“As A Sign from God, Just stop the Bloodshed”: Transcending Our Cultural Complex
A few weeks ago, as reported in the October 15 issue of the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz,” Avichai Brodetz of Kfar Azza went to stand outside military headquarters alone before being joined by hundreds condemning the government. This what he said:
"My kids are over there along with my wife [taken as hostages to Gaza]. And I want them to come back in good health. I came here where decisions are being made in Israel. If I could go to Gaza, I would do the same thing. I hope to go there someday. We have to stop; we got this right now as a sign from God to stop the bloodshed. And I ask Hamas, which is holding my family in good health, to please stop. And I ask the Israeli government to please stop.”
Doug’s Therapeutic Trigger Warning: I am aware that the language to talk about this terrifying situation unfolding in Israel following the nightmare of October 7 and the impeding ground war in the Gaza Strip can be inflammatory. How do we even speak about the overlapping humanitarian crises we face without betraying unconscious biases or tendencies to favor some human suffering over others? If we don’t talk, at least to ourselves, about what we are trying to learn and struggling to feel, we betray the peoples we care about. But if we do engage, we are already in the historical soup and may tend to add to misunderstanding, hurt, and pain. There are ways to metabolize trans-generational trauma, but not when you are running for your life.
Silence equals death. But perhaps not always does Action equal life.
For anxious friends who have written to me, aware I was in Israel doing some work during civil strife, I wanted to note that I am home and safe. I cannot say the same for the people I have come to love and admire—terrified, hurt, fragmented, and beside themselves.
I want to warn you about the article below. I have tried to write it from the point of view of a “human.” However, my identity as a Jewish person with my tribal loyalties and biases can not be so easily surmounted, what I call in the article the “cultural complex.” I am aware that cases of anti-semitism are rising around the world. Hundreds of people stormed into the main airport in Russia's Dagestan region and onto the landing field Sunday, chanting antisemitic slogans and seeking passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv, Israel, Russian news agencies and social media reported.
I also believe in my Jewish soul that wishes to adhere to our 1,000-year-old Talmudic philosophy of “Tikkun Olam” to repair the broken vessels of the world. For me, and many others, “Never again” means “Never again for all.” During my sojourn in Israel just a month ago, I participated in the joyously raucous weekly demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of diverse Israelis and Palestinians walking arm-in-arm, calling for an end to the corrupt, racist, and antidemocratic policies of the nation’s most rightwing government coalition. I share my history, my thoughts, and my desire, like so many Jews on the Left today, to have empathy for both the Israelis who suffered a 9/11-like blow to their country on October 7 and the innocent Gazans. Please feel free to engage with me, and I hope our conversation can transcend the reactivity accompanying the conflagration of multi-generational traumas.
“Many Jews Oppose this War,” Sarah Schulman on MSNBC, October 29, 2023
I'm still coming to terms with how uncanny it was that my intuition told me to go to Israel three weeks ago and to return just a week before the atrocious October 7 attack and massacre that killed 1,400 Israelis and took 200 Israelis hostage and resulted in the brutal War on Gaza killing thousands of Palestinians. And troubling. And confusing. And painful.
“An assault historically reminiscent of many assaults Jews have experienced throughout history,’ says Dr. Gabor Mate, a leader in the world of addiction and trauma, whose grandparents were killed by the Nazis, in a YouTube interview.
In response, the Israeli military is expanding its war against Hamas, announcing a ground invasion into the battered Palestinian enclave. It has been reported that 8,000 people have been killed, included 3,342 children. The U.N. says that it is sheltering more than 600,000 forced from their homes.
It had been almost 50 years since I had been to Israel as a 17-year-old member of a 6-week New York City multi-ethnic exchange program where we got to live with an Israeli family, work our asses off picking oranges at a Kibbutz, culminating with a sit-down with the former Prime Minister, Golda Meir. I will never forget our tour guide pointing to the area of the West Bank, the handsome soldier, saying, "This land is not ours," and adding, "We have to give it back."
The reasons for my not returning are complex. However, I believe they are unconsciously related to a subtle unconscious affiliation with that man's conflict, which has stayed with me for 50 years. I am still investigating my feelings of caring for Israel and the grievous disillusionment shared by many Jews about the current Israeli government’s destructive policies, putting the matter lightly.
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On October 27, Jewish protestors chanted "Never Again for Anyone," gathered in Grand Central Station to demand a Gaza Cease Fire.
"While Shabbat is typically a day of rest, we cannot afford to rest while genocide is unfolding in our names," said one rabbi.
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About a month ago, now as a person in my early 60s, a community psychologist, a parent, a writer, a full-time psychotherapist, a person shaped by creating the country's first LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology, something in me said, "go and see what is happening for yourself because, as an American Jew with a Jewish psyche, your perspective matters. And you can't say shit if you haven't seen for yo self." Lech Lecha.
I got to see, in about ten days, returning not that long ago, what makes Israel seem like a land "flowing with milk and honey," but also multiple conflicting histories and oppressions that touched me and made me feel feelings I had never felt before. Pride and Sadness. And Shame.
I knew a little. But it's been painful to face. It remains painful.
As a psychoanalytically trained clinician, I was aware that much of what makes some humans develop painfully negative stories of other humans can be understood as the manifestation of autonomous processes in the collective and individual psyche that organize themselves in rigid structures that are hard to surmount, but that explode in irrational group psychoses that are motivated by what seems like logical processes but are not. This ethnic, ideological frame of reference has been called "the cultural complex” by post-Jungians who have adopted Jung’s notion of the “complex.”
Jung’s idea of the complex, in my opinion, is one of the greatest discoveries made to humankind, on the scale and scope of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and Melanie Klein’s concept of infantile envy and rage as expressed by the “paranoid/schizoid” position gripping most humans.
The “complex” is a part of the psyche that is so super-charged with nuclear emotion that it erupts as a separate personality. For my clients, this can take the form of the “injured child” and the cruel and vicious “inner attacker.” It is the subpersonality fueling addiction and erotic love. It is a bitter pill for most of us to swallow that we are not a unified personality but made up of parts, many of which remain unconscious but get projected onto others.
Post-Jungians have taken that concept of the COMPLEX as SUBPERSONALITY to the collective realm.
A cultural complex is like a CULT PERSON who lives in a group that is filled with so much rage and hurt that it can’t see another community’s pain and hurt.
Many people would like a break from their cultural complexes. But this is hard to do without a lot of personal inner work because it is often the case that leaving home, even if it is a terrible home, hurts, especially if one feels homeless.
But yet again, it can be so healing to be reminded that we are more than our trauma stories that feel like home, but remain a prison—or a cult. I like being gay, Jewish, and a parent. But I'd prefer to be a human with you. I can cry for my friends in Israel, shaken by the events of October 7. And I can also cry for the innocent people who are dying in Gaza, the children who will never have a future, a generation that has no choices.
Never again must be for all people.
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“It’s almost impossible to speak about this without emotion, whatever side you are on. It brings up so much trauma that it is difficult for us to engage the rational parts of our minds. A very difficult conversation, but one we must have.” Dr. Gabor Mate on Israel/Palestine, YouTube, October 28, 2023
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I remember my petite chic, dark-eyed, and dark-haired but tremendously powerful mother, Penny, marching into the Adath Israel Hebrew School on the Grand Concourse circa 1970 to reprimand Mr. Goodman. She did not appreciate our Hebrew School teaching us kids about the values of "Zionism" with the hopes that we would make “Aliyah” (move to Israel and become citizens as all Jews can do). "Your job," she informed the Methuselah, "is not to incite my children to go to Israel,” where there was war, “but to teach them the Aleph Beth," by which she meant the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
“Why are you teaching an eleven-year-old," she asked, "about the Balfour Declaration?" (The public statement issued by the British government in 1917 announcing support for a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population).
A few weeks later, he was replaced by a younger woman who replaced the map of Israel with a poster about the Hebrew alphabet.
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Despite the model of Penny’s independence of thought for a Jewish lady raised in the Great Depression, I had somehow developed an unseemly cultural complex by the time I reached college.
This amounted to a bellicose narrative related to Israel and its enemy neighbors that was tinged with moral insensitivity to the plight of other humans because "the world is against the Jews." This is not an entirely incorrect statement. But it's good to remember that the world is against many people. Being an unworldly sophomore at Columbia College, having secured a dorm despite Penny's stated desire that her eldest live at home, and also beginning to lose weight and "come out," I exposed my cultural complex with a degree of entitlement. As the College was teaching us, I spoke my mind, but to my eventual embarrassment.
This was in the sacred lecture hall of Professor Edward Said (1935-2003), the great Palestinian professor of literature at Columbia College. The author of "Orientalism” in 1978 would make Said a cultural critic, but he was already considered one of the greatest intellectuals of our age. He somehow connected a reading Willian Butler Yeat’s “The Second Coming” to the problem of colonialism.
Despite how trenchant he could be in class, Professor Said was a nice man with an ethical duty to all his students to help them grow and evolve.
He took me gently aside in several one-on-one kickbacks in his office to allow me to discover a more complex history for myself. He served me tea. He helped me crack, just a bit, a story that contained as much of my unresolved hurt from my childhood trauma as it did my comprehension of geopolitical sociology.
“We create stories to preserve the self," he told me, but also to stop from growing."The Jewish people have one reading of 1948," he said, referring to the historic moment when David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.
"The Palestinian people have another reading. They call it the "Nakba," the Palestinian Catastrophe, the displacement of a majority of Palestinian Arabs.
"The Jewish people have created a nation of refugees," he told me. "I know this will be difficult for you to understand."
It was.
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While in Israel just a month ago, I thought of Professor Said and felt sad that I did not take him up on his offer to stay in touch. I wish I had told him that I went into psychotherapy to help people address and resolve the undiscovered dark feelings of abuse in their psyche and to struggle with their own repressive compulsions of which they preferred to remain unaware. He would have been pleased, being a learned man who knew his Freud inside and out. I think he would have been intrigued to see how I am struggling with my own repressive compulsions.
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It has been reported that the country was taken by surprise by the Hamas attacks, the shock of the massacres, the taking of hostages, and the brutal acts of sociopathic violence. The dismantling of the Israeli semblance of security from which I benefited during my short sojourn has been a gut punch to the people I have come to love who live there. I was very upset by this. I was also upset by the kneejerk reactions on the left by people who lacked empathy to say that the Jews had this coming to them.
But no one in Israel would have been surprised that the status quo with the current government policies had led to a massive dissociation and distraction that is now being reported in the news. The headline on today’s New York Times reads, “How Years of Israeli Failures on Hamas Led to a Devastating Attack.” One of those failures is that Netanyahu continued to push his policies despite countless warnings from senior generals that the political turmoil caused by domestic politics had to be addressed.
You could hear the noise on the streets!
Since January, hundreds of thousands of people had been demonstrating each week, as soon as Shabbat was over. Can you imagine going to a demonstration every week for nine months? That's some dedication. People were very, very alarmed!
That's why I mostly went. To participate in these demonstrations, marching with Jews of Western, Eastern, and Arab descent, Arab Israelis, Palestinians, mothers, grandmothers, soldiers, activists, and artists—singing, dancing, and percussion. People were calling for an end of policies that rendered the Israeli leaders not as participants in the much-touted philosophy of “Tikkun Olam,” which means to repair the broken vessels of humanity, but as agents of bigotry, fascism, and expulsion.
You may have been reading a lot about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This power-hungry man had been in power for 16 years and had become virulently divisive. To hold onto state control so as not to face corruption charges, sound familiar? He had made an improper bed with ultra-religious and anti-Arab legislators. They aimed to move the country from a democracy into a religious theocracy. The country had been founded by non-religious socialists from Eastern Europe (called Ashkenazim). One example of such a person was Yitzchak Rabin, who had won the Novel Peace Prize with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994 for making headway in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was destroyed when a religious right-wing zealot assassinated Rabin.
A new psychology would be formed by a more right-wing coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu would exploit the needs of the Jews from Arab countries (Mitzrayim) and who had experienced racism from the more Western-looking Jews (Askenazim) to form a series of governments that would also include the religious right. They created a cultural complex of might-makes-right that would sideline the Palestinians in service to alliances with neighboring Arab countries. Over the last 16 years, Netanyahu was successful in tearing Israeli society apart by fueling the cultural complex of the victim/victor, the cultural complex that Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives. In a recent podcast, this is not a Jewish value, says Ezra Klein.
The straw that broke the camel’s back the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed the first part in a planned overhaul of the country’s judiciary system. The measure would strip Israel's Supreme Court of the power to overturn government actions it deems "unreasonable."
The first protest was organized by a socialist Arab-Jewish organization. The LGBTQIA+ communities joined the protest, feminist groups fearing a Handmaiden’s Tale, and eventually, 300 Israel Defense Reservists organized by the Brothers in Arms movement. On 9 August 2023, hundreds of Israeli and American academics published a statement claiming that the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul was to "annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” On 3 September 2023, the Youth Against Dictatorship group released an open letter signed by 230 Israeli high schoolers in Tel Aviv, who collectively refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Force, citing their opposition to the judicial reforms and a refusal to serve Israeli settlements. On 9 September 2023, a statement signed by over 3,500 Israeli academics, artists, writers and former officials called on U.S. President Joe Biden and United Nations Secretary- to avoid meeting with Netanyahu, claiming that the ruling government undermined Israeli democracy and was "ignoring the historical conflict that is tearing Israel apart – the forceful domination of the Palestinian people.
So there were signs that a major protest against the situation was afoot. The cultural complex of “victim/victor” was breaking?
And then October 7. And now the destruction of Gaza. And this is only the beginning of what could trigger a regional war.
This is horrific. The only hope is that the cultural complex represented by Netanyahu—and his Hamas counterparts behind the October 7 massacre—will crack, not in the literal man himself, that is a Shakespearean tragedy, but rather in all of us.
We now know that Netanyahu's aim to bolster Hamas to weaken the rival Palestinian authority and undermine any possibility of a two-state solution has failed.
We now know that the siege on Gaza taking place is shifting empathy for Israelis to empathy for Palestinians.
But we can have empathy for all; we must have empathy for all.
Writes Nicholas Kristof in an editorial in today’s New York Times: “Decades from now, when we look back at this moment, I suspect it's the moral failures that we may most regret—the inability of some on the left (and many in the Arab world) to condemn the barbaric October 7 attacks on Israelis, and the acceptance by so many Americans and Israelis that countless children and civilians must pay with their lives in what Netanyahu described as "Israel's `mighty vengeance.'"
Along these lines, I would like to refer you to the compelling work of Jewish lesbian queer author, playwright, and social critic, Sarah Schulman. I will post her October 16 article in New York magazine, "Explanations Are Not Excuses," for people like me who are struggling, who feel a tie to Israel but also would like to remain congruent with the Jewish mission of Tikkun Olam:
Speaking of people like her parents, Jewish people whose parents had been "helpless peasants living under pogroms and without rights in the Russian Pale of Settlement," Sarah quotes from the typical way in which many of us were raised: "My parents raised me with the idea that Jews were people who sided with the oppressed and worked their way into helping professions."
She then addressed that "cultural complex" this way:
"They could not adjust the worldview born of this experience to a new reality: that in Israel, we Jews had acquired state power and built a highly funded militarized society and were now subordinating others. No one wants to think about themselves that way. As a Jew and an American who has gone through the complex, painful, and transforming process of facing the injustice against Palestinians committed in my name and with my tax dollars, I have had to change my self-concept. I have had to deprogram myself from the idea that Jews continued to be victims when, in some cases, we had become perpetrators."
She ends her article this way:
"The most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence. Every person has to face their own complicities, and we start this by listening to whoever is suffering. Even if it is by our own hand. It is this transcendence that can lead us all to a better place."
And to quote from another Jew:
“And now turn your eyes away from individuals,” Freud writes in his “Introductory Lectures, “and consider the Great War, which is still laying Europe waste. Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies which are able to spread over the civilized world? So you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience have succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt?”
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I will write more and collect various articles that help us break free from one-sided stories and cultural complexes. How can we respond to the call to effect a “transcendence that can lead us all to a better place”? This is the work we do in therapy: to seek a safe house from the personal complex. May we also find the strength to help guide the collective away from its regressive cultural complexes and, goddess forbid, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere…The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”