“Wounds into Wisdom is for anyone who has suffered trauma, either directly or in a family whose generational trauma is buried. It helps readers uncover suffering and use it to help others—the final stage of healing.”

– Gloria Steinem

Big Blue Marble is thrilled to welcome Rabbi Tirzah Firestone and her urgent new work " Wounds Into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma." The event will be hosted by our neighbors at Mt. Airy Nexus, 520 Carpenter Lane - a fully accessible space.

In keeping with shabbat practice, the event will begin at 7:45 pm with a short havdalah service (the closing of shabbat) and the event will begin after sundown at 8 pm. Rabbi Firestone will be working with Jewish congregations across Northwest Philly on Friday night and Saturday - this talk and book signing will be the only opportunity to purchase the book during her visit.

"Wounds Into Wisdom" makes a compelling case that trauma legacies can be transformed and healed. Fusing contemporary neuroscience, psychology, and ancient Jewish wisdom and values, this work provides a roadmap for Jews, and all individuals and groups with trauma history, who wish to seize the power to change their lives. Gripping case studies and interviews with trauma survivors and their descendants—from Berlin to Shanghai, Cairo to Colorado—demonstrate what Viktor Frankl called, “the uniquely human potential to transform personal tragedy into triumph.” Building on the work of acclaimed traumatologists such as Drs. Rachel Yehuda, Bessel van der Kolk, and Yael Danieli, Firestone shows how people can transform the residual effects of their families’ painful pasts and change their long-term futures.

Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, PhD, is an author, Jungian psychotherapist, and founding rabbi of Congregation Nevei Kodesh in Boulder, Colorado. Ordained by Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi in 1992, she is a leader in the international Jewish Renewal Movement and a renowned Jewish scholar and teacher.

Raised in an Orthodox home in St. Louis, Missouri, Tirzah’s spiritual curiosity called her to search beyond the confines of her family’s strict Jewish upbringing. The younger sister of the groundbreaking radical feminist, Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, William Morrow & Co: 1970), Tirzah left home to embark upon a life-changing spiritual odyssey, chronicled in With Roots In Heaven: One Woman’s Passionate Journey into the Heart of Her Faith (Dutton, 1998).

After immersing herself in a wide variety of spiritual practices and worldviews, Tirzah returned with fresh vigor to Jewish studies and became a rabbi in a pluralistic and egalitarian Judaism.