Jewish national mourning is designed to channel private rituals of bereavement into an enhanced feeling of solidarity and a common fate. They are not meant to glorify death or make a virtue out of suffering. On the contrary, the Jewish approach to bereavement takes pains to emphasize the priority of life and the living. For example, Jewish rites of national mourning such as the fast of the Ninth of Av seek to preserve the connection with something alive and present—in this case, with Jerusalem—and not to foster a sense of identification with the dead. This, as we shall see, stands in stark contrast to the Israeli idea of national mourning, which is marked by a near-obsessive preoccupation with sorrow and death.
 

In truth, the Zionist approach to mourning owes more to Christianity and to European romanticism than it does to Judaism. Both of these traditions are marked by the worship of death. Self-sacrifice, after all, lies at the heart of Christian mythology, which sanctifies Jesus’ death on the cross. Catholics and Orthodox Christians venerate the image of the lifeless Jesus and other martyrs who chose the path of pain and suffering. Their bodies are exhibited everywhere. It is as if the Christian is in a constant state of mourning: He has not, nor cannot, bury his dead. Moreover, unlike in Judaism, in Christianity it is a willingness to relinquish and abstain from earthly life that is the mark of the holy man, one who aspires to resemble God. The Christian cemetery is therefore a cherished and sacred place, one in which the living are invited to dwell freely and at length. The Christian befriends death, allays the encounter with it, and beatifies it, thus blurring the distinction between life and death altogether. Christianity has succeeded in creating a cult of mourning, in particular of the mother for her son. In the same vein, European romanticism, which served as the basis for many national movements in the modern era, glorified heroic death as the most sublime expression of human existence.

Although Jews traditionally rejected the exaltation of death and suffering, emphasizing instead the importance of life, some proponents of modern Judaism adopted Christian and romantic motifs of sublime anguish and heroic sacrifice. These European-educated Jews sought to recast Judaism in accordance with European cultural standards. As a result, the idea of the Jew’s fate as a repetition of the suffering of Jesus abounded in Jewish thought, art, and literature in the first quarter of the twentieth century. (Marc Chagall’s paintings of Jesus as a Jew are perhaps the most famous of many examples.) Influenced by the prevailing moods during Russia’s revolutionary period, Jewish literature of the early twentieth century exhibited many expressions of the idea that the suffering of innocents is a necessary sacrifice for the greater collective good. The best-known examples are Uri Tzvi Greenberg’s Yiddish poems from the 1920s, Avraham Shlonsky’s poem “Deathbed” (1924),¹⁴ Yitzhak Lamdan’s poem “Masada” (1927),¹⁵ and Natan Alterman’s works “Joy of the Poor” (1941) and “The Silver Platter” (1947).¹⁶ Zionist leaders and the framers of Zionist political culture also continued, in the formative years of the state, to give credence to the romantic idea that suffering and even dying for the Zionist cause is honorable and sacred.

  

This perception of the Zionist struggle has all but disappeared in Israel today. To us, mourning the loss of a loved one in a terror attack or military operation is not an event of mythological significance, but rather an all too familiar and tangible part of our everyday experience. Only a few identify with the words of Saul Tchernichovsky, “Here they are—our best sons, youths of pure dreams”;¹⁷ or those of Alterman, “Whether the road be strenuous or treacherous; whether not only one will be stricken; we cherish you, our Homeland; we will devote ourselves to you in battle and in toil.”¹⁸ Today, the grief of parents whose children have fallen in wars defending Israel is no longer portrayed as a willing sacrifice for the homeland, as it was in the early years of the state. Instead, we relate to this sort of loss mainly through psychological terminology, in particular the concept of “trauma.”

Trauma is ubiquitous in Israeli life. Every war and every battle leaves a trail of traumatized soldiers. Combat stress reaction—a concept that was not even in use prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War but today describes the long-term mental condition suffered by a large number of IDF combatants—has been depicted in literature and film as an overpowering force, one with which its victims may struggle indefinitely. Then there is the Holocaust, the traumatic nature of which needs no explanation. Of late, the perception of its victims as irreversibly traumatized by their experiences has been gaining salience. Indeed, restitution payments are given to Holocaust survivors not only for lost property or diminished earning capacity, but also for mental damages, based on the assumption that the horrors they experienced cannot be blotted out.

Another uniquely Israeli trauma is the new immigrant’s encounter with the local population. Israeli psychologists describe numerous cases of integration-induced distress among Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, some of which have resulted in suicide or even murder. This phenomenon recalls the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors and immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries who arrived in the land of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. Undoubtedly, the fact that Israel is a state of refugees gathered from around the globe, each suffering from both personal and collective traumas, makes it difficult, if not frequently impossible, for us to attend to the particular needs and suffering of others. The state’s current failure to absorb the waves of immigrants from Africa and the Soviet Union attests to the fact that doing justice is far more difficult than complaining about injustice.

And then there are women who have suffered domestic and sexual violence. There are children who have been neglected or abused at the hands of their parents. Road accidents, which kill hundreds and maim innumerable others every year, leave the casualties and their families in a post-traumatic state. Not to mention divorce—is that not also a trauma for the couple, and certainly for their children? Even growing up on a kibbutz may be traumatic—at least according to Nahshon Goltz, who sued his kibbutz for mental damages on account of being separated from his parents and forced to sleep in the “children’s house.”¹⁹ Is there anyone left in Israel who has not fallen victim to one trauma or another?

Today, we treat every loss as a trauma. There are certain traumas, however, that may be credited with generating a founding myth. The trauma of terrorist attacks, of losing a child in war, of the Holocaust, and of the new immigrant’s encounter with the Israeli population—these are the painful experiences that actively shape a collective Israeli identity. They generate a narrative that identifies both the individual Israeli and Israeli society as a whole as victims of undeserved tragedy who will suffer profound long-term psychological damage—damage that molds their character, their personality, and their response to the world.

  

The psychological paradigm has profoundly changed our understanding of grief. The experience of loss, we are told, leaves deep psychological wounds, the traces of which cannot be expunged. Thus, the act of mourning is perceived as a continuous post-traumatic condition, even when the affected person displays no specific pathological symptoms. As with any trauma, bereavement has been blamed for a host of abnormal and antisocial responses, including shock, guilt, and depression, along with anger, vindictiveness, and even suicidal tendencies. Moreover, if grief is indeed a pathological psychological condition, can we demand responsible and moral behavior from individuals in a state of mourning? If the post-traumatic condition is permanent, it seems that we cannot. The consequences of perceiving the individual and society through a psychoanalytic lens is the mythologization of trauma, making it a primal emotional state determined by forces greater than man and against which man cannot prevail.

This perception has permeated our collective consciousness and is reflected in our media, our art and literature, and even our educational system. Israeli culture, I believe, has embraced this view of trauma—and thus, of mourning—as a permanent and untreatable state. Journalists, for example, and especially television personalities, exploit the suffering of the bereaved in the service of politics—specifically, to attack the political establishment. They encourage traumatized victims to re-construct their experiences in order to evoke such emotions as anger, protest, and vindictiveness—even when the victims themselves might prefer to hasten the healing process and return to normal life. On the basis of a superficial understanding of the psychoanalytic method, according to which subconscious forces more powerful than the human will and much stronger than reason cause irreversible damage, the Israeli media has entrenched the idea of trauma at the center of the national discourse, with grave consequences.