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