A couple of recent important films have dramatized this dilemma-one made by an Israeli, and one by a Jewish-American director -Steven Spielberg-who, twice now, has used his position to give voice to some of the deeper parts of the Jewish experience. The Israeli film is Walk on Water, and the Spielberg film is Munich.
The two films parallel each other in some telling ways. The protagonist in both films is an Israeli hit-man, working for the state of Israel by assassinating its terrorist enemies. In both films, we identify and empathize with the state-assassin. Both are basically good men. Both are dealing with internal torment. Both tend to run away from their pain, and both seem able or willing to show the world only their toughness.
Both films end up with some degree of reclamation of a part of the protagonists' deep humanity that has been lost under the impact of traumatic experience
The Burden of History is Carried by the Jews as Well as by the Arabs
It is traumatic enough that, in the almost sixty years of its existence, Israel has fought such a long succession of wars for its very survival.
But of course that more recent series of traumas has been piled upon a millennium of previous traumas, culminating in that most appalling trauma of all, the holocaust.
The path from the destruction of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Europe to the emergence of the Hebrew-speaking Sabras of Israel has entailed an extraordinary transformation.
It is visible even on the physical plane of the human body.
The Yiddish-speaking Jew of the European shetl may have been formidable in some ways, but they were not at the level of physical prowess. As an adaptation to centuries of being at the mercy of a hostile world with overwhelming superiority of raw force, the Yiddish-speaking Jew had developed the hunched posture of one who seeks to communicate that he is no physical threat. With that same posture he can bend over the sacred texts, an alternative world in which he can find a power for himself of a different sort.
But the non-threatening vulnerability of the physically unprepossessing Yiddish-speaker ultimately proved -in the face of the Nazi death camps-- an insufficiently protective adaptation.
Out of the ashes of the historic traumas of anti-Semitic Europe, the Jews who built Israel repudiated the old vulnerability. Just as Yiddish gave way to Hebrew, so also the posture of the pale scholar (the yeshiva buecher) was replaced by the bold and powerful physicality of the new Israeli.
(In America, over the same period, one saw a similar transformation in the body language of the black American male-from the shuffling and stoop-shouldered posture of the inoffensive Stepin Fetchit to the broad-chested, aggressive posture of Shaft. In the case of the African-American male, the transformation occurred less because the old posture had become unacceptably unsafe than that -with the rise and success of the civil rights movement--the new, more aggressive posture was less unacceptably unsafe.)
After World War II, the battle cry of the new Jew was "Never Again." "Never again" has an explicit meaning---no more holocausts. But perhaps there was also the post-traumatic subtext: never again will I be vulnerable, never again will I be soft, never again will I be weak. Never again will I let the world see my full humanity, my heart, my soul.
The denial of vulnerability is one of the most basic consequences of great trauma. And like most traumatic learning, it is part adaptation and part over-adaptation. It is part throwing out the bathwater of what is recognized as no longer viable, and part throwing out the baby of part of one's fundamental humanity.
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