As we enter Elul and mark the yahrzeit of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, I find myself thinking about resilience.

A recent Jerusalem Post reflection by Jeffrey Kahn on Israeli resilience immediately inspired me. Among the questions he raises, two stayed with me:

Can our enemies make young Jews abroad question their relationship with Israel?

And can they make Israelis believe that international legitimacy is the ultimate measure of whether their country deserves to exist?

Kahn asks these questions within a broader discussion about strategic and national resilience—our ability to preserve social cohesion, institutional confidence and psychological strength even when we cannot control the threats around us. His questions led me somewhere else.

What happens when the pressure is directed not only at Israel’s security or social cohesion, but at the Jewish people’s confidence in its own story?

Since Oct. 7, Israel has demonstrated extraordinary military and social resilience. Soldiers returned to their units, communities mobilized, volunteers filled enormous gaps and families somehow continued despite unimaginable loss. Yet there is another dimension of resilience that is harder to measure.

Military resilience determines whether our enemies can defeat us. Narrative resilience determines whether, in fighting them, we still know who we are.

By narrative resilience, I mean the ability of a people to confront criticism, tragedy and attempts to delegitimize it without losing confidence in the truth of its history and the legitimacy of its national story. It does not mean refusing criticism or pretending our history is perfect. A mature national story must be capable of absorbing uncomfortable facts and competing perspectives. But complexity cannot require self-erasure.

The Second Trauma of Oct. 7

Oct. 7 inflicted a terrible physical trauma. Jews were murdered, raped, kidnapped and burned in their homes in the sovereign Jewish state. After generations of persecution and 75 years of independence, scenes reminiscent of the pogrom returned.

Then came something many Jews were not prepared for: a battle over what Oct. 7 meant.

Within a remarkably short period, Israel shifted in significant parts of global discourse from the victim of a horrific terrorist attack to the alleged embodiment of colonialism, apartheid, genocide and even evil. Hamas’s ideology and responsibility often faded from the conversation, while Zionism itself increasingly became the accused.

This was profoundly disorienting. The first trauma was what happened to us. The second was watching the meaning of what happened being rewritten.

Our story........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)