Breaking Out Of The Rage Cage: October 7 And Beyond

For the full context of this essay, please link here to Yagel Haroush singing Kin’at Bee’ri, his elegy that he composed for Kibbutz Bee’ri, which was destroyed on October 7, 2023. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSC17wGNQo&list=RDJTSC17wGNQo&start_radio=1

On the early morning of October 7, 2023, the Hamas terrorist organization broke through the boundaries between Gaza and the Israeli towns just east of it. They set about massacring, sexually abusing, wounding, and kidnapping the residents of those communities: Israelis and other nationals, Jews and non-Jews. By the end of the carnage more than twenty-four hours later, and well into the next week, more than 1,200 innocent human beings had been murdered, 252 people had been brutally kidnapped, thousands more had been wounded and traumatized, Israeli society was forever changed, and the world was plunged into darkness.

Kibbutz Beeri was one of the most devastated communities in the Gaza envelope, the Israeli communities extending east from the Gaza border. The details of what happened in Beeri are too many and gruesome to detail in this essay. The lasting emotional trauma from Beeri’s destruction is captured in the mournful song by the Israeli poet Yagel Haroush that you can access above on YouTube.

On the early morning of October 7, 2023, Judi Weinstein-Haggai, a gentle, gracious, peace-loving friend of my community in upstate New York, was taking her daily walk with her husband, Gadi outside their kibbutz, Nir Oz, a mere 13 ½ miles from Beeri. As part of my community’s relationship with Israel’s Eshkol region in the Gaza envelope, we all got to know and love Judi. That morning, as she and Gadi strolled, they suddenly heard bombing inside the kibbutz and exchanged frantic texts with loved ones, after which all communications with them ceased and their whereabouts became unknown. We all hoped that, at least, they might be alive as hostages in Gaza, as if that would be such a blessed relief. Weeks later, Nir Oz officially announced that Judi and Gadi had been brutally murdered by Hamas. The lasting emotional trauma from their deaths and Nir Oz’s destruction is captured ironically in one of Judi’s famous haikus:

For those in need

May you accept this day

And its delights.

In the days, weeks and months following October 7, 2023, I did what most American rabbis were doing. I counseled people horrified by this assault on the collective Jewish body, and whose horror at the carnage in Gaza caused by Israel’s war with Hamas was growing like a tumor of grief. I taught and wrote about the conflict using the lens of Jewish tradition and religion. I prayed for the hostages. I attended rallies and vigils, helped people deal with antisemitism here at home and offered comfort to others where I could through prayer and listening. I urged all of us to not lose hope that the peace and reconciliation which have eluded us for over a century would become a reality.

Like many other rabbis, I put my own feelings of rage, fear, hatred, grief, shaky hope on hold. I reasoned, better to dissociate, to put aside my personal devastation and confusion over the massacre, over the bloody war and its human toll, over the deaths of Judi and Gadi, of Nir Oz and Beeri, over the resurgence of antisemitic hatred. Nothing I would or could say about how I felt was going to take away anyone’s pain and might only add to our collective suffering by getting distorted in polarizing political debates. I mostly maintained emotional equanimity, political neutrality, and sermonic sobriety.

Several months later, on August 13, 2024, the façade fell, my masks came off, and the floodwaters of my bitterness broke through my professional demeanor and emotional self-defenses. August 13 was Tisha B’av, the 9^th of the Hebrew month of Av, when we Jews weep collectively over the tragic events of Jewish history. The events of October 7 and its aftermaths were quickly becoming the next historic tragedies to be framed by Tisha B’Av, as Jewish thinkers, leaders and artists asked the question: how will and should this year’s Tisha B’Av observance reflect our newest anguish? Listening to the elegy for Beeri during the holiday, I finally allowed myself to explode inwardly with the intense anger and feelings of helplessness that I had suppressed for those last ten months. I raged, then I wept, feeling like I was echoing Jerusalem personified in the book of Lamentations as a woman abandoned:  al eileh ani bokhia: over these things I weep. Sitting quietly afterwards, I turned to what tradition teaches us about holding anger for too long until it starts to hold you and squeeze the life out of you:

The sage bar Kappara taught: An angry person only manages to acquire chronic anger [ragzanuta], i.e., nothing beneficial comes through anger; in the end he is left with nothing but anger itself. And a good person is given the fruit of his actions to taste. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 40b-41a, Sefaria Translation)

Bar Kappara seemed to equate the emotion of anger with evil, which is quite problematic. We know that feelings are neither moral nor immoral, only actions are. Feeling and expressing anger are critical to a balanced life. Perhaps he was drawing a clear contrast between a chronically angry person and a good person, because he knew how easy it is for corrosive anger to cause us to do evil. He distinguished a chronically angry person from a good person whose goodness results from a kind of emotional freedom, in which we forbid anger and despair from degrading our moral integrity or stymieing our moral action. Bar Kappara’s role model of good action isn’t paralyzed by destructive emotions but is liberated by hopeful, forward-looking action.  Rather than be sickened by fruit from the poison tree of corrosive rage, the good person produces and is nourished by the fruits of his or her good work in the world.

Bar Kappara’s words spoke to me clearly on Tisha B’av: my anger over October 7 was real and needed to be given space for expression. Yet I needed to replace the worst of my rage with action, to channel my feelings of helplessness into doing something good. That need has become even more clear for me in these last few weeks as the war has threatened to widen into an awful regional conflict between Israel and Iran. I have made the decision that I will make every effort to travel to Israel this coming year for the first time in five years: to give my hands, my heart and my head to at least a few of the people of the land, our home; to help someone, some community, not with world transforming redemption, but with single, simple acts of kindness that might bear some fruit of peace and healing. The situation in Israel permitting, I am committed to being there this coming year of 5785. If you feel moved to do the same, I encourage you to do so. Yet even if volunteering in Israel this year is not possible for you, know this: there are so many ways to transform your own anger, confusion and feelings of helplessness into doing good, so many opportunities for each of us to respond to the trauma and rage of this past year with acts of kindness and justice, however modest, right now, right here in our home. Pursue them and don’t assume that they will make no positive difference in the world; they will, for each person is a world unto themselves, and each person whose life you improve becomes a world at peace.

This has been a year of walking over hot coals of rage: rage within many of us, rage at times directed hatefully against us for being Jews, rage between my fellow citizens in America, rage closer to home in American Jewish communities, rage in Israel and throughout the Middle East; hot coals of rage on an increasingly hot and emotionally scorched planet. The walk has done us no good; it has singed our feet and left us hobbled, unable or unwilling to go out and meet anger and despair with good actions that bear fruit of kindness and blessing. I love the imagery of Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of the world, but I’m not so naïve to believe that the world literally gets a reset on the first of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, obliterating magically the traumas of the last year.  It doesn’t. But that’s ok, because the world whose birthday is on Rosh Hashanah and which gets a reset isn’t the world at large, it’s you and me, worlds unto ourselves, each of us. Our tradition teaches that adam bechinat olam katan, each of us is a microcosm: we, as it were, are mini worlds, sharing with all of nature, all of life the imprint and reflection of God’s image. I don’t need to wait for world leaders and arbiters of global power to harness collective rage into acts of kindness, peace and transformation. I can do that as a world unto myself, together with each of you, each of us free and powerful enough to break out of that which  paralyzes us; each of us free to liberate ourselves from the despair that gets masked as apathy, anger, and even at times hatred; each of us free to be the good people and do the good things that bear the fruits of kindness.

As we enter this new year, having just passed October 7, as we look backward and set our visions forward, together, we will plan to sing a new song for Kibbutz Beeri and her regional neighbors, for the hostages who must be brought home, for our beloved state of Israel, for our great American nation, for every innocent person trapped in this war, for all of humanity: not a mournful elegy but a joyous chorus of hope.