In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Aryeh Green, author of My Israel Trail, about divorce, forgiveness and spirituality.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Note: For some reason, this episode was either never published on YouTube or the video was later removed, so there is no recording to play here. I’ve included the transcript for anyone interested.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: And welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today, we are going to discuss divorce and spirituality, and that is why we have brought on a very special guest speaker to help us really dive deep.
Barbara La Pointe: Aryeh Green has been described as an inspiring and dynamic. He is an expert in media affairs and media relations and the history of Israel. Today, he is the chief strategy officer at Energia Global Renewal Energy Company, and he is also an inspiring speaker with unique perspectives on Israel and Jewish issues.
Barbara La Pointe: Yet today, Aryeh is here because he, like so many others, have experienced a divorce. He wrote a book about it, and that book is a best seller. It’s called My Israel Trail: Finding Peace in the Land of Milk and Honey, Lessons Learned. His book invites us to accompany him as he journeys through the Israel National Trail, over 680 miles.
Barbara La Pointe: Welcome.
Aryeh Green: Thank you very much, Barbara. I don’t know if it’s yet a best seller, but hopefully at some point it might become that.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, thank you for that clarity. It must be on the trajectory, then. I thought I had read that somewhere, but I certainly would hope that for your book.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s excellent ...
Aryeh Green: Let’s hope so. Thank you.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, listen, we have to, before we can get to the actual trail and that transformational walk that you took, we have to talk a little bit about the pain and trauma of divorce. So what ultimately led you to walk the Israel Trail after your divorce? We could start there.
Aryeh Green: Sure. The truth is that I grew up in California hiking in the Sierras and the Coastal Mountain Range, and having moved to Israel at age 21 and raised a family with three small children in Israel where it’s a national pastime of going hiking, taking your kids. Schools have at least once or twice a year school field trips, and some of the parents accompany them, and I always did, and we used to take our kids out for hikes at least a few times every year.
Aryeh Green: So the idea of hiking was not new to me, but I’d never done something quite as audacious as a two-month trek all alone for 800 miles with a 50 pound pack on my back. It was definitely well beyond my comfort zone. When you ask what led me to do it, well, on the one hand, I’d like to say that as an avid hiker, having children of my friends and friends of my children who had done that kind of a through hike, it became a thing about a decade, two decades ago when it was first introduced.
Aryeh Green: It’s Israel’s Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail or what have you, where young Israelis, age 21, after their national service or their military service in the Israel Defense Forces, they would hike the Israel Trails for a couple of months. And I always had a yearning to do that.
Aryeh Green: I actually accompanied some friends of children and children of friends on the day here or there as they were doing it, in their experience. But what really precipitated it without question was that I went through a devastating divorce, which basically turned my world upside down as all of you and our listeners, viewers of course will be familiar with.
Aryeh Green: Doesn’t really matter whose choice the divorce is, whether it’s mutual or one party, it is something that turns our world upside down. And what led me to walk the trail after the divorce was this need, this desperate need to find a way to deal with my pain and my suffering, with the anger and the resentment, frustration, that I had built up.
Aryeh Green: And the funny thing is, perhaps we’ll talk a little bit more about the silence of the desert that I experienced, but I had spent two and a half years talking to therapists, to family members, and to friends, and to my former wife, talking and talking and talking. I just wanted to just get out, get away, and that’s basically what led me to hike the trail after the divorce.
Barbara La Pointe: ‘Cause even though you grew up knowing about it, it’s quite a unique solution to heal. Not one I would have thought of, but a beautiful one indeed.
Aryeh Green: It’s very true. As I say that something that I had wanted to do and already for at least a decade had thought, “Yeah, one day I’m gonna hike the trail.”
Aryeh Green: And the truth is that the real precipitation, if you will, was that I hiked up Half Dome. Don’t know if you’re familiar or if our listeners or viewers are familiar, but Half Dome is a huge granite mountain in Yosemite Valley National Park, Yosemite National Park in California. And it’s an excruciatingly difficult physical and emotional and psychological challenge to hike up the sheer face of Half Dome, hanging on for dear life to these metal cables, so that the wind doesn’t knock you off the side of the cliff.
Aryeh Green: And people have unfortunately been injured and died on this ascent up the back of Half Dome. And I did that. I did that with my daughter right after she finished her military service. We took a trip to visit my family in California, and we went off to Yosemite, and we hiked up Half Dome.
Aryeh Green: We got to the top of it, and my daughter, in fact, had to lie down and recover from the experience. And then as we’re standing there and hugging each other at the top, I looked at her, I said, “You know what? When this divorce is through...” We knew it was imminent at that point.
Aryeh Green: This was August, September, before the divorce came through at the end of December. So it was just a few months away, but we knew it was on the way. And I just looked at her, I said, “You know what? I’m gonna hike the Israel Trail.” And that was really what led me to do it then and there in terms of the real finite decision to take action.
Barbara La Pointe: I love that. I just love that. I can tell Andrew does too by the beautiful smile on his face. And I have a little gut feeling that there’ll be a lot of beautiful metaphors that we can highlight throughout this conversation. Even just hanging on a cliff, being possibly blown away while you’re waiting for divorce is highly symbolic and metaphoric.
Aryeh Green: Absolutely. In fact, every one of the lessons that I described in the book, every one of the lessons that we’ll talk about some, I’m sure, today, they were all lessons from the physical hike. They weren’t philosophical ramblings or contemplative explorations of life or theology.
Aryeh Green: They were physical lessons from the actual hike. But all of them ended up not even being metaphors, but having specific application to the process of my healing from the divorce.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. You mentioned earlier the silence of the desert adding a great deal of either catharsis or even just a point of reflection.
Andrew Folkler: I was wondering if you could open up on that a little bit as well.
Aryeh Green: Well, as I said, I grew up in California, so I love forests. I love forests and greenery and lush and verdant hillsides. I’ve never been much of a fan of the desert. I found deserts stark and boring and just unwelcoming.
Aryeh Green: So for me to start the first three weeks of the hike from the southern border of Israel on the Sinai Desert and the Red Sea up through the Negev Desert are stark, almost overwhelming, vast expanses. You don’t think of Israel as a vast country. It’s a small country. But believe me, when you’re walking, and especially with a 50-pound pack on your back all alone, there’s it’s a pretty big country when it takes three weeks to get up through the really serious ascents and descents and long dry riverbeds through valleys in the desert, and I found it incredibly overwhelming. And I mean that in two senses. There is a negative implication to that.
Aryeh Green: It’s frightening. It’s lonely. The silence of the desert is almost oppressive. But on the other hand, it was incredibly liberating for me to feel this sense of silence, which I was mentioning, having talked for the last two and a half years, it was nice to have some quiet. But being alone with my thoughts, I was able to reflect on so much of the process that had brought me to where I was at that point.
Aryeh Green: And the silence in the desert ended up connecting me to a number of different ideas which I wouldn’t have anticipated, although when I talk about them afterwards, it seems intuitive. So for instance, walking along the desert, minute after minute, step after step, hour after hour for eight, 10, 12 hours at a time, it obviously gave me a lot of room to think, but it was surprisingly peaceful, not only in the sense that it was, of course, overwhelmingly quiet, but it also gave me a sense of perspective.
Aryeh Green: And as I was working through that first stage of my pain and my regrets and my frustration, and my anger, to be honest, it gave me a perspective on that pain. I was very aware of the fact that I’m just a small speck, almost invisible, trudging along hour after hour in the middle of this desert where nobody knows where I am, nobody needs me, nobody cares, nobody can see me.
Aryeh Green: And that could have been a little bit depressing, but it wasn’t. It was surprisingly liberating. It made me feel like I was perhaps a small speck, but a small part of a vast universe, and that perspective, that humility, that modesty of an understanding that, “Hey, it’s not all about me.
Aryeh Green: I got problems, but so do other people, and a lot worse problems than I do.” It really did, to a great extent, the way you asked the question, it supported my journey, the physical journey of enabling me to take that next step after step after step, and also the beginning of the processing of the pain of the divorce, and the beginning of the process of healing.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s beautiful. And you did take a lot of steps for over eight weeks, and in fact, you went through the hills of Jerusalem whereby gratitude started to show up after silence. I was just wondering how gratitude supported you in your walk or in your healing journey of divorce.
Aryeh Green: Well, for me, all the elements that I talk about in the book, that we’re talking about here, were not necessarily new to me, but they were reinforced in the process of the hike and the process of healing from the pain of the divorce.
Aryeh Green: And I had always been somebody who appreciated the blessings in my life. But there’s no question that as I started to walk from the desert into the more green and verdant hills of the Jerusalem mountains, I really did experience an overwhelming sense of gratitude. On the one hand, I cried when I saw the first colorful flower after three weeks of the grays and yellows and blacks and browns of the desert.
Aryeh Green: Seeing color again, and this symbol of life and renewal of life, to me, was an overwhelming experience of re-engagement with life as it were, and that prompted a real sense of appreciation and gratitude for all the blessings in my life, starting from the privilege that I had.
Aryeh Green: It sounds counterintuitive, but I was grateful to my former wife. If she hadn’t wanted a divorce, I never would have had the privilege to hike the Israel trail 800 miles all alone in the course of eight weeks with a 50 pound pack on my back. Did I mention that?
Barbara La Pointe: No, we can’t forget the 50 pound pack.
Aryeh Green: No, I can’t forget that. That’s the truth. But I was extremely grateful for... I should mention that, as I said, the gratitude itself came from the physical experience of seeing the verdant green forests and the flowers and water streams and what have you, but also the Jerusalem Hills.
Aryeh Green: We’re very near Jerusalem. So for me, it was also coming out of the desert into a very familiar territory where I ride bikes and go for bike rides two, three times a week and walks with the kids and passed through places and trails that I had walked with my children as little children, even camped overnight with them.
Aryeh Green: And so the gratitude that I was feeling internally was also a part of just this feeling as I was coming towards home as it were. Although I didn’t go home ‘cause I still had the other half of the trek to do. But the feeling of familiarity and being near home filled me also with gratitude for my family, for my friends who’d supported me, both my adult children and my parents and my brother, and my friends who’d supported me in the course of the difficulties and the challenges of the divorce, and also the preparations for and during the trek itself.
Aryeh Green: So it was definitely a very big part of my healing process to move from humility and also an acceptance of the reality that I found myself in. On the one hand, on the hillside, a mountainside in the desert where I got lost and I just had to say, “Okay, Ari, accept it. You’re lost.
Aryeh Green: You gotta deal with this,” to that my writing in my journal that, “Okay, you’re divorced. You have to accept that, that’s your reality. Deal with it.” Moving from that acceptance based on the humility that I experienced in the desert into this real appreciation and gratitude for the blessings in my life was a very, very important element in the process of my getting over my divorce.
Andrew Folkler: I think it’s a really powerful thing the way you describe that, going through the different steps in the grief cycle because some people up front just might hear, oh, gratitude, and then they’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve heard gratitude all the time, and how can I be grateful for all these things?”
Andrew Folkler: But they’re still caught in that pain and anger. They haven’t worked through that or then subsequently through acceptance like you mentioned. That gratitude’s the last step, but it’s the most empowering I think is at least the vibe that I’m getting from this.
Aryeh Green: Well, there’s a lot of truth to that.
Aryeh Green: For me, it was the last step in what I would call the beginning of healing. It was not the last step in terms of the lessons I learned on the trail, and it was definitely not the last step in the process I was going through to enable me to move on with my life. But it was, as you say, the last step.
Aryeh Green: I often put the three of them together within one package of humility that led to acceptance, that opened me up, that enabled me to feel that gratitude again and to appreciate all the blessings in my life rather than being resentful or angry as the main motivator of my trek itself or the actions I wanted to take in terms of moving on with my life.
Barbara La Pointe: I’d love to go back and find out if there’s any snakes in the desert. But before we do, let’s just recap what you just said, ‘cause it was super powerful. And correct me if I’m wrong. It was humility, whereas then you moved to acceptance, and then gratitude showed up for you.
Aryeh Green: Yep. In that order.
Barbara La Pointe: And so what did walking through humility, gratitude, and acceptance give you that was even more powerful?
Aryeh Green: Well, I think I had a really transformative experience in the desert, in the Judean Desert as I was moving from that desert into the region of the Jerusalem Hills and the greenery there. But still in the desert, in the Judean Desert, of recognizing that I was walking in the footsteps of my ancestors.
Aryeh Green: You may be familiar, as a Jew, I’m very much a person with a religious, spiritual approach to God and the universe and religiosity and ritual, but Judaism is much more than a religion or than a faith community or a set of beliefs or rituals. Jews are a faith community.
Aryeh Green: Jews are a people and a national identity, a clan or a tribe or a family you might say. And with a shared language and a connection to our ancestral homeland. This awareness for me was really brought home when I was wandering through the Judean Desert and at one point realized this is the exact area where King David fled from King Saul, as described in the Hebrew Bible.
Aryeh Green: This is part of the land which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob literally walked through. Not in some generic idea, “Oh, I’m walking through the desert like the children of Israel did.” No, this actual area that I was walking on, I’m literally walking in the footsteps of my ancestors, and that also engendered a great sense of humility and acceptance, but also the gratitude of being part of this amazing experience of our people returning to our ancestral homeland.
Aryeh Green: A miraculous event after 2,000 years of dispersal was something that definitely accompanied me and led me and opened up my heart to a whole different view of myself and my place in the universe, my place in my community, my place in the family. And also along with that humility, put into perspective the pain that I was going through.
Aryeh Green: And so when I then had an experience of almost... Well, I would say it was religious, spiritual rebirth in a freezing cold stream in the north where I literally jumped in naked. I looked around to make sure there were no families with small children walking around either way.
Aryeh Green: It was like being in a ritual bath, which you may be familiar with in Jewish tradition. I would go into the sea or into a spring waters or what have you, or what’s called a mikveh, or a constructed ritual bath made of fresh water to approximate the waters of Eden and the rebirth that can be felt spiritually.
Aryeh Green: It’s the basis for the idea in Christianity of baptism, comes from the same sources. But it’s something that I do every year before the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, to experience a rebirth. All that is just background to say one day in the stream, I jumped into the stream where I had played with my children and my former wife a number of different times and family, on family outings, and I recognized that I was never gonna get there again. We would never be there again as a family unit, and I was tremendously upset.
Aryeh Green: I was crying. But I jumped into this stream, and as I came out of the water, it takes much longer in the telling than the actual happening of it. As I came out of the water with the water streaming down my face, with the tears and everything, I realized that I had reached a level of forgiveness of my wife that I hadn’t achieved before.
Aryeh Green: I had intellectually forgiven her. She’s a grown woman. She has a right to make a decision. If she wants to end the marriage, then I’m not gonna stop her. I tried to suggest we didn’t have to do that. It was not my choice, as I said. It was devastating. But I accepted her right to do that, but that was very much here.
Aryeh Green: It was intellectual. But at the heart level, the gut level, I hadn’t yet reached that sense of forgiveness, and there’s no question that the humility and also the gratitude that I had developed in the preceding few weeks, including the gratitude to her for the incredible 28 years that we had together, with great love and partnership, friendship, and building a faith-based home in Israel, raising three beautiful children, helping to start a number of different communities in Israel, and just having a wonderful life and sharing this experience that I’ve now mentioned twice of being part of this miracle of the return of the Jewish people to our ancestral home.
Aryeh Green: And that gratitude that I had to her, I think, opened my heart to this much more emotional, almost spiritual sense of forgiveness that transcended the intellectual, the academic, the theoretical. Yes, she has a right to do this, but that day in the stream, I really found a much deeper sense of forgiveness for her.
Aryeh Green: And in answer to your question, that wouldn’t have been possible without the gratitude and the acceptance and the humility that preceded it.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you for sharing that with us.
Aryeh Green: That’s what we’re here for. That’s why I wrote the book, and I think it’s so important for all of us who have experienced the pain and the difficulties. There are other challenges in life.
Aryeh Green: You lose your job or you lose a parent or a spouse. Divorce is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to us, but we don’t have to compare. This is a bit of a tangent, but I have a friend, very close friends, who lost their daughter in a car accident, and they came and visited me as I was hiking a trail.
Aryeh Green: I describe in the book they’re coming, sitting around a campfire with me. And my friend Jeremy looked at me at one point because I said to him, I guess I was talking a little bit about the pain and the lessons that I had been learning up until then, the previous few weeks, and I stopped myself and I said, “You know, they lost their daughter literally in the week that I gave my wife the divorce.”
Aryeh Green: In other words, it was also very new and fresh for them, just six weeks previously. And I said, “Well, you know what? Why am I talking about this? You’re still recovering in the midst of... You may never recover from the pain you’re experiencing.” And he looked at me and he said, “Ari, we’re not gonna compare our pain.
Aryeh Green: Everybody suffers their own sense of pain and difficulties and faces their own challenges. And for one person, divorce may be liberating and uplifting and wonderful, and for somebody else, it may be the most devastating thing that makes them want to take their life.” And you can’t generalize about these things.
Aryeh Green: But all I was saying there was... went off on that tangent a bit. But the issue of forgiveness for me was a crucial and transitional point in my healing and there on the trail.
Aryeh Green: But I guess what I was saying is that the sharing of these things I think is so important, because I think people facing their own challenges can be helped by these conversations, whether it’s my book or your work, the two of you, the conversations that you have. I feel empowered by talking about it, and I feel that others if anybody can learn and can benefit from the experience that I went through, that would be terrific because we’re all in this together, as it were.
Barbara La Pointe: Beautiful. And we do talk about there’s so much pain, but it’s so important that we transcend that and don’t miss that rebirth.
Barbara La Pointe: And everyone is more or less, we could probably agree, familiar with the term forgiveness, but the difference is when you can authentically, in your body, authentically experience forgiveness, authentically experience gratitude and truly spiritually feel a rebirth, I think that’s when healings happens.
Barbara La Pointe: And it sounds like you have had some profound healing, which is why I feel your story is so relevant to others.
Aryeh Green: Thank you for saying so.
Barbara La Pointe: When you were tapping into the love of your country and that ancestral history it’s so powerful when we heal and we look at things through the lens of inherited family trauma, to tap into, in that form of therapy we call it the ancestral field.
Barbara La Pointe: But just tap into know that there’s more than just us, and it sounds like it was very strengthening for you.
Aryeh Green: It was very much so. The combination of feeling walking through the land of my ancestors and the family connection that I have, as well as the connection to my people, without question it was hiking the land of Israel, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Jew, Christian, Muslim, whether it’s a national identity thing or a religious spirituality thing, it is more profound than hiking Machu Picchu or the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail. There’s a real spiritual element in connecting to the people and the culture and the history as much as the physical challenge and the physical beauty of the desert or the hills in the northern Galilee or whatever.
Barbara La Pointe: So you’re walking along, backpack. You must have done other things. I understand that you made some journal entries. What else did you do so that you didn’t feel alone? Or I wanna ask you if you felt alone on your walk. But I also wanna ask you what you did in terms of journal entries, or maybe you sang songs.
Barbara La Pointe: What else occurred on your walk?
Aryeh Green: Well, I would say all of that and more. I was definitely writing in my journal most nights, and that helped me to consolidate my thoughts that I was spending 12, 14 hours of the day walking and just contemplating life and thinking about all of these thoughts as well.
Aryeh Green: And in fact, I sent a picture to a friend of mine, a very close friend, who happens to be a psychotherapist, and I sent him a picture of me meditating on a cliff, a mountaintop, by a cliff. And he writes back and he says, “Ari, this entire trek is just one long meditation.”
Barbara La Pointe: So true.
Aryeh Green: I had to have some opportunity to process all of that thinking, since I wasn’t talking about it with a therapist or a friend or a family member. And so I did write most nights. So many nights I was just too tired. I was just exhausted. I was too tired to make supper. Would just fall into i’m sometimes too tired to even put up my tent. But most nights I did write in my journal. And I would say when I was in college, I wrote a lot of songs. In high school and college, I was a songwriting writer and budding guitarist-songwriter, and I never really did much with it, but I wrote a good maybe 70 to 100 songs, and I hadn’t written a song in years.
Aryeh Green: Years and years. And walking through that day that I was describing in the Judean Desert was one of the most formative days of the two months of hiking. And that day I wrote a song. I took a song that I had written before and I made it better, and I added to it. I did that a few times, writing a few songs, as I was walking.
Aryeh Green: And you mentioned being alone, and I don’t think I’m the first to have thought of this. I didn’t look it up to find others, but I’m sure other and better people before me have thought of this. But I achieved at least one sense of an understanding that I enjoyed the play, the wordplay involved with the term aloneness.
Aryeh Green: Because I was walking and was feeling alone, and it was lonely, and definitely had its negative parts, but most of it was turned very positive because I didn’t feel lonely. I was alone, but I was really very happy to be or satisfied to be, recognizing that it was important to be alone.
Aryeh Green: And I remember one day thinking about the word aloneness as I was contemplating the universe and my place in it and the perspective, that’s the acceptance that we talked about, the perspective that I gained walking through the silence of the desert with this sense of humility and recognizing I’m just a small speck on this planet in the vastness of the universe, which was liberating for me, as I said.
Aryeh Green: But it also connected me, not just to my history and my country and my people, but to humanity and in fact beyond that to the universe. And so I started to think about how the word aloneness could also, if you divide it up into three different words, it’s really all-one-ness. That we are all one. And even when we’re alone, if we reflect on that, then even if we are on our own, we can still recognize that we are all actually one.
Aryeh Green: And that accompanied me through many, many days of hiking alone without seeing another soul from morning to night, but to still feel connected with all of humanity and all of the universe and my people and my history and my family and my children and just everything.
Andrew Folkler: That’s an incredibly powerful sentiment to carry within you, and I could see how that would give you that renewed inner fire to not only just live life with zeal and passion, but to also accept and grow from these hurts and challenges.
Andrew Folkler: I think that a lot of people, especially in the modern era where we’re constantly bombarded with social stimuli, be it through social media, just news or anything that was just constantly trying to grab our attention that it’s very easy to dissociate from our own thoughts and our own feelings and just be carried down the lazy river of distraction.
Andrew Folkler: And one thing that I think is really powerful and something I’ve heard echoed by various, you could say business influencers, is where when you’re reducing that dopamine influx from all this stimuli that you’re better able to process these feelings and emotions.
Andrew Folkler: And being in a desert where all you have to look at is sand and rocks and the open sky, I think that very much is what you would colloquially call a dopamine detox and allowing you to really be alone with your thoughts, which again, a lot of people are terrified of to begin with. So I was wondering, from going through that journey of just being alone with your thoughts, how would you, as someone who has seen the other side and knows what it means to be alone with your thoughts, what would you say to somebody who’s that afraid to take that journey?
Aryeh Green: Well, I would say two things. First of all, it’s an incredibly powerful experience and I definitely recommend it. You don’t have to do it for three weeks, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute in the desert, all on your own with a 50 pound pack on your back. But it’s definitely something that’s worthwhile doing.
Aryeh Green: In fact, when I give talks to groups, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a group of 500 people or 50 or five people, we won’t do it here on a recorded online conversation, but sometimes I’ll just stop and I’ll stop talking to give people a feeling, the experience of what it is to just sit or walk in silence.
Aryeh Green: So I just did it there for three seconds. You’d be amazed, in fact, if you’re listening or watching this, you should go ahead and pause the playback and count, look at your watch, and pause it for 30 seconds. I think we are all amazed how long 30 whole seconds can be in nothing but silence, and yet it’s something that I think it’s a wonderful discipline.
Aryeh Green: I do silent walking meditation in my garden almost every morning for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. But there’s something very centering and very focusing on walking slowly or sitting, it comes from Zen sitting practices as well, in complete silence to help you both gather your thoughts and also to alleviate the stress that comes from the constant movement and constant thinking and constant talking that we all do, and of course, all of the stimuli that we’re all exposed to.
Aryeh Green: So I said there were two answers. So one is that the experience is powerful and I highly recommend it, and it’s something that we shouldn’t be afraid of. I don’t think any of us... And it doesn’t have to be in the desert. You can walk, as I just said, in your backyard, and you can walk down a forest path or just around the block and still experience a certain element of silence that enables you to look inward and to not necessarily intensively resolve a problem that you wanna think about, but just to free your mind and allow the silence to help you relax.
Aryeh Green: The second thing I was gonna say, which is I think a really important element of our history that it’s worth recognizing, I know for me as a Jew, but I think it’s true for from the Christian tradition, but also Islam, Buddhism, and other faith communities, and that is how much of the revelation that we’re familiar with that comes to us through the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible, through the Quran, to the Bhagavad Gita, to all sorts of different sources of spirituality in our modern world that we recognize, that tradition has taught us how much wisdom has come through the experience and the silence of the desert. Jesus wandered the desert.
Aryeh Green: King David fled from King Saul into that Judaean desert where I had my different epiphanies. The children of Israel were given the Torah, the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Torah there on Mount Sinai in the midst of the desert. The prophet Eliyahu, Elijah, heard the still small voice that was not in the wind and not in the thunder and not in the lightning, but that God and wisdom and revelation was in the still small sound of silence, which Simon and Garfunkel obviously sang a wonderful song about.
Aryeh Green: And so I think that’s the second thing that I would share in answer to your question. People who are afraid of silence or who are hesitant to experience it or to explore it might take comfort from the fact that most of our religious traditions are based at least partially on the experiences of prophets or wise people who came to their wisdom, call it revelation, call it God speaking to them, call it their own contemplative experience or meditative, through the silence if not of a desert, often a desert, but through the silence of a time for quiet reflection.
Aryeh Green: It’s incredibly powerful.
Barbara La Pointe: That can be applied in so many ways. Just if we can access silence and quietness anywhere, even if we can’t make it to the desert. That’s some beautiful lessons there. Thank you. I think.
Barbara La Pointe: Go ahead...
Aryeh Green: I was just gonna add, I’m not a student of Zen, and I don’t consider myself even more than just a passing, to have a passing familiarity.
Aryeh Green: I did some comparative religion studies back at UC Berkeley and some Zen sitting at the time. That was so long ago. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so I’m obviously the world’s expert. But I can definitely share that one of the foundations of Zen sitting and that practice to clear your mind and to focus, to allow yourself to center yourself, can be done anywhere.
Aryeh Green: And in fact, it’s often encouraged to be done not out in a field in beautiful nature, ‘cause that can be distracting. It’s done sitting and staring at a blank wall. And so yeah, Barbara, you’re right. It doesn’t have to be in the desert. It could be in your own home in a corner, or it can be on the top of a hill, or it can be anywhere where one wants to try and explore that contemplative silence.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you for that. So in my body, I feel like it might be a good idea to go back to your journey, ‘cause I would love to just hear, if you’re agreeable, to how you came out of the desert. I know that you encountered an ocean. What happened at the end? I highly recommend that we read the book and that everyone reads your amazing book, but maybe just a little bit of how did this end when you came out of your walk, your 800-mile walk?
Aryeh Green: Well, I appreciate the question and I have to combine two elements of the question, because you mentioned two things. One is the sea, and then the other is of course the end of the walk and how it ended up leading to a certain set of actions.
Aryeh Green: So the truth is that when I came upon the sea for the first time in the sixth week of the trek, I wish I could share with you, I actually videotaped my arrival at the sea near Caesarea, which is just north of Tel Aviv and Herzliya and Netanya, south of Haifa, where I came up a dune and there was the sea in front of me, and I was singing and I was yelling and I was crying and I was dancing because there was something so uplifting about arriving at the sea.
Aryeh Green: And I didn’t understand it at the time because I live in the hills of Jerusalem, and I love the sea. I’ve always loved the sea. Pacific Ocean when I lived in California, the Atlantic, my grandma lived in Florida, the Mediterranean Sea of course, and what have you. I love swimming in the sea.
Aryeh Green: But that doesn’t explain the exhilaration that I felt as I came and I crested that dune and saw the sea in front of me. It was only afterwards when I was writing my book that I did a little research, a little bit of research, and I discovered how psychologists and researchers have basically established that there’s a reason that we all or that many people enjoy the sea as much as we do, and that is because the sea with its constant motion and with its horizon, which is basically indefinable even though there is a line there, but you know that the sea goes further and it’s flat and it basically disappears.
Aryeh Green: It gives us a sense of infinite possibility, that we look out there and the constancy of the movement gives us a feeling of life and movement and rejuvenation. Water itself, we already discussed, is the waters of Eden, the rebirth concept of being in the womb and water having that element as a fundamental element of the world.
Aryeh Green: And this sense of no horizon and endless possibilities and continual movement, I think explains a lot of why many of us are so uplifted by the sea. And for me, coming onto the sea at that point, which is basically six and a half weeks into the eight-week trip. So I was ready, I was walking home.
Aryeh Green: I was gonna come down the coast and then move inland and end up... I actually walked home quite literally physically. The trail itself is north and south from the southern border of Israel with the Sinai Desert, Egypt, and the Red Sea up to the northern border of Israel at Lebanon.
Aryeh Green: But I actually did half of it towards the Jerusalem Hills and then jumped up to the north and walked south from the northern border specifically so that I could end my trek walking physically back to my home in the center of the country. And so for me, starting that last week and a half on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, I was literally making my way home, and therefore my thoughts started to turn to those endless possibilities, to the ideas, “Okay, I’m gonna do this.”
Aryeh Green: I achieved my goal of hiking the trail, but guess what? When I get home in a week and a half, I’ll still be divorced, and then I’m gonna get back to an empty home. My daughter, who had just finished her military service was there, living at home. But literally I was gonna be alone and divorced and what am I gonna do now?
Aryeh Green: So my last week, week and a half was focused on this fifth element, the fifth lesson that I learned, which was the importance of having a goal to give our lives meaning. Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, which based on his experiences in the Holocaust of recognizing and seeing, observing how people with a reason to live were more likely to survive the horrors of the death camps and the concentration camps.
Aryeh Green: It’s a very heavy concept, which we don’t have to go into the heaviness of it, but he developed a whole school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, which is based on his experiences there, which relates to the importance of having goals, having a sense of purpose in our life to give our life meaning.
Aryeh Green: So I spent the last week and a half of my trek thinking about, “Okay, great. I had a goal. I hiked the trail. Terrific. That I’m gonna achieve. Now what?” I thought about personal goals, family issues, my children, relationships, professional goals and what have you. One of the most important goals that I set for myself there in the last few days of the trek was that I was going to love again.
Aryeh Green: I really felt that possibility, and I set that as a goal for myself, that this was one of the things that I was gonna pursue and please God achieve, and spoiler alert, I was remarried a year and a half later to my wonderful, wise and caring and beautiful Miriam, who I’ve been married to now for six years.
Aryeh Green: We’re actually celebrating our sixth anniversary this week.
Barbara La Pointe: Oh my gosh. Congratulations. Happy anniversary.
Aryeh Green: So that brought me full circle towards the end of the trek of moving from the humility and acceptance and gratitude and then the forgiveness that I needed to achieve and get beyond to developing a renewed sense of meaning in my life by focusing on the kind of goals that I wanted to pursue over the next few decades.
Andrew Folkler: It’s incredibly moving journey. One thing I wanted to ask was, some people, we just get so caught up in the bustling of our lives, and then when this divorce happens or even any other personal crisis happens, maybe there’s not an 800-mile trail next door. What could they do to try and achieve a, you could say a spiritual growth of similar effect?
Aryeh Green: Well, it’s interesting. For me, the walking in nature was important, but it also was important that this was the land of my people. As we’ve discussed, where our prophets and forefathers lived and worked and fought and died and introduced the ethical monotheism of Jewish thought and tradition to the world.
Aryeh Green: But I think to a certain extent, even though this, for me, because it was Israel, combined my love of the outdoors with a deep emotional identification with the Zionist enterprise and our country, my spiritual and religious commitments. I think others can benefit from my experience and do similar things within the context of their own both spiritual and or identity makeup because that’s what Viktor Frankl talks about.
Aryeh Green: He talks about giving meaning to our lives by acting, by actually doing. For me, walking the trail was doing and acting, but he also talks about the importance of love and relationships to give our life meaning as well as the idea of goals and most particularly personal growth of growing as people.
Aryeh Green: And so the truth is, all of us facing challenges, transitions in our lives, whether loss of a job or loss of a loved one or change in living standards or other hardships, obviously here we’re talking about specifically the breakup of families and divorce and what have you. I think we can and we must even with those challenges actively pursue whatever is gonna give our life meaning.
Aryeh Green: Developing our skills, contributing to our family, our community, our nation, working on our relationships with our children, our grandchildren, our friends, spouse, partners, and obviously looking to constantly improve ourselves. So I was able to do that within the context of the lessons that I learned.
Aryeh Green: I found the issues for me of humility and acceptance, the gratitude of course and forgiveness that I found just meant that somebody with a humble sense of purpose has greater motivation to forgive and more to appreciate and to be grateful for and more of an incentive, I think, to accept the historical or present reality that we face because we just wanna move forward with our lives.
Aryeh Green: So I guess taking to heart. This was true for me, this combination. It’s true for me on the trail. It’s true for me in my life. It’s been carried with me ever since, the last six, seven years, eight years now. And it can be true for others who are seeking solace and direction, and that’s why I wrote the book, not just to describe my experiences on the trail, but how they helped me to face my personal challenges and how they might be able to help others.
Andrew Folkler: And I think you’re absolutely right with the aspect of knowing what are the emotional and spiritual drivers within ourselves, and using that to take action. Both Barbara and I have had quite a few trauma experts brought on board, and they all agree on the same sentiment, that taking action is what prevents getting really rooted into the trauma itself, and taking action is how you’re able to slowly work through those emotions.
Andrew Folkler: And even if that action is, in your case where it was a physical journey, that’s still taking action. That’s still doing something that will help the individual process and work through that entire ordeal. So I think it’s a very powerful piece of wisdom that you’ve shared.
Aryeh Green: Thank you. Look, I don’t think you have to hike an 800-mile trail in eight weeks with a 50-pound pack on your back all alone in order to achieve that. But I definitely... That’s always worth considering, and I would invite anybody who’s interested to come and hike even if just for a few hours or a day, let alone for longer on the Israel trail.
Aryeh Green: But I think that the sense of possibilities, for me, sense of purpose and this combination of gratitude and humility and acceptance, it found a home in me, and I think it definitely can be helpful to others who are facing their own challenges.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you so much for sharing that and sharing everything with us and spending time with us today. Likely the fastest hour of my life, but we are at the top of our podcast hour, and we usually always ask our guests to finish up with any last pearls of wisdom.
Barbara La Pointe: So if you’ll allow me to set the stage for you, I really loved it when you hit the ocean and metaphorically described it as an infinite possibilities. So from that place of infinite possibility, what are your closing statements to our audience today, or anything you’d like to leave us with before we say goodbye?
Aryeh Green: Well, I think I just did, at least offer a little bit of a summary. But I guess I would like to say that the lessons that I learned, they weren’t new. I don’t feel like I’ve introduced new concepts either in this conversation or in my book, because everything that I learned from my experience from the physical hike that then I applied to my situation of facing my personal challenge, all these ideas are based on time-honored wisdom and the works of giants from Talmudic sages to modern psychologists.
Aryeh Green: But I discovered a path which helped me. And in all humility, there’s that word again, I think if all of us recognize that it takes a certain amount of introspection and inner work, we have to do the work. We have to take the time to reflect on these issues and to develop our sense and reinforce our sense of humility and gratitude for all the blessings in our life, and forgiveness of others who’ve wronged us or perceived wrongs.
Aryeh Green: And really, Stephen Covey talks about setting weekly goals and monthly goals and five-year goals, and having this sense of purpose and explicit goals to pursue in our professional life and our personal life, relationships we have. I think that would be the only thing that I could share that might be helpful to others, is that it’s not that difficult and it’s incredibly beneficial and often enjoyable also to do this work, to make the effort.
Aryeh Green: And the inner sense of peace and harmony that comes from it, it’s not a coincidence that my book is subtitled Finding Peace in the Promised Land, because it’s all about inner peace. It’s not about international peace between the resolving the Arab-Israel conflict. That’s my next book, applying these lessons to help resolve the Arab-Israel conflict.
Aryeh Green: But it’s all about achieving the kind of inner peace and serenity and contentment that I think we all strive for.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s all about inner peace and serenity. You’ve been so kind to us, and also so kind to offer up one of your books signed by you to one of our members, which we will give by way of social media, when your podcast airs. But just wanted to say thank you again.
Aryeh Green: Pleasure.
Barbara La Pointe: I think we really did dive pretty deep today. Do you, Andrew?
Andrew Folkler: Oh, absolutely. And often we get too caught up into the technicalities of divorce, whether it’s the legal or the psychological, but there is a spiritual element, and I think that this is a powerful spiritual episode.
Aryeh Green: I’m so glad. Thank you for having me on, because I’ve enjoyed it and I enjoy sharing my story and I like to think, and I’ve been told, that it can be helpful to others facing similar challenges.
Aryeh Green: So thank you for having me, for hosting me.
Andrew Folkler: If listeners wanted to reach out to you or learn more about your book or even learn more about you as an individual, what would be the best way for them to do so?
Aryeh Green: I think probably through the website for the book, which is myisraeltrail.com, is probably the best way, because people can reach out to me by email through the website.
Aryeh Green: And there’s photos and videos and more stories, even a chapter of the book. And obviously, the book can be found on Amazon, the Book Depository, Barnes & Noble, et cetera. But the website, www.myisraeltrail.com, is the best way to learn more and to connect with me.
Andrew Folkler: And definitely audience members check out his website.
Andrew Folkler: All righty, and that is all we’ve got time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us and enjoy. Hey, and if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or through our podcast through the various podcasting platforms. Don’t forget, we summarize everything we talked about in a downloadable document below.
Andrew Folkler: It’ll be on Barbara’s website at www.barbaralapointe.com/podcast, and this will help you and your loved ones deal with these various challenges, trauma, and learning to grow spiritually from it. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: I’m always here at barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: Right on. And if you wanna email me, you’re welcome to email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. Have a wonderful day, everyone.
Aryeh Green: Thank you.