Dr. Jenny Holland, PsyD

THE FIRST MIRROR

Some stories rise from the oldest places in us — before language, before memory, before choice.

This week’s Torah as Mirror is my most personal yet, and I’m sharing it in case it helps you see something true in yourself.

In this piece, memory, dream, and Torah meet each other in a single reflection. It’s an invitation to consider the places where we hesitate, the thresholds we circle, and the part of each of us that waits — patiently or not — for a truer graduation into who we are becoming.

This one is about origins — the kind that shape us before memory.

It’s about twinship, blankets, early attachment, and the blessing we spend a lifetime wrestling toward.

You don’t need to be Jewish or religious to enter this work. What I’m offering isn’t tied to belief or ritual; it’s tied to the human need to recognize oneself. The mirror doesn’t ask for affiliation. It asks for honesty — for the courage to see your own life without flinching, and to listen for the truth that’s been waiting beneath the noise.

And you don’t need a particular lineage to understand this. In my clinical practice, I sit with people who are trying to understand the parts of themselves they long ago hid away — the stories that never had witnesses, the thresholds they keep circling. What I’ve learned is that recognizing your own reflection is a form of protection. When you know yourself, you stop abandoning yourself. You become less permeable to harm, less shaped by what others project, more anchored in your own truth. The First Mirror is an invitation to stop running from the life that is already waiting for you and to trust that inner knowing that has been steady all along.

The First Mirror

This is the week where Torah turns inward —

where the text offers not a story, but a mirror to our earliest lives.

The place before memory.

The place before language.

The place where relationship becomes destiny.

Where We’ve Been So Far

Each week has carried a different truth:

Bereshit — Moving With the Divine

Creation as the spark of selfhood, the beginning of consciousness.

Noach — After the Flood

What survives, what washes away, what a life rebuilds from.

Lech-Lecha — My Own Personal Angel

The moment we leave the familiar in order to become ourselves.

Vayera — The Laugh That Knows

The wisdom of disbelief, and the humor that saves the soul.

Chayei Sarah — At the Gate

Thresholds, sovereignty, and choosing the life that expands rather than diminishes us.

And now:

Toldot — The Beginning Before the Beginning

This is the Torah portion of twins — two beings forming in the same dark water, two nervous systems shaping each other before the world arrives.

Developmental theory teaches that our first mirror is not a parent’s face —

it is the presence beside us.

Kabbalah says every soul is born with a counterpart — its echo, its shadow, its completion.

Attachment theory reminds us that the earliest bonds shape our sense of safety.

Jung tells us that the twin is the first archetype of the unconscious.

For me, this is not metaphor.

This is biography.

The First Mirror I Ever Knew

I was born a twin — tiny, premature, in separate incubators, before either of us learned each other’s names.

But his existence oriented me.

Jeff was my first “other,” the first presence that made me a “self.”

Twinship shaped me at the level of breath and blood.

There is a memory that stays unshakably clear:

a handmade elephant blanket, made with love by my Aunt Regina.

Me, army-crawling across the floor because that is how cerebral palsy shaped my movement,

and the corner of that blanket held between my teeth

as I pulled my brother behind me.

Not because he couldn’t move.

But because I wanted him with me.

Because connection, even then, was oxygen.

“Come on,” my small body insisted.

“Come on, come with me. I don’t want to do this alone!”

That was my first act of devotion.

My first theology.

My first understanding of attachment.

A core belief that I was not meant to be alone.

The First Tallit

There were other blankets too — each one becoming a kind of early sacred garment.

The therapy blanket —

the one that lifted me instead of demanding effort.

Being swung in that blanket was the first time joy arrived without labor.

The hospital blanket —

soft, stitched by my Nana,

carried into every surgery at Stanford.

It was the only gentle constant in rooms lit by fluorescent coldness.

Only now do I understand:

These blankets were my first tallit.

A tallit is a covering that says,

You are not alone.

A shelter made visible.

A blessing you didn’t have to earn.

• The elephant blanket was my tallit of effort — pulling someone I loved toward life.

• The therapy blanket was my tallit of joy — being held without working for it.

• Nana’s blanket was my tallit of continuity — the softness that traveled with me through pain.

Before ritual, before theology, before language —

I already knew what blessing felt like on my skin.

What Toldot Teaches All of Us

Not everyone is a twin.

Not everyone learned to move through childhood by pulling someone else behind them.

Not everyone carried a blanket into surgery.

But everyone has an origin story that formed them before they could speak it.

Everyone has a first mirror —

a first bond,

a first wound,

a first longing,

a first shelter or the aching absence of one.

Toldot reminds us that these beginning-places don’t trap us —

they simply name the terrain.

Our work is to move with awareness.

Developmental theory calls this repatterning.

Kabbalah calls it tikkun — soul repair.

Psychology calls it integration.

Our lives call it becoming.

This is why I return each week to the text:

because somewhere in its ancient lines,

something in me comes into focus.

And I share it in case something in you does too.

A Thread from My Poem

I Will Not Stop Until I Am Blessed

— a poem I wrote months ago, when a door should have opened and didn’t —

sits beneath this portion like a heartbeat.

Jacob grasping Esau’s heel is the echo of every moment we’ve reached

for closeness,

for belonging,

for blessing —

sometimes gently, sometimes desperately, always humanly.

I understand that pull.

I honor it.

I no longer apologize for it.

A Quiet Blessing for My Twin

Not reconciliation.

Not expectation.

Just blessing.

For the one who entered the world with me,

whose breath shaped mine before we knew what breath was:

May the origins we shared soften in both of us.

May the distance be gentle.

May the memory be clear.

May the blessing of our beginning reach you,

wherever you are,

and may it return to me

in whatever form it chooses next.

Closing Blessing

May you remember the coverings that first held you —

even if they were small, even if they were imperfect.

May you recognize the mirrors that shaped you

and choose the ones that will shape you next.

May the tallit of your beginnings

become the tallit of your becoming —

luminous, strong, sheltering, and entirely your own.

Shabbat Shalom!

Love,

Jenny