The Jewish Power Blog: Escaping Victimhood

In thinking about how we might escape the Israeli-Palestinian sweepstakes of competitive victimhood that has such a destructive influence on our daily life and our hopes for the future, it is interesting to step back and take a look at the problem from a universalistic perspective.

What victimhood is, essentially, is surrendering to the power of the past.  We are, after all, largely a collection of our memories, and often it seems that memory is more powerful than our power of agency.  It is often difficult if not impossible for us, as feeling humans, to just “let bygones be bygones.”  Our – and others’ – past acts are too much a part of us.  Both as individuals and as groups, we bear scratches, bleeding wounds, and permanent scars that can cripple our ability to live a healthy and happy life in the present and to freely plan a better future.  Humanity has developed a number of mechanisms – both constructive and destructive – for living with this inevitable presence of the past in the present; i.e., responses to victimhood:

• ruminating on our victimhood, absorbing it into our identity
• avenging
• seeking intervention by society through the system of justice/punishment/restitution
• recalibrating: with the passage of time and change of circumstances we find ourselves empowered and our injurer appears to us pathetic, powerless – so we let go of our resentment
• excusing our injurer’s behavior as we have now come to understand what lay behind it
• forgetting
• forgiving: making the conscious decision to take the power into our own hands to forgive our injurer (either transactionally – if they repent, apologize, and seek to make amends; or unilaterally, without requiring their repentance)
• pretending to forgive, in order to enable life to go on – and in the hope that perhaps the pretense will, with time, become the reality.

Sometimes these get tangled up together and it is hard to know what is really going on.  For example, when Joseph tearfully reveals himself to his shocked (and, presumably, scared) brothers (Gen. 45), he calms them, “do not reproach yourselves,” for this was all part of God’s plan.  Later, not trusting that he has truly moved on (Gen. 50) the brothers claim that father Jacob, before his death, had instructed Joseph to forgive them.  Joseph tells them not to worry, he won’t punish them.  But, interestingly, he never says “I forgive you.”

So, did Joseph ruminate, in prison, on his victimhood?  Did he get his revenge by the emotional torture he inflicted on his brothers before revealing himself (Gen. 42-4)?  Did his religious belief that his suffering had been God’s will enable him to avoid seeing himself as the victim of his brothers’ jealous cruelty?  Did he get out of his victimhood by realizing how the tables had been turned, and all the power was now his?  Did he do some soul-searching and realize that his brothers’ treatment of him was a response to his own arrogance (Gen. 37), and thus excusable?  Did he forgive them?  Did he pretend to forgive them?  All of the above?  In any case, Joseph does seem to have escaped his victimhood, allowing both him and his injurers to move on and live in peace.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the above mechanisms can “cure” victimhood that preserves the memory of the injury long after it occurred; however, when the victimization is ongoing – not merely a memory – then these mechanisms are irrelevant.  The Israelites were cruelly victimized by the ancient Egyptians who enslaved them.  But that chapter ended dramatically and permanently, and Jewish communities throve in Egypt over the centuries.  I don’t think there are any Jews today who boycott Egyptian products because of that ancient injury.  On the other hand, while American slavery ended a century and a half ago, the victimization of Blacks in American society still hasn’t ended, so excusing, forgetting, recalibrating, forgiving – all of these processes are not sufficient to allow us to “turn the page.”  In some cases, persons and groups choose to ruminate on their past victimization, clinging to the moral superiority of their powerlessness; but in other cases, they really are victims, right now.

The Israel-Palestine case is a complicated dynamic, in which ongoing violence of each toward the other gives rise to present victimization – justified by the perpetrator as vengeance for victimization in the past.  Each side measures its own power in its ability to inflict pain on the other – and each side insists that it is powerless to avoid doing so.  But what if one side were to say, “Wait, stop!  We have been victims – but we admit we have also been victimizers.  We’ll be the first to take responsibility, to openly examine what we have done, and seek a way to make amends and move forward on a different path, trying to stop our victimhood from keeping us locked on to the path of resentment and revenge.”  And what if the side displaying that kind of power were to be… us?  Indeed, isn’t asserting the power of choice, of responsibility, superior (morally and practically) to the power “to bomb them back to the stone age”?

“Who is the mightiest of the mighty?  He who conquers his own [vengeful?] passion…  And some say: he who turns his enemy into his friend.” (Avot D’rabbi Natan A 23)  Perhaps the latter is the result of the former…