4 | JANUARY 18 • 2024
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s 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 con-
fessed 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 disproportion-
ate, confusing and sometimes
uncanny. One way to under-
stand this is to see them as
having roots in earlier times.
In this sense, the attacks on
innocent Jews on Oct. 7 rever-
berate with a kind of biological
memory of traumas that we
ourselves may never have expe-
rienced, but whose residues
nevertheless live within us.
Sound like a bubbe mayseh
(grandmother’s tale)? Or a
teaching from an obscure kab-
balistic 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 demon-
strate 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-grand-
parents survived the violence
of the Russian pogroms, or
whose grandparents hid from
the Nazis with little food or
light, or whose parents wit-
nessed the bloody Farhud in
Iraq in 1941, may carry within
them a kind of cellular byprod-
uct of their ancestors’ adverse
life experiences. These molecu-
lar vestiges hold fast to genetic
scaffolding.
Though the DNA itself
remains unchanged, how
those genes express them-
selves 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 fine-
ly tuned machine after the sea-
water 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 congrega-
tion is when the Torah scroll
is taken out of the ark and
lovingly passed down from the
most senior relative to the next

opinion

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

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 7

Rabbi Dr.
Tirzah
Firestone
JTA