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You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to evade it. (Avoth 2: 17)
-Rabbi Tarfon of Lydda and Yavneh
INTRODUCTION: THE DIALECTIC OF THEORY AND CASE STUDY
The history of science-including psychohistory as a science-consists of the dialectic and constant tension between (1) comprehensive explanatory theories and taxonomies, on the one hand, and (2) intensive case studies, comparison of cases, and (where appropriate) experiment, on the other hand. In his celebrated essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin (1957), following Archilochus, distinguished between thinkers who are great generalizers (the hedgehog, "who knows one big thing") and the particularizers (the fox, "who knows many little things"). Science-indeed all thought-flourishes in the interplay between these two modes of thought.
This paper explores certain aspects of Jewish identity by focusing on a widely shared (though certainly not universal) perception and experience of time and history among Jews. It builds on my earlier studies of Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish identity (Stein 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1994, 1995, 2006, 2009), which I shall not repeat here. The present essay presents the pioneering model of "chosen trauma," "chosen glory," and related concepts, formulated over the past two decades by Vamik Volkan, and explores Jewish history and identity as a kind of historical "test case" for this model. Volkan's concepts are used to help explain the role of the memory of calamity, and the specific narra- tive forms that memory takes, in Jewish identity. I shall first present Volkan's model in detail, mostly in Volkan's own words, and then explore its dovetailing or "fit" with a widely held Jewish sense of history.
I emphasize from the outset that the account that follows does not apply to all Jews, living and deceased, but rather to the continuity of a pattern that has long been widely shared among Jews (Gonen 1975, 2005; Falk 1996, 2004; Rapppport 1999). It is a cultural "master narrative," but not an exclusive one. Even in our time of tribal and religious retrenchment and regression, moments of transcendence are still possible.
Here, I explore a widely shared sense of Jewish identity and history as refracted through the "lens" of Vamik Volkan's concept of "chosen trauma" and related concepts. After...