Today is September 11th. And tonight, at sundown, is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish new year lasts 2 days and shifts around based on the lunar calendar. (So, no Sunday newsletter this week... this one instead.)

The feeling today has been a strange one.

September 11th has me looking back into some of the darkest grief and horror I've ever witnessed. Rosh Hashana, Jewish New Year, asks me to look forward, with sweetness and hope, into a brand new year.

I've been emotionally wrestling with just how to hold both in my body on the same day.

On September 11th 2001, I was eighteen. I was in Israel, a soldier in basic training, a long way from home.

On a break, I wandered into the rec room, flipped on the TV, saw the footage, decided it was a rubbish disaster film, and switched it off again.

Twenty minutes later a friend came running. "Switch on the TV!" I turned it back on and said, "Ugh, it's still this stupid film." And she said, "Sylvie. This isn't a film. It's CNN."

We were still standing there, watching, when the second plane hit.

The whole base went into lockdown. As far as any of us knew in that moment, this was the start of a world war. And I remember, physically, the sensation of my own naivety leaving my body. Like something draining out of me.

I've come to think of that day as the one my childhood actually ended. Eighteen years old, far from my parents, no familiar shoulder to cry on, watching the most iconic US city shatter, with the same scenes replaying over and over on a loop.

I didn't know much about trauma yet. About PTSD, about what it does and how it lodges deep inside the body and mind.

I was in an army, so I was about to learn a great deal, first hand. But that was the very first time I remember asking the question that would end up shaping my entire career: how do people carry on after something like this? How does a body survive what it isn't built to survive?

The cost of that morning was so much more than the nearly three thousand people killed. It ran on, through the tens of thousands of service members killed or wounded in the wars that followed, and the hundreds of thousands who came home carrying PTSD in their nervous systems.

I treat some of those veterans now. So I can tell you what it actually does.

PTSD disrupts sleep, mood, the entire nervous system. People with it can be fine one minute and then startle for seemingly no reason the next. The anxiety many live with on a daily basis has no obvious source other than its origin.

It bleeds into relationships. It affects intimacy. It disrupts the body's basic ability to feel safe being touched, being close to others, of being here, being present.

PTSD lodges in a person's nervous system and tells them, over and over again, that the world is mortally dangerous, and it keeps sounding the alarm long, long, long after the danger has gone.

Firstly....if this is you, I want you to know categorically that you are not defective or weird or, God forbid, alone.

What's happening in your body is a normal response to an abnormal amount of pain. It has a name, a diagnosis, and it is (increasingly) understood. Most importantly, it is starting to be more and more treatable.

Secondly...you do not have to feel unsafe in your own body forever.

That's not a slogan.

It's the actual, daily work of my profession, and I've watched people who were certain they were beyond help find their way back to sleeping through the night, to being held, to being present.

So, please, if you need help, get help. It exists. You're allowed to have it.

Also, in case you don't know... I have very special rates for veterans. They have served and protected us, I am only too honored to try to serve and protect them too. If you know a veteran struggling, let them know.

Which brings me back to tonight.

When I first noticed when Jewish New Year would fall this year, I thought the date collision between September 11th and Rosh Hashana was a cruel accident of the calendar.

Grief and celebration, shoved up against each other.

But I've come to see it differently, because Rosh Hashanah, for us Jews, is never simple, uncomplicated joy. It's not like the Secular New Year on December 31st.

We Jews dip apples in honey for a sweet year, yes. But these two days also open the Days of Awe, a solemn stretch of looking back over the past year to see our shortcomings, our failures, to really take stock of who we were as people this year. Maybe we did some really amazing things this year.... and maybe also, we messed up and acted like a bit of an A-hole (I know I did...).

Sweetness and sorrow, held in the same heart. It's how life is designed, isn't it?

Something I love about Judaism is that it refuses to separate mourning from hope. We light the candles AND we remember the dead.

We taste the honey AND we feel the weight of the year. Not one or the other, but both, simultaneously, held in our one aching but resilient body (and soul).

So today, I'm remembering that frightened eighteen-year-old on a locked-down base, watching the world change. I'm praying for and honouring everyone lost that morning, and in the subsequent wars, and everyone still carrying that shock and grief in their bodies twenty five years on. AND...turning, at sundown, toward a new year, with as much sweetness and hope as I can gather up.

To my Jewish brethren observing.... Shanah Tovah. A good and sweet new year to you all. To those not of my faith, I also wish you nothing but sweetness and goodness, whatever date it is on the calendar.

And to anyone reading this who is still fighting to feel safe in their own body, whatever put you there, my door is open.

You don't have to do it alone.

With love, and this year, a great deal of tenderness,

​
Sylvie