The world breaks everyone

An essay on Jewish trauma.

“The world breaks everyone,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

Hemingway was neither a Jew nor an Israeli, but when he wrote this, he might as well have been. Perhaps no people and no nation has been broken as many times as we have, and we have grown strong in the broken places. But we also know, with terrible intimacy, that the world kills the very good and very gentle and very brave impartially, and this comes with its own fear and its own despair. It falls to each of us to make at least the attempt to overcome it, and thus become strong at the broken places.

In April, I was not strong. I was visiting my family in the United States for the holiday when another security escalation occurred in Israel. I decided that I would extend my stay in hopes of avoiding what looked about to erupt into the all-out and long-dreaded multi-front war against Hezbollah, Hamas, and, behind them, Iran.

It is possible that I should be ashamed of myself for doing so. Certainly, there will be people who think I should be. Perhaps to some degree, I am. But I have lost count of the number of wars I have endured over 20 years in Israel, and while some may be capable of the stoicism or perhaps indifference required to think little of them, I am not.

For many years, however, I was. There would be terror attacks and wars and rocket fire, and I was certain I was Superman, never giving them a second thought, possessed by the folly of youth that always believes itself to be immortal. I was one of those who would not break.

But when the war with Hamas struck in 2014, I did break. It was not just the rocket fire that sent us all scrambling for the rudimentary bomb shelter next door on a regular basis, but also the eruption of horrendous antisemitic violence around the world and the horrific racism that coursed across social media.

On Twitter, the hashtag “#HitlerWasRight” went viral. Israel-haters were sending anyone remotely connected to Jews and Israel snuff films of Palestinian casualties to smash our spirit and force us to capitulate to their ghoulish emotional blackmail. Muslim tweeters repeatedly referred to myself and my Jewish friends as “satanic” and “pigs.”

In Europe, and especially in France, Jews were mobbed, attacked, and vilified. Thousands marched in the streets calling for Israel's destruction and howling for Jewish blood wherever it could be found. Everything from petty harassment to mob attacks on synagogues cut a swathe through Jewish life on the continent. The authorities, as in centuries past, did nothing. Nobody cared.

The walls of hate and terrorism and racism seemed to be closing in on all sides, and I had to report and write about it all. Under severe stress, never sleeping, and desperately worried for both my safety and that of my friends at home and on the battlefield, I managed to struggle through, but after the war was over, the full weight of it all hit me. Not just Hamas and not just the Palestinians but the world hated us and wanted to kill us, and that was more than I could take. I had a nervous breakdown and spent the next year in a hell of the psyche from which I sometimes thought I would never emerge.

I lived for days, weeks, and months in a single, unending panic attack. Loud noises would send me into spirals of anxiety. At times, I would burst into tears for no discernable reason. I was terrified to leave the house and isolated myself in a manner that only exacerbated the problem. Sometimes a terrible, ominous voice would resound in my head saying, "They're coming for you" over and over again. Psychiatrists pondered whether I had PTSD or some more mysterious confluence of symptoms.

On the way home from one appointment, I looked out the window of a taxi cab, saw the darkness of the Tel Aviv night, and thought, “It’s all black. All black forever.” I wondered sometimes if the storm would ever pass, or if I was doomed to live like this for the rest of my life.

Eventually, with the help of therapy, medication, and the passage of time, I regained myself and my footing in the world. If Hemingway was right, then my ultimate breakage was what kept me from being killed by that world, and perhaps I have grown strong in the broken places. Certainly, I have not been the same since. The journey through an interior hell changed me in innumerable ways, though not all for the bad. It made me less selfish and self-absorbed, and a more compassionate and empathetic person. I have grown strong in the broken places.

Nonetheless, part of me still lives in fear that another such war, and another such eruption of Jew-hatred, will break me once again. So, this time around, I decided that I would not take the chance. I would remain in the ironic safety of exile with my family around me for comfort and protection.

In many ways, for a Zionist, this cannot be seen as anything but a failure, a dereliction of one’s duty to the people, the nation, and the land—and perhaps it is. Nonetheless, I know a great many Israelis who break and have broken when the world strikes with all its unstoppable fury. We are a nation of post-trauma cases, not only the Israeli nation but the Jewish nation as a whole, though we often fear to admit it.

I have seen grown men, scarred by battle trauma, faint during a particularly violent movie scene. I have seen refugees and victims of persecution in innumerable countries display their trauma and pass it on, tragically, to their children. I know the worried looks of people huddled in bomb shelters, wondering when the booms of the interceptions will stop. I am painfully aware of the fact that suicide rates among Holocaust survivors are depressingly high. And there are worse tales that, for the sake of discretion, I will not recount in writing.

In his book Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride, educator Ben M. Freeman explored the terrible toll that centuries of trauma have taken on the Jewish people. Even those of us who have lived in relative safety in countries like the United States carry the legacy of millennia of persecution and violence. I remember being taught about the Holocaust and knowing that as a child with bad eyesight and little physical strength, I would have been among those immediately sent to the gas chambers, without the slightest chance of survival.

Children of Holocaust survivors, those expelled from Arab and Muslim nations, and the Soviet refuseniks who braved the gulag carry a more immediate knowledge of trauma, left unable to ever fully trust the non-Jewish world and looking always for the slightest sign of antisemitism—signs that are, regrettably, plentiful.

As Freeman pointed out, this trauma has terrible consequences. We live, quite often, in a constant state of low-level fear, wondering if we are safe or will ever be safe. We know because we were told as children that there can always be the knock at the door.

And then there is the abuse. To face antisemitism is like being slammed against a brick wall. At the moment of confrontation with the antisemite, it becomes instantly clear that the antisemite is insane, and there is nothing you can say or do to change their minds. They hate you and will never give it up, because it gives them pleasure. They enjoy it and intend to continue enjoying it. To witness this spectacle of human sadism is, in and of itself, a trauma.

There is another terrible consequence of antisemitism, which is that we often begin to believe it ourselves. We wonder if it is really possible for the Jews to be right and the entire world wrong. We turn, sometimes, to self-hatred and even collaboration, convinced that we must have done something to deserve all this. And, of course, the antisemites are always there to confirm our suspicions.

But this is a lie. If history teaches us anything, it is that it is entirely possible for the Jews to be right and the entire world wrong. The great early Zionist intellectual Ehad Ha’am asserted as much more than a century ago, bringing forward the irrefutable proof of the blood libel. In that case, the world was not only wrong, but laboring under a psychotic delusion, and every Jew in the world knew it. But as Ehad Ha’am noted, “And yet…”

Today, my greatest fear is not for myself, but for the young. I see the emergence of a generation of Jews who never knew the post-Holocaust interregnum during which antisemitism was at least socially unacceptable. It lasted until the Palestinians reignited the inferno in 2000, and the young generation has had to live with it ever since.

I admire this young generation because they are strident in a way my generation was not. They do not lie to themselves and pretend the thing is not happening again. They take to the streets and social media to defend themselves and their people.

But I also know that this takes a terrible toll. The abuse, hatred, and social isolation they suffer as a result of their efforts are terrible, as they have told me themselves. They are sacrificing their psyches on the altar of their people, and in return, they receive almost no support from the Jewish establishment.

Many minority groups, such as Black Americans, have long struggled with the traumas of the past and sought to confront them. Despite our unbreakable sense of history, however, Jews have proven particularly inept at doing so. We prefer to mourn and remember, rather than recognize and tackle the damage that our disasters have done to us.

Since the Holocaust, we have chosen to emphasize strength and resilience above all. This is understandable, but it means we do not allow ourselves to break and contend with our brokenness. And as Hemingway noted, the world kills those who will not break.

I think, for example, of Menachem Begin. He was, in many ways, a tower of strength, a defiant, proud, willful Jew who fought the most powerful empire in history to gain his people's freedom. But he was also a man beset by the trauma of antisemitism, the Holocaust, imprisonment by the Soviets, and the violence unleashed by his revolt against the British.

He was destroyed by his inability to confront these traumas. The upheavals of the First Lebanon War shattered him, he resigned his high office, which he had sought all his life, and retreated into a decade of seclusion.

One hopes that today, we would acknowledge that Begin had suffered a nervous breakdown followed by clinical depression. But back then, such a thing was unthinkable. Of all people, this tower of Jewish strength could not be allowed to be broken, even though, had we acknowledged his brokenness, he might have received the treatment he needed and recovered. In many ways, Begin died of stigma.

It is this stigma that we must now overcome, because if there is one thing that fights trauma most effectively, it is solidarity. If one feels that other people are with you and empathizing with your brokenness, because it is theirs as well, the battle against the past is not over, but one has acquired a formidable weapon against it.

By acknowledging our universal trauma, the Jews will not weaken ourselves. The world breaks everyone, and thus there is no shame in brokenness. If we acknowledge this at long last, we may find that we have not regressed to an earlier era of Jewish weakness. We may find instead that we have grown strong in the broken places.