Why you may be resenting Jews without knowing it.

I am Jewish, so needless to say these last years have been

a very uncomfortable time for me.

The masks have fallen and the long repressed hatred towards Jews has taken many forms.

My heart has been breaking little by little as I have been witnessing the explosion of horrific comments everywhere on social media and on the streets. But more so, as even those who are supposedly "spiritual" have been taking sides so easily against Israel. Without second guessing the information they are fed regarding the situation. And don’t get me started on the “inclusivity" people actually becoming horrifically violent towards Jews, even among supposedly highly educated people...

The immensity of the hatred outpour, compared to the quasi absence of reaction regarding all the other conflicts of the world, can only reveal that the roots of this hate go much deeper. It's as though this were just an excuse to let it rip. And it is not new information that this cycle has been repeating itself for millennia.

But, you know, I deeply respect discomfort, I see it as a necessary stage of evolution. I can always come out the other side with a new, deeper, more integrated understanding of what feels true and aligned to the expansion and freedom of all. My eternal mission.

And so, I decided to contemplate this deeply.

I was eager to let the underlying dynamics of this resentment reveal themselves to me. I desired to go back to the roots. And one day, something became fascinatingly clear as to why so many people have a generationally implanted aversion towards the Jews.

And so much compassion overflowed in me as I understood this. It suddenly made so much sense.

Here is the breakdown of what came through:

It has to do with what the Gene Keys call the “shadow of limitation”, in other words an old-as-time human battle between freedom to be, and the structure of laws. Which is completely linked to the battle between sovereignty over one’s land, one’s body, one’s thoughts, and colonization, domestication, conditioning tied to external approval and protection.

Ever since their beginnings, Jews haven’t conformed to the implicit (religion-based) laws and ways of the people who inhabited the same lands.

The very birth of the Hebrew people was made through Abraham: a man who felt the call to leave his own people and the ways of his culture to go “towards himself”. He felt a sacred invitation to choose his own truth, to stop following the long transmitted pagan rules of his family, in order to start living according to the rules given by what he felt was a great mysterious Knowing he suddenly had access to (aka God).

And it seems that this sovereign differentiation was something nobody could ever stand.

The following has been a history of persecution after persecution.

With the exception of the short ancient times when they had a sovereign state, the Jews historically were minorities in other people’s lands, always doing things… differently.

In countries where the rulers were fierce and deeply linked to religion – whichever one it was – some strange people were somehow not required to obey to absolutely everything. Do you see what I’m getting to? The Jews were choosing not to obey anyone but God. They responded to God’s Laws as they had received them, and to God’s Laws only. Be it on their own promised land where dozens of various occupiers ruled one after the other, or when they were dispersed around the world, adopted, hosted by others, they were devoted to something greater than any law of the government in power. They would follow it, of course, respectfully, but their existence wasn’t tied to it. And religiously speaking, therefore at the time, socially speaking, they were already heretics. Which means they were not bound by the social rules implicitly controlling everyone else via the fear of being excluded from the system.

The others, though, had to obey. The citizens of the state were bound to that law for fear of exclusion, for fear of death. And we all know that in ancient and medieval times those laws were ferocious – the official ones just as much as the implicit social ones. Your own mother and father would disown you if you didn’t abide. Yet, the Jews were there, following their own beliefs and rituals unconcerned with the obligations that their adopted hosts were bound to.

(note: Jews then usually had to pay for it by not being allowed their full human rights and/or certain professional occupations in their country of adoption – but if they didn’t have to die, they agreed to those compromises, because their sacred mission and devotion to the Law of Torah prevailed)

What it mirrors back to the rest of the world.

Perceived freedom will reflect to the trapped mind the heaviness of its limitations.

Choosing one’s own way regardless of the overwhelmingly powerful conditioning of one's host country is particularly annoying to the host, who is bound by the limitations of heavily restricting laws, who is continuously shamed and guilted by parents, teachers, priests, and entire societies into following a very disempowering, colonizing, unnatural mindset.

First Christianity and more recently Islam have widely used this kind of disempowering repression over the centuries, even though it was of course not the original intention behind any of those religions’ sacred texts and transmissions.

(Note: this type of coercion appeared within very religious Jewish communities also, as the rules and laws adopted by those authorities are quite strict and sometimes deny basic human rights too. However the celebration of life is always at the core of all teachings, as rigid as they may be.)

So of course, seemingly having a special treatment would seem unfair to people who are brutally conditioned, repressed, forced into the unnatural implicit laws and ways of the country. Understand what I am saying here: when your religion has never felt freeing or pleasant in the way it is practiced, and when it bleeds into the concept of being a “good citizen” because of how religions have influenced governmental laws, you carry a LOT of repressed anger and frustration.

Being denied the purity of sensuality and sex, being denied the beauty of body and emotion, being shamed and guilted and separated from oneself has been the curse of all the religious and governmental distortions of the past millennia.

Civilization as we know it has not been respectful of human nature – even in the current “free” countries, we are ravaged by a deep denial of human nature in all the systems put in place. It is a very ancient disease implanted long ago for reasons I won’t get into here, but the point is, everyone is unconsciously bitter because of that.

As a very simple example: emotions don’t even have their place still today in school or working environments – and they are the very basis of humaning! Needless to say, in the thousands of years that people have been civilized up until now, the level of violence present in all institutions is beyond horrific for the sensitivity of a human system. And very few people are aware of how deeply this goes. So of course, everyone carries a sh*tload of repressed anger in their bones.

And of course, from their point of view, seeing that a certain group of strangers don’t even feel they need to abide by the entirety of this, would be enraging… when one hasn’t made peace with one’s own fate.

Understanding the psychology behind this phenomenon:

When someone is shamed and guilted into behaving certain ways and believing certain truths, there are three main ways it can impact them:

-               they either identify with the authoritarian voice – become the good girl/good boy that judges and despises those who do not follow the very rules,

-               or they identify as an ugly duckling, the rebel victim that lives with repressed and unconscious rage for this abuse.

Both feel envy and extreme bitterness towards those who didn’t seem to have to go through that – in their perspective (it’s all projected).

-               In the best-case scenario, the person has healed the wounds of this conditioning, made peace with it and feel no need to compare at all. Those ones celebrate everyone’s differences and the richness it brings to the table.

But over the last millennia, most humans have been deep in unconsciousness, and fallen in the two first categories – in a more or less acute way. The Holocaust and all previous pogroms and persecutions would not have happened if most humans had been in the third category. (This is just the way things have been and it has a higher purpose; I go into it in previous blog posts if you feel like reading more about it).

So, here people are, drowning in their own wounds that make them feel so bitter and frustrated, unconsciously or consciously feeling repressed by their governments, schools, parents, and religious establishments, but obligated to comply in order to survive – and taught to love it – and meanwhile those ones over there don’t need to??

And in addition to that, they are said to be “The Chosen People”?! I mean, wtf??

No wonder hatred festered. And no wonder that hatred would then be passed down from generation to generation. No wonder it would even cause Jews to hate themselves sometimes, for fear of being the ones who cause such harm to their hosts!

Radical Islam, and even the moderate islamic people it softly bleeds into, is a conglomerate of people who have been so deeply repressed that having Jews as the scapegoat for their rage is the perfect solution - especially because it is encouraged in the distorted translations of the Quran.

But to me, this is all a complete misunderstanding.

It is a game of control and brainwashing of masses who are unaware of their inner power to be free.

The Jews were not "chosen" above others by God! They were chosen to be the Guardians of the Knowledge (Torah) that ALL are Chosen by God. The Knowledge that God is One for ALL.

Can we clear this once and for all, please, for everyone? YOU ARE CHOSEN, JUST BECAUSE YOU EXIST.

In some ways the Jews simply embody the concept of Freedom and Sovereignty in knowing that fact:

Judaism is originally meant to be a constant Questioning, of and with God. It is the great rule that contains freedom within its very definition. Only later did it become distorted and calcified into a set of rules.

So yes indeed, from the outside, and the way it was originally intended, the Jews have been chosen to incarnate discernment, self-thinking, a critical eye, and most of all, a way of living in the knowing of Oneness: an eternal mystery that binds us all together.

Such is the prayer that is repeated day and night and declined a thousand ways throughout the Torah.

But the prophecy at the core of Judaism is also that in the long run, ALL will feast under the tent of Life, all families together, not just the Jews. The Jews are just a people whose original intention was to be a guardian of Oneness in a world that still worshiped multiple gods, a guardian of Faith and Trust in a world that was continuously distracted by materiality and golden calves.

The Jewish people was designed literally through and for change, for evolution, for life, for all. To be living reminders for ALL humans that we are all chosen by God, if we choose to see it.

I believe it has become a closed off community for political reasons, and through a misinterpretation of the texts, read in too literal ways by closed off men who wanted to keep control later on.

I personally have always cringed at the communitarian attachment to identity and rules, and never really belonged to any of the Jewish communities that I was presented to. But the bond is untold, implicit, from birth.

And thankfully the magic hidden within the Torah is always there for those who dare to really look, regardless of whether or not you belong to a certain community, and it is encoded in the prayers that some say daily without maybe even realizing the depth of the mystery they hold.

I choose to let their resonance vibrate in my being in my own way through my personal devotional practice, and have dedicated my life to being a guardian of this sacred knowledge in an embodied way for anyone who feels called to be guided and refined by it.

But I also see so much beauty flourishing from the different Jewish rituals and traditions that have made my family and others come together to celebrate life generation after generation, the cyclical honoring of the earth and of her gifts, the regular revisiting of the stories of humanity year after year, the values of study and respect of the rules of countries of adoption, and the thriving in hostile environments that all of this has permitted.

What I honor most of all is the devotion to inner freedom, to sovereign choosing of one’s truth (they say there are as many ways of being Jewish as there are Jews, and such is the way it’s meant to be), and of course, a repeated remembrance of the Oneness of our Source, for the blossoming of all of Life.

So, to those who still carry a generational hatred against Jews, sometimes totally unconsciously, I want to say I see you, it makes sense and it’s not your fault. It comes from the distorted message and the heavy weight of our ancestors’ repression history. Or it comes from your own rage of having been repressed in your own childhood: as that part of you needs someone to blame for it, your unconscious generationally transmitted hatred might be coming in handy for that.

I see you, and, I have a question: do you believe you are free and chosen? Or does part of you still believe, maybe because of other generationally transmitted unconscious distortions, that you might not be?

Are you projecting onto Jews the darkness and repression that you experienced? The colonization of your own body and emotions by the patriarchal rules of your culture, the repression of your true existence and expression by external authorities in your family?

The only way it can be transmuted and transcended is not through repressing it yet again with shame "oh no I'm not antisemite, I'm not racist". But through facing your own deeply – generationally – embedded fears that you might not be totally free or chosen.

Because of course you are. By definition, Everyone is.

The ones who are respectful of the Jews are the ones who have deeply made peace with their inner shadows around freedom and chosenness. Have you?

In love,

Rafaëlle Cohen.