The Fall of Jerusalem: Cultural Trauma as a Process

The Song of Moses blames Israel for the idolatry that caused divine wrath and led to the people's near annihilation by their enemies. This article analyses the Song's structure and dynamics, its rhetoric of blaming and shaming, and its literary context within the book of Deuteronomy before re-evaluating the Song's message through the lens of psychological and sociological trauma theory. Psychological research on the relation between trauma and feelings of guilt and shame helps us to understand the divine message of blaming and shaming as an externalised transformation of self-blame. Through the lens of the sociological concept of cultural trauma, the Song can be seen as an intellectual 'working through' of past collective suffering that marks the community's identity for the future. A HISTORY OF RESEARCH AND TRAUMA THEORY The Song of Moses in Deut 32:1-43 is the most extensive poem in the Pentateuch, and its position towards the end lends it structural weight. The Song's exceptional form and language have attracted intense exegetical interest. The notorious complexity of the Song's textual transmission 1 involves significant variants, especially in vv. 8 and 43, with implications for Israel's history of religion. 2 The sheer diversity of proposals for the Song's

Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2021

This study analyzes the final form of Ezra-Nehemiah through the lens of historical trauma. Previous studies examine symptoms of trauma in literary characters and fragmented memories in the literature of the Bible. Historical trauma, however, focuses upon the cross-generational genetic, epigenetic, and social effects of trauma. Sociologists suggest that narrative construction is essential for multigenerational resilience. Based on parallels of forced migration and colonized repatriation, this study utilizes findings regarding historical trauma in indigenous American communities to illuminate the experiences constructed in the Masoretic form of Ezra-Nehemiah. From a colonized perspective, Ezra-Nehemiah imagines a response of resilience to the exile and long-term colonization of repatriated Judeans. Historical trauma theory would frame the reestablishment of the temple, the city walls, and the law as a narrative source of agency, resilience, and cultural clarity. Ezra-Nehemiah communicates to future generations that even though the trauma of exile has not finished, the ability to reassert agency and an adaptable differentiated identity is continual, pressing, and restorative.

Transcultural Psychiatry, 2019

The concept of cultural trauma serves as a useful analytical framework for analyzing social processes of the creation of trauma narratives. Following the conceptualization of “cultural trauma” by Jeffrey Alexander, this article focuses on representations of the “nature of pain” produced by mental health professionals who identified with Religious Zionism working Jewish settlers involved in the 2005 evacuation of from Gaza and the West Bank. Based on ethnographic and written materials collected during fieldwork at a mental health center that offered professional interventions to settlers, I argue that the “nature of pain” associated with the evacuation was represented by religious practitioners through reference to otherwise distinct contemporary and biblical events and characters. This specific narrative organization exposes the normalizing function of time in narrating trauma. The article demonstrates how, by framing the evacuation story within a religious timeline, the settlement ...

AJS Review, 2019

The following group of essays emerged out of a seminar held at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015. As section heads of Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity and Rabbinic Literature and Culture, tasked to think about how to address gaps in our fields, we recognized that despite a large amount of scholarship available on the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood, there was a dearth of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange, especially between ancient Jewish historians and those of us who engage in literary analysis of rabbinic sources. As a result, our divisions joined together to create “The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual,” taking advantage of the “seminar” format at the conference. Twelve scholars, each working with different source material and employing different methodological approaches, participated.

Biblical trauma studies strongly emphasize that texts and traditions that eventually formed the Hebrew Bible helped both the authors and the (former) 'readers' to cope with catastrophic events. This approach, however, leads to side-lining other functions of biblical texts, for instance the extent to which biblical texts were used and transmitted not only to 'heal' but also to 'wound' the collectivity, namely to shape the collective identity of ancient Israel and early Judaism as profoundly damaged. The perspective of cultural trauma studies may help us to go beyond the 'healing hermeneutics.' The present paper aims to understand how the psalms of communal lament in Books II and III of the Psalter contributed to make the collective trauma of the Babylonian attack become Yehud's cultural trauma during the Persian period. It suggests that by building and transmitting a coherent metanarrative of the catastrophe and through the communal laments' dramatic images and metaphors, the redactors of these portions of the Psalter made sure that during the Persian period the people of Israel in the province of Yehud would be wounded by their ancestors' pain.

Biblical Interpretation, 2019

The understanding of trauma in sociology as the group’s creation of meaning for horrific events has been highly influential in the study of the Hebrew Bible. This sociological approach is very different than that of literary criticism, where trauma is understood through the lens of psychoanalytical analysis as that which has not been fully experienced by victims and is not truly known by them, as “unclaimed experience,” in other words. The sociological understanding of trauma has helped scholars understand potential social benefits of biblical texts, but scholarship often fails to clearly distinguish this approach from that of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, and this has led to problematic claims that texts which create meaning for traumatic events will prove to be therapeutic for individual trauma sufferers. The use of texts to create meaning and explanation actually forces trauma victims to repress the speech about their trauma that they need to engage in therapy.

Pharos Journal of Theology, 2004

The book of Isaiah is one of the world's oldest surviving resistance literature. Isaiah 13 describes God who collects an army for the battle against Babylon which will lead to Babylon's utter desolation and destruction. Isaiah 13:16 deeply shocks the reader when it states that the wives of the Babylonians shall be raped and ravished by the men of this marching army. A literary, contextual, and historical methodology will be applied. Integrated insights from trauma studies will be used as a multidisciplinary approach to engage with these texts. A trauma perspective helps the reader to look squarely at the violence that the Bible often advocates and it can only become comprehensible if understood as the reaction of a dominated people to their domination. The oracles against the nations express the hope of freedom and return to their land, but also the hope of a triumphant reversal of the role of oppressors and oppressed. Insights from trauma studies suggest that these features transform this oracle into a work of resistance, recovery and resilience.

Medium Aevum, 2011

In the very early fifteenth century, an English preacher, frightened by the desolations of the Hundred Years War, advised his congregation to take stock of the apocalyptic signs around them, and to view themselves in the likeness of the Jewish community under attack by Titus and Vespasian during the first-century Roman siege of Jerusalem. Aligning a late medieval Christian parish with an embattled Jewish community would prove to be an effective rhetorical device that dared its audiences to imagine not only a shared ruin, but also a shared humanity. A few years earlier, the romance entitled "The Siege of Jerusalem" began to circulate in England, dramatizing the events of the first-century siege, and embellishing these happenings with chivalric trappings. By that time, England had already experienced invasions on its shores and limitations on its sea powers imposed by Castilian-French forces, as well as repeated incursions from the north, as Scottish and English troops harassed one another’s borders. In North Yorkshire, where the romance originated, many locals made their living by fighting with Scottish neighbours, and had themselves participated in sieges directly across the English Channel. In exploring the "Siege" poem as an apocalyptic text, I draw attention to an often-overlooked moment nevertheless vital to medieval Christian religious narrative: the interval between the Passion of Christ and the later destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. This forty-year span was interpreted by Christian exegetes as the historical moment when the Jewish people awaited divine vengeance for their role in the Crucifixion. Significantly, this moment would also become an appropriate analogue to the apocalypse. The poet depicts these four decades as heavily freighted with expectation and the trappings of suspense, coming to a crisis point in the siege.The complex presentation of the Jews suggests that the poet and his source saw value in making Jewish figures relatable, thereby inviting the audiences to entertain the possibility of a better fate for the holy city’s citizens. In doing so, the narrative emphasizes this weighty moment between Passion and Vengeance and thereby offers a more nuanced reading of the "Siege" as an apocalyptic text. Certainly the ugly narrative of violence and retribution is present, but the faculty of agency receives special attention in the poem. This article continues my work on Jerusalem and Jewish identities as spaces of premodern Christian affective piety. This piece draws from Christian homiletic and apocalyptic texts which remember the first-century siege alongside Jewish ritual remembrances on the 9th of Av (Tisha b'Av).

This article seeks to investigate the rhetorical function of Jeremiah's Temple, Covenant and Sabbath Sermons against the backdrop of cultural trauma. I propose that the three sermons found in Jeremiah 7, 11:1-14 and 17:19-27 provide a good illustration of what is understood under the notion of cultural trauma according to which one or more of the public intellectuals of the time seeks to offer an interpretative framework that is focused on making sense of the calamity that threatened to destroy not only the community itself, but also everything they regarded to be sacred and true. By means of these three sermons, Jeremiah is reminding the people of Judah once again of the important tenets of their faith such as the Temple, the Covenant and the Sabbath as found predominantly in the Pentateuch. By 'preaching' on Judah's earlier traditions, the prophet reconstitutes these ancient customs in a new way in an attempt to rebuild the fractured community.

Recent psychological research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has demonstrated that one of the most common symptoms of the disorder is heightened or even uncontrollable anger. In the past decade, various works in biblical studies have assessed the effects of trauma on the ancient Israelites and on the texts of the Hebrew Bible, but these have not fully explored either the connection between anger and PTSD or that between anger in the Hebrew Bible and Israelite trauma. This article seeks to demonstrate the close relationship between trauma and rage and argues that biblical authors often locate their own traumatized rage in the figure of Yahweh. The emotional response of Yahweh toward the Israelites is frequently presented as one of rage, blame, and contempt—a trio of socially distancing emotions. This depiction of Yahweh results in a “theology of distance” wherein Yahweh’s furious emotionality negates the sympathy of audiences toward the traumatized Israelites.

Lumen et Vita, 2012

Interfacing the work of Paul Ricoeur on time, narrative, and identity with that of Judith Herman on trauma, this paper explores the ways in which the prophetic book of Ezekiel and the pseudepigraphal book 4 Ezra spoke to the needs of ancient Jews in times of crisis by offering a realm in which readers could symbolically play out their trauma, experience catharsis, and reconfigure the greatest hopes of Israel.

In this collection scholars of biblical texts and rabbinics engage the work of Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Schwartz provides an introductory essay on the study of collective memory. Articles that follow integrate his work into the study of early Jewish and Christian texts. The volume concludes with a response from Schwartz that continues this warm and fruitful dialogue between fields.

European Judaism, 2013

Almost 2,000 years after its destruction, the Jerusalem Temple remains present in the Jews’ imagination and imagery. The Temple is remembered in Jewish tradition as a place of unity, utmost purity and holiness, an intersection between the divine and the human, between Jew and Jew, between the vertical and the horizontal. Generations of Jews have prayed to be able to behold the restoration of the Temple but have not been privileged to witness it. Nevertheless, it shaped their language and encapsulated their hopes for redemption. The Temple was the essence to which all other practices were compared; after its destruction, the Temple itself became the measure of many contemporary rabbinic practices. This article surveys the different ways the Jews kept the symbolism of the Temple and embedded it in their lives. It also examines the contemporary state of affairs – what was viewed in the past as an almost imaginary messianic hope, is now on the agenda of some right-wing groups who wish to hasten rebuilding of a Temple on the Temple Mount.