80 Years and the Collapse of Restraint

There are words we have locked away, as if language itself could protect us from what they unleash. One of them is revenge. For decades in post-Holocaust Jewish discourse, revenge was unspoken. We chose retentive survival, first silenced. We chose continuity, education, rebuilding, moral protest, and quiet mourning. Even in Israel, where survival demanded force, revenge was seen as a dangerous impulse—an echo of the very barbarism we had endured.

But something has shifted. After Tishri 22, 5784—what the world calls October 7, 2024—a terrible psychic rupture occurred. That date, now etched in Jewish spiritual time, is not just another entry in the calendar of grief. It marked a collapse: of security, of meaning, of the ethical scaffolding many believed would hold even in catastrophe. The massacre on Shemini Atzeret was not only an attack on civilians—it tore into the soul of a people who believed, perhaps naively, that memory itself could shield them.

For over eighty years, we spoke of “never again” (keynmol mer/קיינמאל) as if it were a binding incantation. That phrase now feels deranged—not because its hope was false, but because its logic depended on the world’s reason, and on ours. But time, too, betrays. The longer we remembered, the more distant the fire became for those not burned. Memorials multiplied, while urgency faded. The murder of entire families in their homes, the burning of bodies, the desecration of the holiday celebrating intimacy between God and Israel—these shattered that illusion. What followed was not a calculated political response. It was a blow-up of the moral order itself.

And here we must ask: what rises when musar/מוסר (ethical discipline) falls? What floods in when the dam of restraint, humility, and self-scrutiny collapses? We must tread carefully. Revenge is not a doctrine. It is not an agenda laid out in official plans. It is a climate. Likewise, it is what seeps into the void when accountability is absent, when grief finds no witness, when the memory of the murdered becomes a weapon rather than a warning.

In Yitzhak Katznelson’s monumental Song of the Murdered Jewish People, written in exile and despair, one line burns through the page: “We must not forget, we must not forgive.” Katznelson was not calling for blood. He was naming a sacred wound. Forgiveness, for him, could not be granted where no repentance had occurred—where the machinery of murder operated with precision and pride. His poem gave voice not to vengeance, but to the unbearable dignity of the unforgiven dead.

And yet, something in that voice carries into the present—not as instruction, but as warning. Today, Gaza lies in ruins. Southern Lebanon burns. Tens of thousands are dead or displaced. The scale of destruction exceeds even the logic of retaliation. It is not simply a political failure. It is the eruption of what had long been buried: rage, humiliation, helplessness—the desire not just to survive, but to strike so ferociously that no one dares raise a hand again.

This is where unintegrated memory betrays us. For over eighty years, Holocaust remembrance was ritualized, institutionalized. Schools, parliaments, memorials—all reminding us. But reminding is not metabolizing. Pain was stored, not transformed. In some cases, it hardened into ideology. In others, it became fatigue. For younger generations, remembrance became scenery—heritage, not heartbreak. And so, when catastrophe returned, there was no ethical muscle ready to absorb it. We reached instinctively for the ancient reflex: nekamah/נקומה – revenge.

And let us be clear: this is not just an Israeli problem. In Europe, with few exceptions—Willy Brandt kneeling in Warsaw among them – there has been no true reckoning. The silence of the deportation lists, the complicity of local officials, the bureaucratic efficiency of genocide -these have not been owned. There has been memory, but rarely forgiveness. And almost never accountability. The Shoah was not merely a German event. It was European. And yet today, European moral discourse often lectures Israel, conveniently forgetting its own unresolved guilt.

And while we speak of Europe’s unresolved guilt, we must also acknowledge the silence – or worse, the symbolic inversion—of many local Christian Churches. For all their moral vocabularies of peace and justice, most have offered no solidarity to the Jewish people in this hour of despair. The eruption of Israeli violence is not read as the collapse of moral restraint after unspeakable trauma, but as a confirmation of a long-nurtured narrative: that Jewish power is illegitimate, that Palestinian suffering is redemptive, and that history must bend toward their destiny. This is not theology. It is a myth—one that rewrites pain and erases complexity, again and again along the decades.

This moral vacuum is dangerous. It breeds cynicism, bitterness, and defiance. And in the wake of unbearable grief, it can unleash the desire to destroy, to flatten, to make the world feel our pain by force. That is not an admitted Jewish impulse. It is a human one. And when ethics fail to contain it, the consequences are vast.

What, then, can we do with this? We must first name the danger. Revenge is not justice. It is not security. It is not redemption. But it is real. To ignore it is to pretend we are less human than we are. The task is not to condemn the feeling, but to build societies that give it no fertile ground. That requires rituals of mourning that are honest. It requires language that does not hide, and memory that does not pretend to heal what still festers.

Israel today faces an unbearable paradox: the demand to remain humane while under existential threat, and the demand to remember while carrying traumas that remembrance alone cannot heal. This paradox is crushing. But ignoring it is worse. If we continue to speak as though we are only rational, only ethical, only restrained—we will fail to understand what is rising beneath our feet.

What rises in the place of lost restraint is not always evil. Sometimes it is raw life, unfiltered, screaming for meaning. The challenge is not to sanctify it, but to shape it. That is the only path forward. We must return to musar/מוסר – not as piety, but as honest practice. We must build cultural, spiritual, and political spaces where mourning becomes movement – not massacre.

Furthermore, we do not need to justify revenge. We need to understand what its presence reveals: a collapse of the moral imagination, and a cry for dignity with no place to go.

If we fail to meet that cry with truth, compassion, and courage, we will find ourselves forever circling the fire—unable to put it out, and unable to walk away. Generation after generation, thus disclosing the meaning of history, we are taught, and we show to hope beyond hope and to build, not to destroy (Kohelet 1:11).