Frank: The word resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover from difficulties and I believe is a word that defines so many aspects of Jewish history. While the Jewish people have not always recovered quickly, we certainly have proven to the world that we do recover when adversity is placed before us. From the crusades, expulsion from numerous countries, rampant antisemitism throughout the world, pogroms to the Holocaust, we Jews have found the resilience to bounce back, retain our faith, and build a nation. As it is said in our Passover book the Haggadah, “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” Yet we are strong, vibrant, and resilient people and history proves that Jews and Judaism have throughout the ages, met the challenges of bigotry, hate, and evil, and have revealed an incredible level of resiliency.
Mark, where do you place resilience on a scale of human characteristics and how has resilience played a role in the lives of the Jewish people?
Mark: Frank, when I was a young boy, I still remember the riddle my father shared with me: “Why is a Jew like an egg?” he asked.
“Because the longer you cook it, the harder it gets,” “he answered.
Jewish life has required resilience and adaptability to numerous challenges to our survival. Jewish ingenuity has been our response to each single threat to our survival. Over centuries of exodus and exile, persecution and pogrom, segregation, and slaughter, we have endured, adapted, survived, and eventually even thrived. As you might say, it is now part of our spiritual and even biological DNA.
As Mark Twain famously once wrote: “He (the Jew) has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Frank, there is something quite unique about our ability to adapt to new and often hostile and unpredictable situations; to face an uncertain present with an even more uncertain future.
This cultural, philosophical, and intellectual strength of our people’s resistance and resilience; our ability to overcome and outlast all that has challenged us and after all that we have been confronted with; our ability to triumph over our adversity and our adversaries all stems from our people’s cultural DNA of resilience.
What is your response to this phenomenon?
Frank: Mark, your mention of DNA and its link to our people’s resilience is music to my ears as I am a firm believer in the fact that it is our DNA and the process of epigenetic trauma that creates most, if not all, of our survival instincts. Which brings me to a quite interesting concept and comparison. While Jewish survival over the past four thousand years is one of the best examples of the resilience of a religious people, an even more poignant example of resilience is the creation, sustainment, and evolution of human beings. Let me attempt to explain.
A formless, divine energy that is the God I believe in, initiated the Big Bang an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. This was followed by the formation of one of the two trillion galaxies we live in, the Milky Way, which was formed ten billion years ago. The formation of earth then occurred approximately 5.5 billion years later followed by the evolution of the first living species at the bottom of the ocean some 3.8 billion years ago. It then took millions of years before the first multicell organism was formed 615 million years ago. Then 270 million years later the first vertebrate animal with legs rose from the ocean, followed by an enormous and steady evolutional process including the formation of DNA and eventually resulting in the first bipedal ape walking earth’s terrain four million years ago. Collective learning was discovered to have begun 1.5 million years ago followed by the origin of Homo sapiens 315,000 years ago.
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It has been noted that Homo sapiens became the only surviving species of its kind 13,000 year ago which was quickly followed by the agriculture revolution, kingdoms, religions, scientific, and industrial revolutions. That we humans have endured these monumental creations and evolutions over a span of over thirteen billion years has truly been a remarkable story and points to the magnificence of God and the biological strength and power of resilience.
While the Jewish religion has demonstrated a truly remarkable history of survival by its ability to resist and survive in a world trying to destroy it, it can also be said that the ultimate story of resilience is best exemplified by the evolution of mankind through the works of an almighty God who created our world and guided it to a place we now call home. How much more can we say about this process of resilience?
Mark: Frank, you make an excellent argument about the biological and neurological evolution of our DNA as a survival tool and the root source of our resilience as a human species. I totally agree with the humbling majesty of creation in general, its scale, complexity, and grandeur, and even more specifically, the creation of humankind as the crowning glory of that creation.
All of this is not the result of a series of random occurrences. Rather, they all point to a force, a Creator of the Universe, who clearly continues to evolve that creation in ways that have allowed the human species to survive and to thrive.
While that is true on a grand scale over millennia, I remain focused as a rabbi on the very specific ways in which one people — the Jewish people— have survived, not in response to threats from the natural world or to external forces of the universe; rather, my focus is on this extraordinary community of faith that has endured expulsion and exclusion and exile. That resilience comes from within that community, its values and beliefs, and its cultural DNA which triumphs every challenge and crisis.
As a rabbi, knowing what our people have had to endure through the centuries, gave me that strength of resilience to face the recent challenges of COVID, the trauma and tragedy of the events overseas of October 7th, and the recent and rampant surge of antisemitism right here at home in America. I knew that we would survive and thrive, because of that knowledge that we have been there many times before, and met those moments with strength, with pride and, ultimately, with hope.
In conclusion, while many others would have written us off centuries ago, we are still here. Our people’s story is not yet complete: we are still writing it.
Rabbi Mark Schiftan can be reached at mschiftan@aol.com Dr. Frank Boehm can be reached at frank.boehm@vumc.org
