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What Jews are feeling now is an inheritance of values — and trauma

This story was originally published on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — As we enter 2024, many of us are feeling a sense of uncertainty, even wariness, in our bones.
The events that exploded onto the world stage during the last months of 2023 — the brutal attacks on Israeli Jews by Hamas on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s incursion into Gaza and the ensuing rise of antisemitic incidents around the world — have set off waves of shock, grief and apprehension for Jewish people everywhere. As a rabbi and psychotherapist, I have received many anxious calls and notes.
“I barely identify as Jewish,” one business executive confessed to me over the phone. “Yet I’m unbelievably triggered. Can you help me understand why?”
“For the first time in my life I feel unsafe,” a Jewish student wrote to me. “I suddenly know what my ancestors felt when they had to hide their true identity.”
“I feel ‘re-traumatized’ by all the violence and the resurgence of antisemitism, even though I’ve never directly experienced either one in my lifetime,” a client reported.
Emotions are, by definition, non-rational. But for many of us, our strong reactions to the recent events in and around Israel have felt disproportionate, confusing and sometimes uncanny. One way to understand this is to see them as having roots in earlier times. In this sense, the attacks on innocent Jews on Oct. 7 reverberate with a kind of biological memory of traumas that we ourselves may never have experienced, but whose residues nevertheless live within us.
Sound like a bubbe mayseh (grandmother’s tale)? Or a teaching from an obscure kabbalistic text? In fact, the notion that trauma residues can be transmitted intergenerationally is based on clinical studies in a relatively new field called behavioral epigenetics. These multi-decade studies demonstrate that younger generations can be deeply imprinted by the extreme life experiences that their ancestors endured, years before they themselves arrived on the scene.
This means, for example, that Jews whose great-grandparents survived the violence of the Russian pogroms, or whose grandparents hid from the Nazis with little food or light, or whose parents witnessed the bloody Farhud in Iraq in 1941, may carry within them a kind of cellular byproduct of their ancestors’ adverse life experiences. These molecular vestiges hold fast to genetic scaffolding. Though the DNA itself remains unchanged, how those genes express themselves can indeed be affected. Such epigenetic changes may make us more vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder, more sensitive to stresses in the environment, and can at times leave us with a predisposition to anxiety or depression.
Because I am more poet than scientist, the following vivid description by journalist Dan Hurley brought epigenetics to life for me. It also struck me as exceedingly Jewish: “Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten.”
For me, the phenomenon of intergenerational trauma is a reflection of the Hebrew phrase “mi dor l’dor,” which describes the Jewish tradition flowing “from generation to generation.” You may have heard these words sung in synagogue, or discussed in the context of Jewish tradition. Perhaps you’ve been to a bar or bat mitzvah at which a young Jewish person is celebrated as they are officially called to the Torah for the first time.
One of the most emotional moments of the way this ritual is observed in my congregation is when the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and lovingly passed down from the most senior relative to the next generation (typically aunts and uncles) to the parents, and perhaps to the older siblings of the bar/bat mitzvah. Finally, the Torah arrives into the arms of the young initiate, the newest link in an ancient chain of heritage. At that moment, the celebrant makes a silent commitment to uphold the ancestral values that have been passed down for thousands of years: uprightness and justice, lifelong learning, loyalty to family, and the fierce determination to protect and repair the world we have been given.
This ritual reenactment of mi dor l’dor is often the moment when tears are shed. One can feel the power of ancient heritage in the room. One can sense those who have passed but are with us still in spirit. And one can recognize that however connected or disconnected we are from the Jewish path, somehow we each play a part in this time-honored tradition that so many of our ancestors wrestled to preserve — and all too often, gave their lives for.
The legacies that come down to us are a rich and complex mixture of noble values and the painful trauma residues of our fraught history. All of these reverberate within our very cells. In our generation, both science and the still-unfathomed events of these past months teach us once again just how deep our connection is to our ancestors, and how their lives continue to echo within us, from generation to generation, mi dor l’dor.
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The post What Jews are feeling now is an inheritance of values — and trauma appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Report: IDF Probes Whether Houthis Used Iranian Cluster Bomb-Bearing Missile

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
i24 News – The Israeli military said Saturday it launched a probe into the failure of its defenses to fully intercept a missile launched by Yemen’s Houthi jihadists, parts of which struck not far from the Ben Gurion airport on Friday night.
According to the Ynet website, one of the hypotheses being examined is that the projectile contained cluster munitions, similar to those used by Iran to fire at Israeli cities during the 12-day war in June. Cluster munitions pose a challenge to interceptors as they disperse smaller explosives over a wide area.
In June, Iran fired several missiles carrying scattered small bombs with the aim of increasing civilian casualties.
The IDF said on Saturday that its initial review suggests the ballistic missile from Yemen likely fragmented in mid-air. Five interceptors from various systems engaged with the missile, including THAAD, Arrow, David Sling & Iron Dome.
Authorities said that shrapnel impacted a house in the central Israeli moshav of Ginaton, yet no one was hurt, with the fragment landing in the house’s backyard.
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Iran Forces Kill Six Militants, IRNA Reports, Israel Link Seen

The Iranian flag is seen flying over a street in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 3, 2023. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian security forces shot dead six militants in a clash in southeastern Iran on Saturday, a day after armed rebels killed five police officers in the restive region, the official news agency IRNA reported.
IRNA said evidence showed the group was linked to Israel and may have been trained by Israel‘s Mossad spy agency. There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the allegation.
Another two members of the militant group were arrested, the report said. All but one of the militants were foreign, it added, without giving their nationality.
Iranian police said this month they had arrested as many as 21,000 suspects during the 12-day war with Israel in June.
Iran’s southeast has been the scene of sporadic clashes between security forces and armed groups, including Sunni militants and separatists who say they are fighting for greater rights and autonomy.
Tehran says some of them have ties to foreign powers and are involved in cross-border smuggling and insurgency.
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Benny Gantz Urges Time-Limited National Unity Government to Further Chances of Hostage Deal

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz attends his party’s meeting at the Knesset, Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, June 27, 2022. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz on Saturday called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition politicians to form a temporary national unity government to further the chances of bringing home the hostages held in Gaza.
Addressing Netanyahu, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Liberman, Gantz said that the proposed government’s two supreme priorities would be the release of Israeli hostages held by the jihadists of Hamas and instituting universal conscription in Israel by ending the exemption from military service enjoyed by the ultra-Orthodox.
Upon attainment of the goals, the government would dissolve and call an election.
“The government’s term will begin with a hostage deal that brings everyone home,” Gantz said in a video address. “Within weeks, we will formulate an enlistment outline that would see our ultra-Orthodox brethren drafted to the military and ease the burden on those already serving. Finally, we will announce an agreed-upon election date in the spring of 2026 and pass a law to dissolve the Knesset [Israeli parliament] accordingly. This is what’s right for Israel.”