Recovering from The Trauma of Mangled Meaning
Rabbi Mordecai Finley / 28 Feb 2025
One way that I have defined trauma is the “loss of soul.” By soul, I do not intend a religious sense, for example, “the eternal soul.” I do mean a pure soul, a crystalline essential sense of self. Imagine that this crystalline essence is surrounded by a penumbra that affords the soul the function of “the meaning maker.” The soul, in its penumbra, takes in the events of life and tries to construct a coherent sense of self and the world, a sense of past, present, and future.
At some level, the penumbra of the soul is wise. When we struggle in life, in our conscious mind we do as much reflecting as we can dealing with the external world, and then deliver our work down to the mute and mysterious region of the essential soul. The soul then works to find a way forward, to forge a path where an ideal version of the self can emerge. In doing so, the soul can help birth a self-as-yet-unknown, as the pain of life’s struggles is processed to create a new, healed, and annealed self, just as heated metal is cooled to form a stronger, more resilient form.
But at some other level, the penumbra of the soul is naïve. Unless trained carefully, assiduously, and even ruthlessly, the penumbra of the soul believes in a myth of stability and justice. Life is fair. People mean what they say. Those whom I love will remain. The world will remain stable. If I am good, no harm will come to me.
There is a threshold, however, when the events of life are so outrageous that they strip us of what we had deemed possible. The penumbra of the soul is, generally speaking, not prepared for vicious depredations and injurious randomness. The penumbra of the soul becomes paralyzed. The penumbra of the soul is damaged and must be healed. We can experience ourselves as hanging in space without the foundation of a coherent world, without handles of meaning to hold on to.
The healing of the penumbra comes from the essential soul, a force within that lies dormant until awakened to work with the impossible but real, the unreal made manifest.
For example, I think of an abused child of an addict, a child who has an innate sense of their own loveable goodness and an instinct that life is orderly and fair. Their lived life violates their soul’s knowledge that they are worthy of love and that life is good, fair, just, and orderly. The addict’s child works frantically and, eventually, neurotically to be worthy of love and to create an orderly world. The child’s soul cannot make sense of life with an addicted parent. Trauma sets it. To heal, the adult’s essential soul must be activated. The traumatized adult needs to know that, at times, the parents were evil. While the act is not justified, the hidden urge to kill the “evil parent” was.
Normally, the urge to kill is evil until we are confronted with evil. The laws and rules of the normal world no longer apply. When confronted with evil, the urge to kill evil can be the only thing that saves us. We don’t need to act on the urge, nor do we discount it. By admitting to the evil and repressed will to destroy the evil, the trauma can be worked through.
We are all children of such a time, especially here in Israel.
Israelis were brutalized and traumatized by the events of October 7th and the aftermath. Complete families were annihilated. Children were butchered in front of their parents. Hostages were taken. Fine soldiers have died in an unprovoked fight against evil. How is this trauma worked through?
We in the United States and elsewhere were not physically massacred but were nevertheless astonished at the demonization of Israel after 7 Oct 23. The spearhead of that demonization was aimed at college campuses, led by intellectual elites whose own souls had been possessed by an evil farrago of neo-Marxism and post-modernism, Critical Theory-gone-psychotic, led by so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion cells, mislabeled in Orwellian terms. DUI would be a better acronym – trying to Drive society to self-annihilation Under the Influence of destructive ideologies.
Societies such as ours, rooted in ideas such as reason, morality, law and justice, are ill-prepared for social psychosis. We believed that the path through disagreement is reasoned argumentation. We try to reason, but then are solemnly informed that reasoned argumentation is just another tool of domination.
The right to protest was deformed into the power to defame, silence, exclude and attack, all in order to set morality on its head. Rape, murder, and butchery became means of liberation and achieving justice. War against evil became evil in itself. Some satanic algorithm of splitting the moral difference (“both sides are bad”) became a means to shut down moral reasoning and excuse depravity.
Two and half years later, we see that some sanity is finally reasserting over the debris of mangled meaning. The work is unfinished.
Here in Israel, we suffer from that mangling of meaning continuously. We read in the world press how maniacal butchers are valorized. Excusing depravity is an exercise in Diversity. The aim of destroying Israel and murdering its citizens is an exercise in Equity. The strangling of innocent children with the murder of other hostages is now Included in the lexicon of just war theory.
We in Israel are suffering three traumas: the trauma of the actual butchery and torture of our citizens, the trauma of losing a world where a future of coexistence with our neighbors was possible, and perhaps most deeply, the trauma of losing trust in a part our world that has gone evil, led by so-called intellectual and moral elites.
To recover from this threefold trauma, we must find our way to the core, crystalline essence of our souls, and find meaning in a world that has become devoid of meaning.
In a strong sense, we must all channel Victor Frankl’s ideas on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great evil. This Shabbat, I will begin a course of talks on the works of Victor Frankl – finding meaning in a mangled world.
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