Reflections on Trauma, Sacrifice, and the Divine Presence
At a recent book launch event, the evening opened with the following story; a brother of a fallen soldier told his mother that this past year — the year in which his brother was killed in action — had been the most beautiful of his life. The mother said she understood. She, too, had experienced dramatic personal growth during that year, and hearing her son say it, along with the book under discussion, helped her release the guilt she carried for admitting as much.
I found myself unable to accept the statement. That a brother's death in war could be the cause of someone's growth, that his loss could be credited with producing someone else's success — this is not something I can accept. And yet I recognized something true sitting just beneath it, something closer to an idea I associate with Rav Kook: that having a child in the army creates a lever, a mechanism by which a person's emotional life is transferred from the scale of private family concern to the scale of national, collective feeling. The son's happiness, on this reading, was never about his brother's death. It was about what his brother's death forced open in him — a shift from a life measured only in personal terms to one that also lives on a national scale.
My refusal to accept the statement at face value, is a reaction to the growing philosphical shift occuring in the Israeli public, one from self value to self denegration, something Hasidic thought promotes very often. I need to explain...
One ideology that I echoed only too well at the book launch event was -- Korbanot HaShalom, sacrifices for peace. The Oslo era as promoted by its leadership embodied the belief that peace could be achieved through painful concessions and sacrifices. There are several problems with this framework. First, the people making the sacrifice are often not the people bearing its costs, that is not just a technical problem it is a shift in scale between the leadership that describes personal loss - sacrifice and its citizens looking for national peace. The leaders are selling a national level value - peace and the cost of a personal sacrifice Korbanot - this is a fundemendtal false dichotomy.
Second, there is a moral problem: evil means do not become justified by noble ends. The notion that one may commit wrong in pursuit of a greater good rarely succeeds, either morally or practically. Again, this is due to the desire to solve a noble higher level problem with an evil to act against the individual (at a lower level).
This is the most significant issue I have with the ideology of Korbanot HaShalom - the justification of human sacrifice for national attainment undermines the basic framework that individual and collective are different. Korbanot HaShalom is an oxymoron, either we are discussing the national level topic of Shalom - or we are discussing the individual framework of personal growth through sacrifice - it is not possible to put both in a single phrase.
Societies inevitably operate through competing scales of value. Individual life is of immeasurable worth, yet nations also weigh collective goods such as security, sovereignty, and survival. This is why societies can send soldiers to war. It is not because individual lives lack value, but because human beings can become part of a collective; there are realities larger than any one person.
All this led me to question whether the framework of the Hassidic descent-for-the-sake-of-ascent paradigm speaks to our generation. Much of that worldview is deeply individualistic and centered on suffering as a path to spiritual growth. There are also echoes of Christian religious sensibilities in the elevation of suffering itself.
More broadly, many strands of Jewish mysticism place significant emphasis on the idea that one must descend in order to rise, that suffering creates the vessel capable of receiving greater light. The language of broken vessels, repair, and spiritual growth through pain is deeply embedded within that tradition.
Yet I find myself asking whether this framework adequately reflects our reality. Every Torah must speak to the conditions of the generation that receives it. If our understanding of the world is fundamentally different from the world inhabited by the Polish Hasidic masters, can their assumptions alone provide the foundation for contemporary religious thought? A living Torah must engage the actual experiences and realities of those who live it. When we search for 'A New Torah', a Brit Hadasha, where our relationship with God will be redefined, we need to search within our reality, our very new set of expereinces from the past three years.
A reasonable objection presents itself here: why not simply be content with personal growth through suffering, without reaching for a national or theological frame at all? There is a kernel of truth in the objection's premise. The exercise of free will — the raw act of choosing, of committing oneself fully to a decision — costs the same in kind at every scale. The will required to change oneself is not smaller than the will required to help redeem a people; in both cases the human being stands at the same threshold and must expend the same quality of effort to cross it.
But if the currency of will is spent regardless of the size of the problem, the real question becomes where to spend it. Why direct that same expenditure toward the smaller canvas when a larger one is equally available? This is not a claim that individual growth is unworthy — for many people, in many seasons of life, the personal canvas is the only one available, and there is nothing lesser in devoting oneself fully to it. But where the choice exists, where a person's effort could be aimed at either scale for the same cost, it is worth asking whether the individualistic framework has become the default less because it is truer, and more because it is easier to hold onto in a generation more comfortable with private meaning than collective destiny.
There is a further claim implicit in the descent-for-ascent framework worth naming directly: that joy requires a prior deficit, that the vessel must be broken before it can hold light. I am not convinced this is a general law rather than one path among others. God enables creative joy, not only productive joy — the pleasure of relief when suffering ends is real, but it is not the only register of pleasure available, and it is not owed to us as the price of the other. My wife gave birth to seven of our children with almost no external pain relief, and what I noticed was not that the pain was worth enduring for what came after, but that when she stopped fighting the contractions, they stopped registering as a painful obstacle and became simply a step in a process — present, but not suffered. I suspect the descent-for-ascent model has quietly assumed the first view of joy — that mine must be paid for by a prior lack — when the second is at least as available.
This brings me to a related idea: the infliction of pain not merely upon individuals, but upon the Divine Presence itself.
Consider Jewish history over the last two thousand years. For example, replacement theology dominated Christian thought. The return of Jewish sovereignty and the creation of the State of Israel challenged assumptions that had shaped the theology of enormous populations for centuries. The state's existence created a powerful manifestation of Jewish vitality and a revelation of divine presence within our current reality that could not simply be ignored.
If so, then damage to that manifestation is not merely political or national. It is spiritual. Every blow against Jewish sovereignty, every crack in the structure of national redemption, can be understood as a wound inflicted upon the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence revealed through history.
This helps explain an emotional distinction that I have struggled to articulate. When hostages were rescued through a successful military operation, there was not only personal joy for the individuals saved and their families. There was a national elevation, a sense that something larger has been vindicated. The Divine Presence was strengthened.
By contrast, when hostages returned through negotiations with those who seek Israel's destruction, there was still a profound happiness for the individuals involved. The personal dimension remains real and powerful. Yet alongside that joy there was also a sense of pain: the feeling that the collective dignity and sovereignty through which the Divine Presence is manifested has been diminished.
This is, in the end, the same distinction the mother and son were reaching for without quite naming it. No brother's death can be the cause of anyone's happiness — that claim, made at the individual level, should be refused every time. But grief can still be the lever by which a private life is drawn into a national one, and what is felt on that national plane is not happiness at the loss but elevation through it — the same elevation felt when a hostage comes home by force of arms rather than by concession. The son was not wrong to feel what he felt. He was reaching, without the vocabulary, for the frame in which the Divine Presence, not merely a family, absorbs and answers what has been taken.
