V’ahavta

Reflection by Alicia Lieberman

Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D., directs the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a center of the SAMHSA National Child Traumatic Stress Network. She is the senior developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy, an evidence-based treatment for traumatized children aged birth-to-5 broadly used nationally and internationally as an evidence-based treatment for traumatized young children and their parents or caregivers. Born in Paraguay, she received her professional training in Israel and the United States. Her cross-cultural experience as a Jewish Latina informs her commitment to increasing access and raising the standard of care for low-income and minority children and families.

Aurora Levins Morales, is a Kehilla Member, a Puerto Rican Jewish writer and poet, an artist, a historian, a healer, and a revolutionary.  "V'Ahavta" means in Hebrew "And you shall love...". It is the first word of the verse that follows immediately after the Shema, the core Jewish prayer (Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one).  In the traditional prayer, the verses that follow are:

"You shall love Adonai your God will all your heart,

with all your soul,

and with all your might."

And the rest of the prayer asks us to engage in a range of practices to ensure that these words become a embedded in our daily comings and goings and in how we raise and teach our children.  The poem speaks for me with a prophetic voice, reminiscent of the Biblical prophets who scoffed at piety expressed through empty religious worship and urged the people to engage in concrete acts of social justice and helping the poor.  I find this poem a powerful expression of the message that the practice of infant mental health is inseparable from the quest for a better society.

V’ahavta

By Aurora Levins Morales

Say these words when you lie down

and when you rise up,

when you go out and when you return.

In times of mourning

and in times of joy.

Inscribe them on your doorposts,

embroider them on your garments,

tattoo them on your shoulders,

teach them to your children,

your neighbors, your enemies,

recite them in your sleep,

here in the cruel shadow of empire:

Another world is possible.

imagine winning. This is your sacred task.

This is your power.

Imagine every detail of winning,

the exact smell of the summer streets

in which no one has been shot,

the muscles you have never

unclenched from worry,

gone soft as newborn skin,

the sparkling taste of food

when we know that no one on earth is hungry,

that the beggars are fed,

that the old man under the bridge

and the woman wrapping herself in thin sheets

in the back seat of a car,

and the children who suck on stones,

nest under a flock of roofs

that keep multiplying their shelter.

Lean with all your being towards that day

when the poor of the world

shake down a rain of good fortune

out of the heavy clouds,

and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win

as if it were your child.

It is your child.

Defend it as if it were your lover.

It is your lover.

When you inhale and when you exhale

breathe the possibility of another world

into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body

until it shines with hope.

Then imagine more.

Don’t waver.

Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth

Into the throat with which you sing.

Escalate your dreams.

Make them burn so fiercely

that you can follow them down

any dark alleyway of history

and not lose your way.

Make them burn clear

as a starry drinking gourd

Over the grim fog of exhaustion,

and keep walking.

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.

So that we,

and the children of our children’s children

may live.