HasidiCult

Shabbos, the weekly Jewish holiday, should be a day of rest. But for survivors, it can be just the opposite. I was going to write this as an inspiration piece, full of encouragement of how you can keep going and keep Shabbos even when the going is really rough. (Haha, as if.) But then, I thought, to hell with that. Let's be real.  Keeping Shabbos as a trauma survivor is hell. Plain and simple. Majority of my coping mechanisms are melacha ( which is the term for forbidden work on Shabbos), so I can't cope with the tremendous amount of anxiety I feel. Listening to music? Nope. Putting on lotion? Nada. Calling a friend? Can't do that either. Cutting myself? Just kidding. Don't do that anymore. Plus, all of my major traumas happened on Shabbos, so that doesn't help things much. Even just thinking of the day gets me jittery. As a child, I was molested by a predator in the neighborhood who attended the same Shul (synagogue) as my family. He also happens to be a huge donor

          Sitting at the Friday night Shabbos table last week, I was hit with some shocking news. Casually, one of our guests threw the bombshell that Malka Leifer was extradited to Australia from Israel.      "What, you didn't hear yet? It was all over the news last week."       She said it so casually, as if discussing last night's meatball and spaghetti dinner or the latest celebrity gossip. Meanwhile, my jaw had dropped so low that I was incapable of forming coherent words. After so many attempts to extradite her, countless interventions of the three sisters at the forefront of the case, and the strained relations between Israel and Australia, it had almost become somewhat of a righteous yet unattainable goal. The kind of thing that you hope for desperately but resign yourself to the thought of it never being achieved.      The fact that it was now a reality stunned me speechless. The relief and ecstasy that the news brought me rendered me a jiggling glob of jello