BETTINA PRATOresponse to the testimonial call of the Shoah can resist the temptation to fall into the
vicious circle of trauma discourses that tends to blur the line between past and present
and therefore to reduce the act of bearing witness to a mimetic identification of the living
with the dead. In the case of Israeli Jews, in particular, the temptation to be resisted is
that of a mimetic appropriation by living Israelis of the predicament of the Jewish victims
of the Shoah. This is a risk to be avoided first of all because such identification encourages
the living to take on the mantle of ‘‘innocence’’ that belongs to the dead of the Shoah.
Second, collective witnessing modeled upon the logic of individual trauma risks being
trapped in the same pattern of repetition of traumatic neurosis, leading a testimonial
community to sacrifice meaningful present life on the altar of the past. In the case of a
community that identifies with a state, such as Jews in Israel, this risk is particularly great
because it entails the possibility that state institutions may also become trapped in a
vicious circle that does not lead them to seek ways to sustain life, as states must do vis-a`-
vis their citizens. On the contrary, such institutions are ideally placed to nurture and
perpetuate violence toward ‘‘others’’ as a self-nurturing reaction to what Judith Butler
recently called a ‘‘narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia’’ born of the forced realization
of the vulnerability of a certain community (in this case Jews).^47
How can an Israeli rabbi preach and practice a balance between bearing witness and
a taste for life, and at the same time remind his people that they do not have a perpetual
claim to innocence, or to suffering, even when their present reality lends itself to being
rhetorically appropriated as a threatened repetition of past trauma? Like Rabbi Ascher-
man, Bandel suggests a combination of compassionate recognition of present Jewish-
Israeli suffering and acknowledgment of the historical reality of other traumatic moments
to which Jewish Israelis are linked by religious and political belonging but from which
they are also relatively independent by virtue of living in a different time and place. While
Ascherman stresses the importance of focusing on what Jewish Israelis can do through
practical human rights work as a form oftikkun ha olam, Bandel suggests also the need
to cultivate alternative readings of Jewish history and identity to counter the negative
effects of trauma-centered approaches to the Jewish past. The point is not to minimize
the significance of past Jewish victimization, its traumatic character, or its testimonial
legacy, but rather to search for positive counterpoints in Jewish history that can be inte-
grated into a Zionist project that may enable Jewish Israelis to take responsibility for their
future.
While there is no official preference for one particular narrative of Jewish history in
RHR literature, certain historical and biblical references recurrently provide interpretive
keys in discussions of Israeli affairs by group rabbis. One particularly interesting reference
is to the memory of a ‘‘traumatic departure,’’ to borrow a term from Cathy Caruth’s
analysis of trauma in Freud’s meta-historical story of Moses.^48 This is the memory of
Jewish slavery and liberation from Egypt, which was the prelude to the assumption of
political power in a ‘‘promised land,’’ as well as to a covenant based on God’s giving of
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