I had been thinking about some of the more horrifying images from the attack – which, despite my purposefully having not looked at the photos, had nevertheless taken root in my imagination. There on the plane, I suddenly noticed that my feet were tingling, and that my body temperature was starting to rise. I wanted to get up and stretch my legs – but because I was in a middle seat, and because the plane was already taxiing, I couldn’t get to the aisle. I felt trapped. I started to think about the hostages – who also were trapped, but under far worse conditions than mine. By this point, my skin was crawling and I was starting to sweat. I reached into my backpack to try and find a bottle of water, but there was none.
And so, despite being an ardent rule follower, I climbed out of my seat while the plane was still taxiing and went and stood in the back. I told a flight attendant that I was worried that I was about to have an anxiety attack. She gave me a bottle of water. I rested my face against the cool, metallic wall of the galley, and took a few slow sips. The tingling feeling was starting to subside. A few minutes later, I returned to my seat, put my headphones on, turned on an episode of an old sitcom that I had seen a thousand times before, closed my eyes – and eventually fell asleep.
In the moment, I felt embarrassed about what had happened on the airplane. But in retrospect, I recognize that it was not so out of the ordinary. We are living in an era of great anxiety.
According to public health officials, one out of every five adults in the United States suffers from intrusive anxiety. And we see it reflected in our popular culture. Consider, for example, one of this year’s best-selling works of non-fiction: a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation – in which he explains why today’s youth will likely be more anxious than any generation that came before them. Or, consider the award-winning podcast from WNYC Studios called The United States of Anxiety – which made the case that the one thing that Red States and Blue States have in common is that both are anxious about the future of our country. Or, consider the summer’s biggest blockbuster film, the animated family movie Inside Out 2 – in which a teenager must learn to cope with the anxieties of starting high school. It seems that everywhere we look, anxiety is there.
To understand what anxiety is, it might be helpful to first understand what it is not. The American Psychological Association makes a distinction between anxiety and fear. Fear, as they describe it, is a short-lived response to a specific, immediate threat. For example: a car swerves in front of ours; we feel afraid. When the car is back in its lane, the fear dissipates.
Anxiety, by contrast, is not about a specific, immediate threat; rather, it is a general and long-lasting feeling that something bad – something unknown and as yet undefined – might happen to us in the unpredictable future. It is worrying about what tomorrow might hold, and feeling that it is beyond our control.
We, the Jewish people, seem to be especially vulnerable to anxiety. It is not just that we count among ourselves some of the most notable interpreters of anxiety, like Freud and Kafka. Rather, statistical studies have found that Jews are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the anxious. Although in the general US population, Jews comprise a mere 2%, among those who have sought psychological treatment for anxiety over the past century, Jews account for 50%.
Of course, there are many possible ways to interpret this data. Perhaps we Jews have greater access to mental health services than other religious or ethnic groups do. Or, perhaps we have greater trust in the value of psychotherapy.
But even without consulting the data, it is clear that, at least in the popular imagination, we Jews are closely associated with anxiety.
We can see it in the ways that we depict ourselves in literature, theater, and film. There are countless examples of the anxious, neurotic Jewish character. Among my favorites is Gene Wilder portraying Leo Bloom in the classic Mel Brooks comedy The Producers. Leo is crouched behind the desk of his soon-to-be business partner, Max Bialystock, suffering a panic attack. “I’m hysterical!” he shouts. “I can’t stop when I get like this. I’m hysterical.” Bialystock fetches a glass of water – which, instead of offering it to Leo to drink, he instead throws in Leo’s face. For a moment, Leo calms down. But quickly, the anxiety returns: “I’m wet!” he shouts. “I’m hysterical, and I’m wet!”
We see the Jewish tendency to be anxious not just in popular culture, but even in our sacred literature. Think of the iconic moment in our Torah story in which our forefather Jacob has his name changed to Israel. [1] After twenty years of estrangement, Jacob is about to be reunited with his twin brother, Esau. He is nervous about the encounter. How will the two of them get along? Will Esau still bear a grudge for the ways in which Jacob had cheated him in their youth?
The night before they are to meet, Jacob cannot sleep. He lies awake until dawn, fitfully tossing and turning – wrestling with some dark and mysterious creature of the night. Is it an angel? Is it Jacob’s own shadow? The Torah does not say.
In the morning, Jacob is exhausted. And the mysterious creature tells him that, on account of his restless night, his name shall no longer be Jacob, but rather, shall be changed to Yisrael – meaning: “the one who wrestles.” It will become the namesake of our people – a people who have, for many nights since, continued to lay awake: tossing, turning, wrestling.
So central is anxiety to the Jewish religious imagination that we could even reasonably make the case that it is one of the most fundamental themes of this, the holiest day of the year: Yom Kippur. We read earlier this morning the familiar, haunting words of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, a centerpiece of our High Holiday prayer book. It begins: “Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day – ki hu nora v’ayom, for it is awesome and full of dread.”
The prayer then goes on to remind us of how fragile our place in the world is. The poetic language that the prayer book uses easily fits our description of anxiety – which, again, is: the recognition that something bad, something unknown and as yet undefined, might happen to us in the unpredictable future. The prayer asks us to consider the year that lies ahead. “Will we live, or will we die?” we wonder. “Perhaps by fire; perhaps by water. Will we be tranquil, or will we be troubled? Will we be calm, or will we be tormented?”
We might ask ourselves: why is it that the Jewish people are seemingly so beset with anxiety? Two contributing factors come to mind: one that comes from within ourselves, and one that comes from the outside.
The internal factor is our worldview. Ours is a civilization that prizes the asking of questions. The very soul of our religious life is to examine, analyze, discuss, consider, scrutinize, interpret, and dissect every last aspect of all of human existence. It is a life of constant searching – never fully satisfied, never really at ease.
But it is the external factor, I believe, that has had the greater impact on our Jewish tendency towards anxiety. We are a people that has known many generations of trauma. Many have been the eras of Jewish history in which our people’s safety has been threatened: by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Spanish inquisitors, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Soviets – the list goes on and on.
Indeed, the oldest artifact in the archeological record that mentions the Jewish people is a document dating to ancient Egypt, to 1200 BCE. In it, the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah describes his great military might. He writes: “I have decimated the people of Israel. Their seed is laid to waste.” The literal oldest thing that human civilization has to say about the Jewish people is that we are subject to being destroyed.
Even if we ourselves did not personally live in one of the many times and places in which Jewish safety was at risk, nevertheless, we carry those experiences with us. At the very least, we carry it in our historical memory – the stories that get passed down from generation to generation. We believe that these things happened not only a long time ago and in a far away place. Rather, in the spirit of the Passover Haggadah, [2] we feel as if we were there; we imagine that it happened to us.
On a deeper level, it is seemingly possible that we carry our people’s historical trauma with us in our DNA. Neurobiologists recently conducted a study in which they trained male mice to be afraid of a particular scent. The researchers then mated these mice with female partners. And indeed, when the resulting baby mice were exposed to the same scent, their brains too exhibited signs of fear.
If fear can be passed down through our DNA, then we should not be surprised to find that a people that has known countless generations of fear would be frequently on edge and highly anxious. For many of us, the warning light is always on. We are highly attuned, regularly looking for the subtle signals that would indicate that our environment is becoming unsafe.
For many Jewish people, October 7 and the ensuing war only heightened or retrigerred our natural predisposition to be anxious. In one traumatic day, our protective psychological shell was cracked wide open – and our underlying anxiety came pouring out like lava. Since then, it has been a restless, fitful, thrashing year, a year filled with worry and anxious thoughts – a year in which many of us felt like Jacob: up all night, wrestling in the dark.
How are we to cope with our anxiety? Unfortunately, the most ancient layer of our tradition, the Hebrew Bible, offers scant advice – and when it does, the advice is not all that helpful. The Book of Proverbs offers the following advice: “If there is anxiety in a person’s heart, let him squash it. Let him turn it into joy by talking about something good.” [3]
But as many good therapists will tell us, this strategy is unlikely to succeed. Papering over our anxiety with happy thoughts will not make the uncomfortable feeling go away. If anything, forcing our anxiety down will only cause it to seep out in other, unexpected, potentially harmful places in our lives.
Rather, the best thing that I, for one, have found is to talk about our anxiety: to try and understand what is motivating it, to let it out through our words. And, if that is not enough, if our anxiety is so intrusive that it begins to hinder our day-to-day functioning, there are helpful medications that a psychiatrist can prescribe to help us find a less anxious baseline. There need be no stigma about either of these approaches. Rather, to get help is praiseworthy.
Additionally, we can come to recognize that anxiety is not all bad. It is a natural human emotion. In fact, when it is properly harnessed, anxiety can be made productive. It can be transformed into a useful tool that generates creativity and meaning.
For the Jewish people, our anxiety has been a tool for our survival. There is a little-known but highly influential 20th century Jewish thinker whom I love named Simon Rawidowicz, who argued that the common theme of all of Jewish history is anxiety.
In each and every generation, he argues, the Jewish people has worried that theirs will be the last era of Jewish history. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible warned that if the Israelites did not improve their moral behavior, then they would be the last generation of Jews. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides worried that, if no future scholars should attain to his and his students’ level of erudition, then they would be the last generation of Jews. In our time, Jewish communal leaders worry that if Jewish life is not made compelling and relevant for the 21st century, then we will be the last generation of Jews. Even Abraham and Sarah – the first generation of Jews! – worried that if God did not grant them a child, then they would be the last generation of Jews!
Rawidowicz sees this pattern, and describes us as “the ever-dying people.” By that phrase, Rawidowicz does not mean that ours is a history filled only with death and destruction. Rather, he says, our constant worrying that we might disappear is, in fact, an assertion of our will to live. “A people that has been dying for thousands of years,” he writes, “is, in fact, a living people.” Our anxiety about the Jewish future is, for Rawidowicz, the impetus that prompts us to survive. “By constantly anticipating the end,” he writes, “the Jewish people has repeatedly managed to avoid it.”
But our anxiety can be a tool not just for survival. Additionally, our anxiety can be a tool for cultural creativity.
In his book Genius and Anxiety, the writer Norman Lebrecht makes exactly this argument. He notes that, especially over the past two hundred years, the Jewish people has made an outsized impact on the fields of art, science, literature, economics, medicine, technology, and music. The reason for our productivity, he argues, is our anxiety.
For starters, if anxiety is a generalized worry about the unknown future, then an anxious person will be naturally attuned to oncoming problems – sometimes anticipating the problems even before they begin to show themselves. When their anxiety is properly harnessed, an anxious person may be able to see a few moves ahead on the chessboard – to intuit possible challenges and begin to dream up novel solutions.
What’s more, as Lebrecht argues, our specifically Jewish anxiety has been especially generative. We are a people that is riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, we feel like insiders in our society; on the other hand, we somehow always continue to feel separate. On the one hand we believe that God is infinitely far beyond our human imagination; on the other hand, we believe that God cares about what we do. These, and many other such contradictions, pervade the Jewish consciousness.
This kind of dialectical thinking causes us, at once, to feel forever unresolved, ill at ease, anxious that the world is far too complex and multifaceted for us to ever fully comprehend. And, at the same time, our dialectical thinking can prove to be immensely generative – like two tectonic plates that refuse to stop pressing against one another, until, miles above the surface, the interminable force of the friction between them has pushed up a mountain peak.
In this era of great anxiety – for our planet, for our country, and for us, the Jewish people – we need a reminder that our anxiety need not control us. Rather, we need the Jewish wisdom that recognizes that our anxiety can be transformed into a helpful tool.
Perhaps this is why we bear the name of our forefather Jacob, who had his name changed to Yisrael. Like him, we have spent many anxious hours wrestling with uncertainty. But also like him, we recognize that our anxiety has compelled us to survive, and has been a prolific source of our people’s creativity.
We are so clearly his descendants. We are the Israelites. We are the people who wrestle.
__________
[1] Genesis 32:25-30
[2] Passover Haggadah, Magid Section: “In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he personally left Egypt.”
[3] Proverbs 12:25
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