As it all came pouring out at the funeral, I was surprised by the crowd that had showed up: friends I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years; cousins who’d once been like siblings; my best friend from high school. People who had no obligation to show up at a cemetery on a Sunday morning. People who showed up anyway. In one of the hardest moments of my adult life, my nervous system was being held in a way I didn’t know I needed.

Acute grief has a powerful effect on our brain, sending the amygdala into overdrive. Your body is stuck in a state of hyperarousal and stress. Shiva is the exact antidote: you are co-regulated by others around you.

Then there are the somatic rituals of mourning: tearing your shirt, crying out to Hashem, sitting on a low stool, not taking a shower. You are forced to sit and process your pain while surrounded by friends and family. People gathered around us, sent food, offered rides and playdates for my children. Something shifted for me in those moments, and I no longer felt so alone. Judaism was saying: these feelings are important, and you need to feel them, but you are not alone in them. We are here for you and we love you.

The community I was raised in was showing up and saying: welcome home. My kids spent their afternoons playing in my aunt’s backyard and with my best friends’ children. I realized my children were learning an important lesson, too: that as a Jew, you belong to something bigger than yourself. That people show up when you need them. They were learning that Jewish rituals help us feel calm and safe.

Much of what I focus on in my presence on social media channels is the very thing I was experiencing that week: in my practice as a psychotherapist, I help clients process trauma. Online, I teach people that Jewish ritual is nervous system science. Judaism is not just a religion but a set of structures, designed over centuries, by people who knew that grief would come for all of us. Who knew that your body needs other bodies around it to remember how to function. That your kids need to see what it looks like when a community actually shows up. This isn’t just emotional support. Sitting shiva, being part of a minyan, are deeply regulating.

There’s a reason it’s called “sitting” shiva: not fixing or improving— just sitting. Being present. Holding space. The food, the prayers, the silence, the showing up: all of it is nervous system technology.

In a time where everything felt tinged with sadness, I remember my children playing with their cousins and friends and being surrounded by people. This is what being Jewish means to me: community showing up when you feel like you can’t do it alone. Rituals designed to calm our nervous system and hold us when we need it the most.

My father is gone. And in the moments I feel the most grief, I remind myself that healing comes from allowing myself to feel that pain, while knowing that as a member of the Jewish people, I am never truly alone.

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What I’ve learned through working with clients and noticing the feelings in my own body is that this is not how the nervous system works. Two channels can be playing at once, even if they sound like they are playing a completely different tune.

We’ve been led to believe that feelings work linearly. First you grieve, then eventually you’re ready to feel joy again. First the fear passes, then you find your courage. This doesn’t seem to be the truth.

Affect tolerance is the ability to hold more than one feeling at a time. It’s not immaturity to feel two things at once, it’s actually the sign of a regulated nervous system, one that’s able to feel two conflicting emotions at the same time.

Fear doesn’t mean you lack the competence, it’s a sign that you’re probably on the cusp of some serious growth. If there were nothing at stake, there’d be nothing to be afraid of. The fear and the pride are, in a strange way, pointing at the same thing from two different angles. Fear can feel horrible, but that doesn’t mean it has to keep you from moving forward.

Judaism already knew this

Joy in Jewish tradition is often framed as something you’re commanded to do, not something you wait to feel once conditions are perfect. Which tells you something. If joy only counted when fear was absent, it would never be commanded. It would just be lucky timing. We’re commanded to feel joy, sometimes when we’re feeling some very conflicting emotions at the same time.

Being Jewish right now is exactly this, holding joy and fear in the same breath. Posting openly and proudly as a Jew on social media, while also being aware of what criticism that might invite. Going to Shabbat services with added worry about how much security is present. This is what it means to be a Jew today, always holding fear and pride in the same breath.

You are allowed to bring fear with you, even as you hold pride, joy, and grief at the same time.

Not the historical why. I know the historical why. Two Temples fell on this date, roughly six and a half centuries apart, and the calendar never let us forget it. Exile stacked on exile stacked on exile, all filed under the ninth of Av, until the day became a container for every catastrophe that came after.

I mean the somatic why. Why hunger. Why thirst. Why now, on the day we are already grieving the most, do we ask the body to suffer too? Here is the conclusion I’ve come to.

Grief that has nowhere to go does not disappear. It moves into the body and stays there, low and constant, with no beginning and no end. This is what unprocessed grief looks like clinically. Not a wave that crests and passes, but a weather system that never lifts. The nervous system, given no edges to the pain, cannot practice surviving it. It can only brace. Fasting gives grief somewhere to land.

When you stop eating, the body does not stay neutral. Cortisol rises. Blood sugar drops. The sympathetic nervous system, the one that governs fight and flight, comes online. This is a real physiological stress response, not a metaphor for one. Scientists have a name for a controlled dose of stress that strengthens a system rather than breaking it. They call it hormetic stress. A little bit of hard, on purpose, on a schedule, so the system that meets it comes out more capable than it went in.

On Tisha B’Av, we are not simply remembering loss. We are asking the body to feel something real while we remember it. The ache in the stomach becomes a companion to the ache of the history. Grief stops being an idea you hold in your head and becomes something you carry in your cells, for exactly twenty-five hours, and then it ends. Fasting becomes a somatic anchor to hold onto our grief.

But the most interesting part is that we did not build a ritual that lets grief run forever. We built one with a door on both sides, a container. You walk in at sundown. You walk out the following night. In between, you are asked to feel the full weight of what your people have lost, in your body, without flinching away from it and without letting it consume you either.

This is what trauma therapists now call titrated exposure. A measured, survivable dose of the very thing that once felt too big to survive. Enough to matter. Not enough to break you. And crucially, done again and again, on purpose, so the nervous system stops treating the memory as a live threat and starts treating it as something it has already gotten through before.

Every year, we do this. Every year, the body learns the same lesson again. You can enter the grief fully. You will come back out.

I think about the loss of my father last month — what it meant to grieve, held by a community with a fixed start and stop time, and how regulating that was for my nervous system.

We were not given a religion that asks us to avoid pain. We were given one that walks us directly into it, on a schedule, with company, and then walks us back out.

The body has always known how to do this. Our tradition simply remembered it first, and gave it a date.

There’s a story a lot of us absorbed early, from the movies we grew up on, from the way our parents talked about getting through hard things. Strength means armor. Strength means you don’t flinch, don’t cry, don’t need anyone. To be strong is to be tough. Hard.

A client of mine, mid-thirties, runs a team of forty people, told me once that her superpower was “just shutting it off.” No anxiety, no crying at her desk, no asking for help even when she was drowning. She said it like a job qualification. It took eight months before she could feel what that switch had actually cost her, which was almost everything except her ability to function.

I see this constantly. People mistaking the absence of visible emotion for strength. Somewhere along the way we started treating hardness and resilience as the same thing. They’re not, and the gap between them is bigger than most of us were ever taught.

What actually predicts resilience

Post-traumatic growth research asks a specific question: who comes through hardship not just intact, but changed for the better? The answer isn’t who you’d guess. It isn’t the people who armored up hardest. It’s the ones who stayed flexible, who stayed connected to others, who could bend without breaking.

Polyvagal theory gives this a mechanism. Shutdown and regulation are two different nervous system states, not two versions of the same calm. Numbness feels protective in the moment, but it’s expensive to hold onto, and it cuts you off from exactly the kind of connection your body needs in order to actually heal.

What my ancestors actually did

I come back to this often, thinking about my family’s history as Mashadi Jews.

In 1839, the Jewish community of Mashhad, Persia was forced to convert to Islam under threat of a mob. For generations after, my ancestors lived outwardly as Muslims. Muslim names. Mosque on Fridays.

And quietly, inside their own homes, a different life kept going. Candles lit in back rooms. Kosher practices behind closed doors. Marriages arranged within the community in secret. A thread of Jewish life passed mother to daughter for over a hundred years, until it was finally safe to live it in the open again.

Refusing to bend at all would have gotten them erased. So they did something harder: stayed soft enough to adapt to whatever the world demanded of them on the outside, rooted enough that nothing essential was ever actually lost on the inside. Both at once. Not a compromise. Maybe one of the most sophisticated survival strategies a people has ever pulled off.

Why this matters for you right now

If you come from a lineage of survival, and most of us do in some form, chances are you inherited the armoring half of that. The adapting, performing, getting-through part. What tends to disappear by the third or fourth generation is the other half: the rootedness. The part that stays connected to yourself and to other people even while everything around you is asking you to adapt.

That’s the half worth going back for.

A small practice

Tonight, or this coming Shabbat, light a candle the way your own great-great-grandmother might have. Not for a post. Not for anyone watching. Just you, in a quiet room, doing something small that ties you to a line that didn’t break.

Then pay attention to your body, not your thoughts. Shoulders dropping half an inch. Breath landing a little deeper than it did a minute ago. That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s your nervous system recognizing rootedness, the exact thing it’s been reaching for the whole time you were trying to armor through instead.

My ancestors didn’t survive because they were unbreakable. They survived because they knew which parts of themselves to protect, and which parts to keep soft enough to pass down.

It was always both. Hineini.

I have been sitting with a lot of loss these past few weeks.

And in that sitting, something has become very clear to me. Judaism knew something about grief that most of us were never taught. It did not leave us alone with it. It did not tell us to process it quietly and move on. It built a container for it. A structure. A communal holding.

That container begins tomorrow.

The Three Weeks start with a fast. Bein HaMetzarim. Between the straits. A period of collective mourning that stretches from the 17th of Tammuz to Tisha B’Av, when we mourn the destruction of the Temple, exile, rupture, and the long painful story of a people who lost their home and had to carry that loss forward through time.

But underneath the history, something else is happening.

Your nervous system is being held.

The period begins with a fast because fasting is a somatic marker. A signal sent directly to the body that something significant has arrived. Before your mind can name what you are entering, your body is already being asked to slow down. To feel the weight of the transition before you intellectualize it away.

Modern trauma research confirms what our tradition always knew. Grief is not purely a cognitive experience. It lives in the chest, the throat, the belly. It changes our breathing, our sleep, our appetite. The body knows something has changed long before we have words for it. A fast says: yes. Something has changed. We are marking it in the body, not just the mind.

This is somatic acknowledgment. Not punishment. Presence.

Then come the three weeks themselves. Weddings postponed. Music quieted. Certain pleasures set aside. Not because Judaism wants you to suffer, but because the nervous system cannot process grief and celebration at the same time. The tradition understood this. It created conditions for mourning by gently removing the things that would pull you away from it.

Titrated grief. The slow, deliberate exposure to loss in doses the system can actually metabolize.

But the piece that moves me most, especially right now, is this. Hashem built co-regulation into the very structure of how we grieve. The entire Jewish people mourns together. Not each person alone in their private loss, trying to make sense of it in isolation. But a whole people, across time zones and traditions and levels of observance, entering the same emotional register at the same time.

The nervous system does not regulate itself alone. It regulates in relationship. When we are held by others who are feeling something alongside us, our own systems begin to settle. The Three Weeks are a co-regulation ritual built into the calendar by design. The communal nature of Jewish mourning was never incidental. It was the point.

You do not have to carry this alone. The whole people is grieving with you.

I have been feeling that more deeply than ever lately. When you are actually inside loss, the structure of Judaism stops feeling like obligation. It starts feeling like mercy. Like someone who loved you built a container before you even knew you would need it.

However you are entering this period, whatever you are carrying into it, whether it is historical grief, personal loss, collective fear, or simply the weight of a year that has asked a great deal of you, you do not have to manufacture the feeling or perform the mourning.

You just have to let the container hold you.

Your tradition built it for exactly this.

The Homecoming is a space for deeper writing on Jewish identity, nervous system healing, ritual, and coming home to yourself. This writing is for education and reflection only and is not a substitute for working with a licensed professional.

The Homecoming is where I’ll be writing about Jewish identity, nervous system healing, trauma, ritual, faith, and the wisdom Judaism has always carried.

I am a trauma therapist. I am EMDR-trained. I am also a Jewish woman who believes deeply that our tradition has always known something about healing, rhythm, regulation, belonging, and the soul.

So much of modern healing language gives us new words for things our ancestors were already practising.

Shabbat teaches the body how to stop.

Havdalah teaches the nervous system how to transition.

Ritual gives shape to moments that might otherwise feel too big to hold.

Jewish identity gives us a place to stand when the world feels confusing, loud, or hostile.

And the neshama reminds us of something I come back to again and again:

Your soul was never broken.

This space is for the woman who wants to feel more connected to her Jewish identity. It is for the person who grew up Jewish but never realised their tradition could support their nervous system. It is also for the non-Jewish reader who wants to understand Jewish identity with more empathy, depth, and humanity.

Here, I’ll be writing about four main themes:

Jewish identity as strength.

Jewish ritual as nervous system wisdom.

The soul as whole, even when the body feels afraid.

Intergenerational healing and the long journey of coming home.

This will be a quieter space than social media.

More reflective. More honest. More spacious.

Welcome to The Homecoming.

I’m so glad you’re here.