The Jewish Resilience Curriculum
Jew haters make the same tired and hateful accusation every day: we see ourselves as perpetual victims. The Jewish calendar is filled with so many recognitions of communal catastrophe that it would be easy for a skeptical observer to conclude that we just can’t escape our past. The Jew haters are wrong, and science can explain why.
Psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at the Family Narratives Lab at Emory University discovered something relevant to the Jewish community in the 2000s. Using their 20-question “Do you know?” quiz to test children’s knowledge of their families’ histories, Duke and Fivush categorized three types of family narrative.
The first narrative a child could internalize was a mixed one: some ups, some downs, some adversity, and some victory over that adversity. The second type of narrative was generally positive: children knew only the good parts of their family histories. In the third type of family narrative, children retained mostly the negative trajectory of the story. Additionally, as in the fourth son on Passover, some children didn’t know their families’ stories well at all.
The children who were the most resilient, most confident, and best equipped for life’s tribulations were not the children who understood entirely positive or (perhaps obviously) entirely negative family histories. They were the ones who knew the “oscillating narrative” version of their family history including its ups and downs. The authors concluded that “knowledge of family history is significantly correlated (emphasis mine) with internal locus of control, higher self-esteem, better family functioning, greater family cohesiveness, lower levels of anxiety, and lower incidence of behavior problems.”
“The Jew haters are wrong,
and science can explain why.”
Sound familiar? This approach mirrors the educational strategy that Jewish tradition has been using for millennia to educate our children and retain critical lessons from our shared history. It’s even become an inside joke: every Jewish holiday can best be summarized as, “They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Let’s eat.”
From Purim to Pesach to Yom Ha’atzma’ut and beyond, through Jewish liturgy and writings, we remember, we grieve, and we celebrate together. The oscillating narrative inherent in this annual cycle is the secret sauce that Duke and Fivush identified as the most beneficial of all. We have built a beautiful and enduring nation from the ashes of collective tragedies, and we teach our children that duality.
Jews don’t observe these traditions because we’re stuck in the past. We never use them as an excuse for poor performance as individuals or as a community. We don’t have a victimhood mentality.
This scientifically proven educational strategy has built something that no enemy has ever been able to destroy: profoundly resilient individuals and a seemingly indestructible tribal family.
You aren’t just lifting a glass of wine at a Passover seder; you aren’t only hearing names read at a Yom HaShoah ceremony; you aren’t sitting on the floor merely to learn about the loss of a temple at Tisha B’Av. You are participating in the world’s longest-running experiential-education program as both teacher and student.
Our enemies might do well to audit our course, too: even though the world hates us more for thriving despite all odds, their attacks will become yet another lesson in our eternal resilience curriculum. We don’t always choose what happens to us, but we can always choose what we learn and teach from it.