Neurons and Narrative

Neurons and Narrative                                  By: Sara Lamm

Every day on my drive to work, I try to use the time to catch up on my own learning, and lately audiobooks have become my favourite carpool companion.

At the recommendation of many friends, I started listening to The Body Keeps the Score, a book about trauma, the brain, and the lasting ways experience shapes the body and mind.

One line jumped out at me: neurons that fire together, wire together.

That phrase is talking about neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to be shaped by repeated experience. In simple terms, what happens to us does not just pass through us. It leaves tracks. Repeated fear can build fearful pathways. Repeated safety can build trust. Repeated chaos can train the body to brace for danger. Trauma, in that sense, is not only a bad memory; it is an experience that can become deeply embedded in the way a person reacts, feels, anticipates, and interprets the world.

And that made me think: the Torah understood long ago that repeated experience and repeated language shape the person we become.

That is why the Torah does not merely command us to remember. It commands us to tell. Again and again. Especially to our children.

The verse says:

‘And you shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what Hashem did for me when I went free from Egypt’ (Exodus 13:8)

That command, vehigadeta levincha, “and you shall tell your son,” is not a sweet educational detail. It is a strategy for covenantal survival.

The Torah knows that the stories repeated most often become the truest stories in our minds. They become the lens through which we interpret reality.

(my addition: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). “He saved us through the mikveh ofrebirth and renewing of the Ruach ha-Kodesh” (Titus 3:5). “to make her holy, having cleansed her by immersion in the word” (Ephesians 5:26).

And that means the question is never only, what happened to us? The deeper question is, what story will we attach to what happened to us?

That is where trauma becomes such an important frame.

A painful event can teach a person that the world is unsafe, that he is powerless, that he is doomed to relive fear forever. That is what trauma does. It can freeze a human being inside one moment and let that moment define everything that follows.

But the Torah refuses to let suffering become the final meaning

of Jewish history. The Torah does not deny pain.

It insists on narrating it properly.

Yes, we were slaves. Yes, we were oppressed. Yes, we cried, feared, wandered, and suffered. But that is not the whole story. The story is that God took us out. The story is that affliction is real, but it is not ultimate. The story is that pain does not get the last word.

That is why the verse in Exodus is so striking. It does not say: teach your child the historical facts. It says: tell him what God did for me. The parent is not acting as a distant historian. He is speaking as someone personally inside the story. That is the point. Jewish memory is not meant to be archived. It is meant to be embodied. The child must hear not only what happened, but what it means.

And what it means is this: we are not a people whose identity is slavery. We are a people whose identity is redemption.

That same principle appears in the transition from Abraham to Isaac.

Abraham is chosen not only because he believes in God, but because he will transmit that faith onward. God says:

“For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of Hashem by doing what is just and right, in order that Hashem may bring about for Avraham what He has promised him” (Genesis 18:19)

Abraham’s greatness is not private spirituality. It is continuity.

The covenant survives because it is taught,

spoken, modelled, and handed down.

That is why Isaac matters so much. He is often read as the quieter patriarch, the less dramatic son. But that misses his role entirely. Isaac is the one who receives the story and continues it without letting it break. He does not need to invent a new covenant. He needs to faithfully carry the old one forward.

We see that most vividly when he reopens the wells that Abraham dug and that the Philistines had stopped up. That is not just a detail about water. It is a portrait of resilience. The enemy buries the source. Isaac uncovers it. The flow is blocked. Isaac restores it. He does not say, “That was my father’s story.” He says, by his actions, “That source of life is still ours.”

One of the ideas that struck me in the material I was reading alongside this is that the way a person narrates hardship deeply shapes what comes next. A person can come to see himself as permanently broken, or as someone who has endured and can still act. That story does not erase pain, but it changes the future.

The Torah has been teaching that lesson for thousands of years.

Tell the story. Repeat the story. Put it in the mouths of your children. Build the pathway again and again until redemption becomes more deeply wired than despair.

That is the task.

THE STORIES WE REPEATEDLY TELL OURSELVES, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, MUST BE ONE OF RESILIENCE AND HOPE. WE HAVE NO CHOICE. BECAUSE THE STORIES REPEATED MOST FAITHFULLY DO NOT JUST DESCRIBE US. THEY FORM US.