A word that is bandied around a lot in today’s world is meaningful. “My girlfriend and I have a meaningful relationship.” “Our trip to Europe this year was quite meaningful.” “My work for this charitable organization is quite meaningful”. So, what are the traits that these three experiences have in common that make them all meaningful?
First, the effects of these experiences are all long-lasting. In other words, the effects of these experiences are all preserved on the person who is having them for a long duration of time and perhaps until the person dies. Some meaningful experiences can last seemingly forever (as preserved imprints that endure beyond the imprinter’s lifetime) and form part of his surrogate immortality.
Second, the effects of these experiences are transformative. One of the reasons that the effects of these experiences last so long is that they are very different if not somewhat unique in relation to what has come before and, therefore, they have a greater impact on the person. Finally, the effects of these experiences tend to be very intense. The amount of stimuli involved is much larger than that which is normally to be found in everyday life.
Now just because an experience is meaningful doesn’t mean that it is always positive. Traumatic experiences are obviously very intense. The emotional problems that result from them usually are very long lasting. And people are very negatively transformed as a result of these problems. There is something about a traumatic experience that makes it partly unique in the way in which it impacts a person experiencing it and partly unique in the way in which it transforms him. This is also because each person has a unique sense of self which is going to respond to similar traumas in a somewhat unpredictably unique way. A trauma is complex, the person’s sense of self is complex and so it is very difficult for a person to be able to control the nature of the response that he is going to have.
However, in spite of all the unique aspects of a traumatic situation, there are certain things that people who experience a collective trauma are going to share. This is true both in terms of their reaction to it, as well as to the way in which it is perceived. An example of this is of course what happened in Gaza. Certainly, there is an intersubjective perception of what Hamas did on October 7th. And the intensity and the duration of the trauma make it a uniquely horrific spectacle for the Jewish people. As to the reaction to this series of events, it will vary according to a person’s life narrative up to the point of these events. For some, it resonates with previous events that brought out a sense of anger and revenge. For others, it resonates with previous events that generated a reaction of grief and mourning. In both cases, the resonance, the ripple effects of the memories make for a deeply meaningful experience.
What happened on October 7th on the border between Israel and Gaza makes unfortunately for a meaningful experience within all the categories that have been discussed here. First of all, the effects of this experience will definitely be long-lasting, and will go right up there with the pogroms, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust as another horrific nightmarish experience for the Jewish people. Second, not only the Israelis, but the Jewish people as a whole will be completely transformed by this experience. The trauma involved in this experience will have a permanent effect on Israelis and diaspora Jews alike. And In most countries in the West where there has been harassment and abuse of the Jews as a result of the events of October 7th, Jews will probably never feel as comfortable as they did before, when they felt fairly well integrated into society. The hurt from the harassment and abuse runs just too deep. Jews have been transformed by this experience and there is no turning back. Since World War II, after many decades of having been successfully integrated into Western societies, to have something like this happen is to roll back all the positive meaningful experiences that made this integration possible. We will just have to see what will happen next.
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