Israel, Jews And The World: An Opportunity for Repair and Redemption in the 21st Century

By Gina Ross

The above title is not quite a book, but is a little longer than a pamphlet. And this present column is not quite a book report either. More like my reflections on a pamphlet.

First, to set the scene, let me tell you about the dream I had last night. In my dream, I was arguing with an anti-semite. He was youngish, looked something like that Fuentes character, and endlessly voluble. Articulate. Never at a loss for words. And I wasn’t nearly so voluble as he was. All I had were … values. Good values. I didn’t want to say anything unless I had sufficient grounds for thinking it was true. But my values and my words seemed weightless. My replies seemed totally without heft in my dream face-off with this character who had got hold of something that worked for him and made him sound important. 

*. *. *

Gina Ross, whose small book I’ve just finished reading, is a specialist in the healing of trauma. She has her own method for repairing trauma’s effects, has written books that approach the subject of trauma-healing from different angles, and has founded institutions in Israel and in the United States where her methods are applied. The back pages of the booklet or pamphlet give links to sites where one can get hold of her videos and other materials.

What interested me is that she has (in a way that seems plausible) identified the special character of the astonishing wave of hatred-for-the-victims that swept over the planet in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity-packed massacres of October 7th and 8th, 2023! 

Here’s her thesis: the Nazi Holocaust that murdered six million Jews was not the start of this brand of hatred: because of its efficiency and scope, it only brought to a climax the ideologies of contempt and rationales for persecution that had been respectably endorsed and openly operative for almost two thousand years. Since most of the countries where Jews had lived had put up no effective resistance to the Nazi roundup – for the purpose of mass murder – of their fellow citizens, a certain degree of shame or moral uneasiness had officially settled over the topic of Jews. However, by and large, the needed moral self-review did not take place. 

Instead, the feelings that had quietly acquiesced in the Holocaust were repressed in the decades following World War II. Repressed, and neither acknowledged nor worked through. So the bizarre, global outbreaks of gleeful atrocity-approval can be understood as cases of the Return of the Repressed (though Ross does not use that Freudian terminology).

That said, our present disheartening situation does offer another chance to revisit the collective bad conscience and, finally, to transcend the past. First, by acknowledging it and next by conscientiously refusing to repeat it. With this hopeful possibility in view, Ross offers eight steps to take, if the therapeutic potential of this moment is to be actualized. 

Since the “steps” are not rote-like but explicated in accompanying discussions, I’ll try to summarize some of them to give an idea of the entire list of eight.

1. Jews who in Israel have acquired effective military skill in defending themselves, now need to acquire equivalent communicative skill in defending their right of self-defense.
2. Moderate Arab nations, having recognized their common interest with Israel in modernizing the Middle East, now need to be joined by forces in the West that recognize the common threat to civilization presented by radical Islam.
3. – 8. The West needs to face its long history of anti-semitism, regain the moral clarity that’s been missing with reference to its past, and shut down the menacing activities that target Jewish students and faculty on university grounds and other public places – activities not permitted against any other group. Liberation movements in Iran need to be supported, the ambivalence of Eastern Europe confronted and the support for Israel from 19 Latin American leaders foregrounded. Israel’s effective self-defense and unusual achievements as a nation are not a byproduct of European guilt but rather the expression of Judaism’s sacred vocation of unbroken chronological memory – beginning in Biblical times and going forward into the present and future. Israel lives in history. That’s what it does. That’s why we have a Bible.

At first, I read her eight steps with impatience at what looked to me like a utopian fantasy. But finally I decided that she’s unlikely to be putting forth these eight steps out of naivete. Her Sephardic family was forced out of two Middle Eastern countries. She’s watched the gradual buildup of anti-semitism in our country, and other Western countries, without surprise or denial. She’s not a fool.

What is she doing, really? She’s identifying a collective displacement without taking instant recourse to empty generalities. She’s giving it the relevant name or category: 

Antisemitism, 

repressed and never faced.

She’s resisting collective delusions, such as the ones that blame the victims or propose abstract remedies that predictably lead to future victims. She’s looking at the constructive forces in the situation and placing her hopes where they have some chance of being realized.

As someone who is still in some degree traumatized by the events of October 7th & 8th, 2023, I’ve tried out one of her healing techniques. I didn’t do it for as long or as carefully as she recommends. I didn’t give it much time. But it did seem to do me some good.

Now we need – 

to get the rest of the world

to try to face 

what it has repressed.