p. 161
"Once the pain is cleared,
laughter
is the final stage of
healing."

(since Rafael "asked" me to cancel the session with Michael Tidhar [another student in my RC class] tonight...) It's about the "lightness" I've to introduce into my life. To hell with that damned seriousness, heavyness, "tierischer Ernst" [animal seriousness] , as they've always said . "Ich brauche noch eine andre Freundin", I need another friend too, said Ursel Merz [my friend between the age of 13 till 18] "mit der man lachen und dummes Zeug schwaetzen kann" [with whom one can laugh and chat nonsense]. Isn't it that, what I've been wanting for such a long time? I wonder, what made me so dead serious, while I feel, that I'm actually a very joyous person, just as my mother described me in her diary about me as a baby: "sie kann so wunderbar lachen" [she can love so wonderfully]. What happened to me? Why was it too dangerous to laugh? Why does it still seem to be too dangerous to laugh?

Some incidents come to my mind, but they happened when I was already grownup. I'll start with them and maybe trace my way back from there.

When Martin and I attended the Fasching [carnival] in Bruxelles with Erich and Maria Kuby in 1960 , I felt safe enough to dance and behave very wildly. But it didn't take long till I asked for a drink and Maria said: "you shouldn't drink any more." I didn't understand a thing, because I hadn't drunken anything before and as everybody knows: I don't really like alcohol. I probably wanted a soft drink, nothing else. Then Martin took me aside and said: "she thinks you are drunk. Now don't make a big fuzz out of this, just try to behave as they want you to behave. " He said it much more nicely than I can phrase it now. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't have returned to the place at all. He really helped me reclaim my dignity. - Still the evening was spoiled for me. "Once in a life-time I want to have fun, to be happy, out of my brains and thoughts that keep tormenting me, and people can't stand it!"

This very Erich Kuby [obviously not the famous one, who had no wife named Maria] took me for a walk some day before Martin and I parted, leaving for USA and Israel, [we both , by chance, left our homes in Germany, Frankfurt and Boeblingen, exactly on the same day, Sept. 6, 1960] and tried to point out to me, that I was "zu schwer", too heavy, for Martin. For God's sake, why then did you interrupt my rare attempt to be light on that carnival? Certainly I exaggerated, but what did you expect me to do, being sunk in seriousness, sadness, anxiety, responsibility, guilt etc. so deeply? I want to be mad! Yes that's just what I want and I don't care for your frowning at my folly. I want to laugh and to shout foolishly. Yes I want to be foolish, I want to talk nonsense, I want to make a fool out of myself. - Do you really? What happened again last week? "Rachel wants to be 'hevremanit" [today one would say "cool", I think] said Naftali about my invitation of the people to Ya'ara [in this "first mixed Jewish-Bedouin village in the country" we, "Partnership", had conducted a very successful workshop!] They all want to pin me down to be serious,    g r a v e ,   a    p r o p h e t ! To hell with you! I said to Naftali, "but I'm just now discovering my Joy of Life, my zest!" [This, of course, was a - temporary - result of the two RC workshops in England, in August 1978.] "Well, that's something I don't know about you."

People are funny. They build up an image ["judgment"!], like Immanuel said yesterday about his class, "and in the end they believe in it", and oi-wa-woi if you try to be different. Alright, I'll be different, from what you all believed I am. You'll see me making jokes, yes you will. You'll see me brushng away every anger and tension with a light, easy word. (Will you really do that? How come? - Well I had that lightness, when I performed in Meron [in January 1978, I took part in an International Workshop of Re-Evaluation Counseling with Harvey Jackins], what Eve [one of the participants] had taught me. I'll practise it whenever there is an opportunity. Every blame, for instance, will be a chance to laugh (HOW??), every failure and every mistake and every lack of action will be an opportunity to laugh at myself and to laugh the blame off in talking with others. (Really?) I should ask myself in the evening, how many times did I laugh today? And I shouldn't be able to count it. Laughter is the remedy, laughter is the remedy for me!

Sometimes I've done well. When we sat together for Shabbat breakfast at Shlomit's place [Shlomit Adler was our neighbor at Ramat-Hadar, born like my husband in 1922. Her sister, a teacher in Jerusalem, used to come to her every Shabbat, and when my youngest, Micha, could hardly walk, the sisters asked, if they could invite the three kids for every Shabbat breakfast. It was rare, that Rafael and I took part in that breakfast too.) and Rafael and Shlomit - not Mirjam - were making jokes about my new idiosyncracy. I was joining them happily, and Mirjam realized, that this was obviously a result of my counseling. I really should internalize that image of Zorba, the Greek, dancing and laughing after his work turned out to be in vain. [When I now , on March 3, 2011, opened Zorba's dancing and laughing, one of the new so easily available videos, tears came to my eyes...] To dance and laugh, whenever things don't turn out as I wanted them to turn out, instead of crying - this is the right "direction" for my discharge! Just as Haravey said concerning my feelings of inadaquacy - I shouldn't display them even through discharge, I should act against them all the time, even in sessions - thus I should not let myself sink, even in sessions. I should acieve this lightness and discharge by laughing all the time.

But back to an incident, a good one first: When I gave a lesson during theological internship in Heidelberg in winter 1961-62, Pfarrer Schoener said - as the first point after we students sat together for evaluation: "There are two things which differentiate Man from animal: laughter and prayer." And he went on telling the class, that somebody laughing so much with the pupils will be an excellent teacher, whatever skills I was still lacking. He went on proposing me to become a teacher at a certain, famous school. I, of course, hadn't realized that I was laughing a lot, nor had I known that it was good to laugh.

I remember Victor in England [one of the 4 families, where I stayed in summer 1956, in order to improve my English) saying about his sister Veronica:"The thing I like best about her, is her lovely laughter." "When she came, I realized it immediately - that relaxed, lovely laughter. I still try to imitate it, but it sounds more often like the laughter of that paralyzed Hungarian student Anna in the student's hostel in Heidelberg in 1962. It was very pleasant to talk to her , but time and again she laughed in a way that made me shiver. Very often I feel, that my laughter, too, is artificial, it doesn't sound spontanous. I try to laugh in a certain way, so as to give it a natural colour. How awful. I'm always afraid of laughing too loudly, if I don't restrain myself. I'm scared. Do I have - like her, the paralyzed refugee, - to hide that much hurt and pain? I have too sound legs and am in my own country, am loved and at home!

Just now Ahmed Watad called me, and I inserted some really lovely laughters. I was conscious of how I laughed, but it did seem to be alright and not artificial at all. It will be with laughter like with the study of Torah - "from [studying her] not for her sake - it will come for her sake"

Why shouldn't one be able to train laughing? Like singing? Who said, it has to be "natural", "spontaneous"? Alright, woever says that, I say something which suits   m e, which is: I'll laugh intentionally! I'll train the sounding of my laughter! And I'll not let somebody shut me down in case of too loud a laughter. "what happens to you when you hear me laughing so loudly? What's bugging you?" I might ask something like this.

Oh, there's another thing that gets in my way: "Your mouth is too broad!", said my mother and said Rafael many times. So when I laugh, I try to tighten my mouth. Hah-Hah-Hah! People might think, seeing me laughing: "what a big, ugly mouth that Rachel has!" - I'm laughing now!!! What a funny way to make myself a slave of other people's judgments! You also keep forgetting, that some people say: Llook what a lovely person Rachel is when she's laughing! "It's like the sun bursting out of the clouds", said Zwi Zohar once and other people found different metaphors, all of them expressing, that my smile and my laughter were one of my biggest assets. So my direction should be: "To be a laughing counselor all the time!"

It also reminds me of the advice of Martin Buber to me [I just, on March 2, 2011, inserted his/my poem Elijahu in .INTEGRATION!] . God can do everythng, "aber eines muss der Mensch dazutun - Humor!" but one thing Man must add: a sense of humor. There you are!

I remember my mother's Spottvers mocking rhyme
"Eine kleine Dickmadam - sass in der Eisenbahn, Dickmadame lachte - Eisenbahne krachte."
Not it's the other way round:
"Eisenbahne krachte, Dickmadame lachte". A little fat lady said in the train. Train cracked, Fat-Lady laughed.
I was hurt, felt deeply invalidated. Why couldn't I laugh with her there? I'll certainly do it now! In this case Martin was wrong. He once said: "Die Leute sollen sich ueber dich aergern, aber nicht ueber dich lachen"."People should be irritated by you, but not laugh about you. Why shouldn't they? I'll laugh together with them and I'll have helped them to insert some fun into a [perhaps] dreary life.

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