors who widened the lessons they learned to include all people and all beings, the ones who say that what they experienced should never happen to anyone, ever. And there are those who are almost kidnapped by those same events, irrevocably seized, and can’t see much of life outside that prism.

This is no judgment on my part—there is no way anyone can judge those survivors—but more a description of those dynamics in my family. My heart broke as I listened to him. An old heaviness I hadn’t felt in a long while crept up and soured me on a day that was summery and beautiful. The horror of it is inescapable.

And the horror in the entire Middle East is inescapable. As sure as I’m writing this, just as he described the events of his childhood, others will tell their children about what happened when missiles hit their homes, when entire families were buried under rubble while those who remained began their refugee life.

We all have our truths. How do we respond?

I’m planning a teaching module for the latest cohort of the Zen Peacemaker Order. It’s entitled History and Lineage and comprises 5 meetings. During the years that I’ve taught this module I often focused on the history of the Zen Peacemakers. I also encouraged students to look at their own history and create their own lineage chart.

This year, I told my co-facilitator, we also need to raise traumatic events from their own past, or events that still rankle and destroy a sense of security, that bring on shame as they think of them. Why? Because the dross of our lives can be turned to gold. Remembrances of violence can lead to nonviolence, and poverty can catalyze not just personal wealth but the wealth of nations.

By doing the opposite of what was done to us? Not necessarily, the journey of healing is not formulaic, it has lots of twists and turns. But just as I keep in mind the importance of holding different truths simultaneously, I also keep in mind Kazu Haga’s reminder in his book, Healing Resistance: “Hurt people hurt people; healed people heal people.”