Empowerment, Gratitude and Resilience

And Their Evil Cousins: Guilt, Narcissism & Victimhood

Our experiences are not self-explanatory.

The way that we interpret and package our raw experiences into the words we carry with us, makes a huge difference to our futures.

Our lives are shaped not by experiences per se, but by the stories we choose to tell about our experiences.

You can observe this phenomenon even in toddlers. Watch a child when she takes a moderately bad fall, and notice that even before she cries, she looks to her mother or father for clarity as to how she should react. Do her parents consider this a “bad fall?” Should she be freaking out? Or is she OK to move on with her life? All she knows is that she fell. She still doesn’t know what it means. As soon as she sees that her mom is calm and smiling, and tells her, “You’re OK honey,” she understands that she is indeed OK — it’s just temporary pain that has already nearly faded away. And so she moves on with life without baggage or trauma.

As we get older, the words we use when speaking to ourselves don’t matter any less than when we were kids.

This is what the holiday of Pesach is about: retelling our story so that it doesn’t degrade into something other than what it was meant to be.

I think you will find the ideas here to be extremely relevant to the scourge of guilt and self-hatred that particularly plagues young people in America today, and I believe that 3,300+ years ago the Torah provided a prophylactic remedy to protect us from it.

During the tumultuous times leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, Rabbi Gamliel the rabbinic leader of the Jews of Judaea, was concerned that people were coming away from their Passover Seders without much more than full bellies.

The Seder was intended to be precisely that crucible that forged Jewish identity and clarified the Jewish narrative from one generation to the next, but his sense was that the average Jew was simply eating the required foods — lamb, matzah and a bitter, leafy vegetable — without properly digesting their significance. Rabbi Gamliel was of the opinion that failing to adequately internalize their intended meaning would have severe consequences. Jewish identity would mutate over time, producing a people that would be unrecognizable from who they were meant to be. They would end up feeling guilty about their privilege yet paradoxically arrogant about their success, and simultaneously scarred by their victimization.

Sound familiar?

Passover “Seder” at a Pro-Hamas Encampment

Rabbi Gamliel demonstrated that this was not his own “New Age” meaning-making, but rather part of the original formulation of the central mitzvot of the Seder since they were first commanded in Egypt the night before the Israelites left their homes in pursuit of freedom and a life worth living. The concerns about these sacred experiences becoming distorted was already being addressed then.

Co-created by me with Meta and Canva AI tools.

You see, the newborn nation of Israel was vulnerable to a few socio-psychological diseases due to what it had gone through:

• GUILT - Having been spared from the plagues that rocked the foundations of Egyptian society — especially the final plague, the death of the firstborn — they should have developed a sense of survivor’s guilt — the sort of heavy feelings that are the hallmark of “white-” and “Jewish-privilege” — feeling bad for being blessed.

• NARCISSISM - Having made the bold choice to leave Egypt, unlike the estimated 80% of Israelites who could not bring themselves to do so, they naturally should have developed arrogance and hubris.

• VICTIMHOOD - Having suffered under the brutal oppression of Egypt for nearly a century — slavery, torture, and the murder of their children before their eyes — they should have developed a sense of victimhood that would have left them mentally captive long after they had gone free.

This would have been quite a toxic cocktail for Jews to imbibe. The mindsets of guilt, narcissism and victimhood are potentially deadly when taken independently — there would be no hope for them (or us) had they coincided.

Rabbi Gamliel pointed people to the way the Torah itself instructed Jews to speak about the meaning of these experiences through these three foods. Their meanings had to be chewed on, savored and digested by our minds while we chewed on, savored and digested their corresponding foods with our mouths and stomachs.

• THE “PASSOVER” OFFERING was meant to make us feel loved and consciously chosen by God Who purposefully “passed over” the homes of our ancestors and spared them from the 10th plague. The reason survivors might feel guilty for having survived is because they see their survival as a random occurrence, and therefore naturally ask themselves, “why me?” But if they were to see it as God’s deliberate choice that they live, they would feel empowered — not guilty. We should all feel loved and empowered by our good fortune, and use these blessings to do good.

• THE MATZAH, which is essentially bread not given time to rise, was meant to humble us by reminding us of the speed with which we were whisked of a terrible situation that we could not have gotten ourselves out of alone. The fact that we took the opportunity that was presented us shouldn’t make us arrogant — to the contrary — it should make us grateful and humbled that the opportunity was presented to us. We should all feel grateful and humbled by all of the great opportunities we’ve been fortunate enough to have in our lives.

• THE “MARROR” (the Bitter, Leafy Vegetable) was intended to help us confront the pain that was inflicted on us, but it had to be first slightly sweetened with a dip in the Charoset (a sweet apple, date and nut spread). Pain is obviously uncomfortable, but overcoming pain is what builds our resilience and fortitude. We should all be able to look at the pain we’ve endured and sweeten it with the perspective that the pain was vital for our growth and strength.

The meanings of our experiences need to be conscientiously articulated because our stories create our identities. Jews have only made it through three and a half millennia of pogroms and persecutions because we interpret our experiences the way we do.

If we don’t tell our story the way its been told for thousands of years, others will tell it for us, and like all stories about people’s identities, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The choice is ours.