Part II: From Trauma to Suppression and the Requirement of Being Prepared
The phrase “epigenetic trauma” is one that I started to employ at some point during the three years since 10/7. That event “united” us with the experiences we had – only – read about: massacres along the Rhine River during the Crusades, the Chelminski Massacre, pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, Babyn Yar and the Shoah. The ruthlessness of those who hate us and our aloneness in meeting those murderers – few friends among the Nations – awakened that dimension of “being a Jew” that the 1960s-1990s suggested had passed.
Epigenetic trauma is a bio-psychological concept that explains how our bodies hold the events of bodies that birthed and generated us carried. The transmission of such information is not only by way of story but is encoded in the very building blocks of our organisms.
Yet, what occurred to me as we closed in on the Third Anniversary of 10/7 was the mechanism of suppression, which is one of the methods of managing trauma. Right after the Hamas attack in the Gaza Envelope, our mechanisms of suppression were overcome. A raw wound opened up. As the war in Israel progressed and politics in the United States, Israel, and globally, got uglier and more fearsome, the mechanism of suppression recovered. Not everyone is an October 8 Jew.
In the context of American Jewish life, suppression is aligned with comfort – the familiar comfort of affluence, being well-fed, well-housed, and cultivating a pre-geriatric relationship to our body. The comfort is also seen in how we seek to recover the reality of October 6, 2023: a state of being asleep.
As a Conservative rabbi, I have encountered the “culture of American Jewish comfort” in the familiar material, socio-economic ways, but the “comforts” that are much more problematic are connected to our status-identity in the sub-section of highly-educated middle and upper-middle class elites. For too many, that “comfort” is too attractive to confront, too seductive to acknowledge, address, and annihilate.
I cannot merely offer critique. Our people, AMCHA, is also entitled to solutions: ways forward. Trade preparation for comfort. Be innocent, but do not be naïve. Revisit the shock to your system regularly and associate with other Jews as often as possible. The imperative is: be prepared; disavow comfort.
