Can We Reclaim the Jewish Story?

As we enter Elul and mark the yahrzeit of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, I find myself thinking about resilience.

A recent Jerusalem Post reflection by Jeffrey Kahn on Israeli resilience immediately inspired me. Among the questions he raises, two stayed with me:

Can our enemies make young Jews abroad question their relationship with Israel?

And can they make Israelis believe that international legitimacy is the ultimate measure of whether their country deserves to exist?

Kahn asks these questions within a broader discussion about strategic and national resilience—our ability to preserve social cohesion, institutional confidence and psychological strength even when we cannot control the threats around us. His questions led me somewhere else.

What happens when the pressure is directed not only at Israel’s security or social cohesion, but at the Jewish people’s confidence in its own story?

Since Oct. 7, Israel has demonstrated extraordinary military and social resilience. Soldiers returned to their units, communities mobilized, volunteers filled enormous gaps and families somehow continued despite unimaginable loss. Yet there is another dimension of resilience that is harder to measure.

Military resilience determines whether our enemies can defeat us. Narrative resilience determines whether, in fighting them, we still know who we are.

By narrative resilience, I mean the ability of a people to confront criticism, tragedy and attempts to delegitimize it without losing confidence in the truth of its history and the legitimacy of its national story. It does not mean refusing criticism or pretending our history is perfect. A mature national story must be capable of absorbing uncomfortable facts and competing perspectives. But complexity cannot require self-erasure.

The Second Trauma of Oct. 7

Oct. 7 inflicted a terrible physical trauma. Jews were murdered, raped, kidnapped and burned in their homes in the sovereign Jewish state. After generations of persecution and 75 years of independence, scenes reminiscent of the pogrom returned.

Then came something many Jews were not prepared for: a battle over what Oct. 7 meant.

Within a remarkably short period, Israel shifted in significant parts of global discourse from the victim of a horrific terrorist attack to the alleged embodiment of colonialism, apartheid, genocide and even evil. Hamas’s ideology and responsibility often faded from the conversation, while Zionism itself increasingly became the accused.

This was profoundly disorienting. The first trauma was what happened to us. The second was watching the meaning of what happened being rewritten.

Our story suddenly seemed to begin in 1948, or perhaps 1967. Thousands of years of Jewish history were compressed into a modern story of colonialism in which Jews appeared almost from nowhere as foreigners taking somebody else’s land.

Yet the Jewish story begins long before the modern conflict. It begins with Abraham and Sarah, slavery in Egypt and the Exodus, Sinai and covenant, Jewish national life in the Land of Israel, Jerusalem and sovereignty, followed by destruction, exile and an extraordinary refusal to forget.

There is a remarkable irony here. Much of humanity knows this story because the Jewish people carried it into the world. Abraham, Moses, David, Jerusalem, Zion and the prophets became foundational to Christianity, deeply significant to Islam and embedded in Western civilization. Yet Jews can now find themselves described as foreign colonizers in the very land where that story unfolded.

Jewish sovereignty was destroyed, but the Jewish relationship with the land was not. Across centuries of exile, Jews faced Jerusalem in prayer, remembered it at weddings and ended the Passover seder with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Then came one of history’s remarkable national restorations: a dispersed people returned in large numbers to its ancestral homeland, revived Hebrew as an everyday language, gathered communities from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, and restored Jewish sovereignty after almost 2,000 years.

Recognizing this does not require denying Palestinian families, memories, suffering, rights or aspirations. Another people’s story does not require the erasure of ours. A Good Society should be capable of recognizing human dignity and competing claims without falsifying history.

When the Victim Becomes the Villain

There is another part of the post-Oct. 7 experience that is difficult to ignore.

For centuries, Jews were subjected to the blood libel, the grotesque fabrication that they murdered non-Jewish children for ritual purposes. Not every allegation against Israel today is a blood libel. Israel exercises enormous military power, its decisions should be scrutinized and Palestinian suffering is real.

But something darker happens when criticism of particular actions becomes a characterization of Israel as inherently murderous; when the suffering of children is invoked not only to challenge military conduct but as evidence of supposedly intrinsic Jewish or Zionist cruelty; when the massacre of Jews is minimized while Jewish power is presented as uniquely sinister.

The accusation changes, but at its extreme the mechanism can feel disturbingly familiar: the Jew is transformed from victim into uniquely malevolent perpetrator.

For almost two thousand years, Jews were frequently hated while powerless. Zionism changed the Jewish condition by restoring Jewish agency. Today, the Jew can also be condemned for refusing to remain powerless.

This is why Kahn’s questions matter. His warning is broader than narrative: an enemy capable of fracturing Israeli society, exhausting it, weakening its confidence and alienating young Diaspora Jews may achieve a form of strategic victory without defeating the IDF.

That leads me to another question: What if one dimension of that vulnerability is the Jewish story itself?

From Sun Tzu to Rav Kook

Kahn draws on Sun Tzu in thinking about resilience: before defeating an enemy, make yourself resistant to defeat. But as we enter Elul, I find myself reaching into Jewish thought for a different dimension of resilience.

Sun Tzu can teach us how not to be defeated by our enemies. Rav Kook can teach us how not to lose ourselves.

Rav Kook understood national trauma. The 1929 Arab violence, particularly the massacre of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, affected him profoundly. Hebron was not simply another point on a map. It belonged to the earliest layers of Jewish memory, the city associated with Abraham and Sarah and the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Yet Hebron did not persuade Rav Kook to abandon the Jewish return. He refused to allow those who hated Jews to determine what the Jewish national revival would become.

His vision of Zionism went far beyond refuge. The return to Zion was part of the restoration of Jewish national life—land, language, culture, responsibility and ultimately purpose.

And this brings us to Elul.

National Teshuvah

Elul is the month of teshuvah. We usually translate teshuvah as repentance, but its literal meaning is richer: return.

Rav Kook expanded the idea beyond an individual’s remorse for wrongdoing. Teshuvah could represent a return to one’s deepest self, and there was a national dimension as well: a people returning to itself. The physical return to Zion could form part of a much greater process of Jewish national renewal.

Perhaps narrative resilience after Oct. 7 should be understood as a form of national teshuvah.

Not self-blame. Oct. 7 was not our fault, and antisemitism will not disappear if Jews simply behave better. Nor does teshuvah mean apologizing for Jewish sovereignty.

It means returning to our story when others seek to rewrite it.

Returning to the Exodus and its journey from slavery to freedom. Returning to Sinai and covenant. Returning to Jerusalem and Jewish sovereignty, to exile and two thousand years of longing, to Zionism and national restoration, and to understanding what the creation of Israel meant after centuries in which Jews depended upon others for their protection.

This is not primarily a public-relations exercise. It is an educational, cultural and spiritual one. Do our children understand why Jews returned to Israel? Can they explain the relationship between the Bible, exile, Jewish prayer, Zionism and the modern state? Can young Jews encounter accusations of colonialism without either retreating into slogans or becoming embarrassed by their own history?

We should teach complexity. We should acknowledge mistakes and the suffering of others. A confident people does not require a perfect history; it requires an honest one. But honesty must never become historical amnesia.

Perhaps we have become so busy defending Israel that we have forgotten how to explain Israel.

Returning to Ourselves

This is why Rav Kook’s message feels so relevant at the beginning of Elul.

Kahn asks, in effect, whether our enemies can change us even if they cannot defeat us. Rav Kook leads us to a deeper question: Do we know ourselves well enough not to be defined by those who seek to break us?

The answer cannot simply be better advocacy or persuading the world to accept our narrative. If Jewish confidence depends upon international approval, we have already surrendered too much authority over our identity.

Our task is harder: to know our story, teach it honestly, tell it confidently and live in a way worthy of it.

That last part matters. We did not return after almost 2,000 years merely to possess an army or a flag. Jewish sovereignty restored the possibility of Jewish responsibility. The Jewish story that begins with Exodus and covenant ultimately asks what kind of society we build once we are free.

That is where resilience, teshuvah and the idea of a Good Society meet.

As we move through Elul toward Rosh Hashanah, perhaps the challenge is therefore not to return to Oct. 6. We cannot. Nor should our objective be to emerge from Oct. 7 unchanged.

The challenge is to ensure that neither Hamas, antisemitism, international hostility nor our own trauma determines who we become.

Rav Kook lived through Hebron and continued to believe in Jewish renewal. His answer was not forgetfulness, weakness or naïveté. It was return.

So perhaps the question I want to carry through Elul and into Rosh Hashanah is this:

Can we confront the hatred directed at us without becoming defined by it; defend ourselves without surrendering our moral purpose; and reclaim the Jewish story strongly enough that we remember not only where we came from, but why we returned?

That may be the national teshuvah our generation now needs.