The Necessity of Metaphysical Trauma for National Teshuvah

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Artwork: Tainted Pact, by Benjamin Ee

The Necessity of Metaphysical Trauma for National Teshuvah 

In The Induction of Metaphysical Trauma I argued that the national teshuvah of Tishah b’Av can only take place from a state of metaphysical trauma – from “abiding sentiments of grief, the resulting sense of void, and the hopeless feelings of groping in the dark,” to borrow the words of Rav Soloveitchik. The question is: Why is this state of “metaphysical trauma” necessary for national teshuvah?

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear, is a philosophical-anthropological analysis of how Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, led his people when their world – that is, their rituals, traditions, and ways of living – came to an abrupt end. Lear’s thesis is that the Crow Nation did not merely lose the particulars of their way of life when they were forced to move onto the reservations; rather, they lost the world of concepts which made that life conceivable, thereby rendering it impossible to live. Lear provides the following “very rough analogy” for this phenomenon:

Imagine that pieces of a chess game had inner lives. And imagine that each took itself to be a center of agency. I am a knight! I see myself in tribal terms: I am a black knight! I am proud to a black knight! We shall fight a glorious battle and capture the white king! I think strategically in terms of my possible moves: two up and one to the right, two up and one to the left. Perhaps I should wait here quietly for several moves, and if that white rook comes my way ... I understand all the other members of my tribe in terms of the roles they play: and I understand that we are all aspiring to excellence in the sense that we are trying to win. Unbeknownst to me, my world exists because it is protected by a group of humans. These are the guardians of the chess world, who insist that the only acceptable moves are moves that are allowable within the game of chess. From my point of view as a thoughtful knight, the humans are as unknowable as the transcendent gods. But suppose these chess-guardians were one day just to give it up: as a historical phenomenon, humans got bored with playing this game, and the game of chess goes out of existence. My problem is not simply that my way of life has come to an end. I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world. I understood the other pieces in terms of their roles, but there are no longer any such roles. Perhaps I am found attractive by humans as a physical object. I am put on a bookshelf as a curiosity, an objet d'art. I might sit for generations on a series of bookshelves – get traded as what humans call an antique – and all this while I am in utter confusion. I have no idea what is going on. This isn’t primarily a psychological problem. The concepts with which I would otherwise have understood myself – indeed, the concepts with which I would otherwise have shaped my identity – have gone out of existence.

Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, says of his work with trauma victims: “I have to help them reconstruct [their] inner map of the world.” Unlike personal teshuvah, national teshuvah requires a reconstruction of the world of concepts in which we live. It is impossible to radically reconstruct our world unless we have recognized and felt its utter destruction, intellectually and viscerally. This is why metaphysical trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. Only when we “hit rock bottom” and suffer the consequences of the false concepts and corrupt values that we, as a society, have embraced – only then can we begin to rebuild. The core experiences of national trauma were generated by the instances of “divine wrath” throughout Jewish history. The communal fast days are designed to preserve and reawaken this trauma on a recurring basis to “open the paths of teshuvah.”

Perhaps this is the meaning of Moshe’s prophecy about the national teshuvah that will occur at the end of days: “When you are in distress and all these things have befallen you, at the end of days, you will return to Hashem, your God, and hearken to His voice” (Devarim 4:30). Like the Crow, the Jewish people may endure the total destruction of our world. But we, unlike they, have access to teshuvah: the ability to return to “Melech ha’Olam” – the King of the world of concepts and values in which we ought to live.

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