POST TRAUMATIC GROWTH
“FROM BENEATH HIM, HE WILL GROW”
We spoke about two main principles in Viktor Frankl's work: the search for meaning as the primary motivator of man, and the definition of faith as providing meta-meaning to life. However, the most important subject for him personally was post-traumatic growth.
He survived the Holocaust, lost all his family—except for one sister—and yet went on to experience tremendous spiritual growth. Since his work, many studies have been conducted with people who have experienced trauma. These studies have revealed that between thirty to seventy percent of those participating experienced post-traumatic growth. It is particularly interesting that the people who underwent the most severe traumas are also the ones who most clearly say that they emerged from them with growth.
One of the main topics of psychology is how a person deals with trauma. A psychologist or counselor should encourage a person who has gone through trauma. He should guide him or her—as if watering them, like watering a plant—to grow from the trauma.
Now, it is important to emphasize that growth is not a return to the previous state. One might be tempted to hope that when a person is in crisis, they should return to what they were before. This must be rejected; the goal is not to return to what you were, but to progress—to experience a quantum leap—to a completely different place, precisely because of the experience of the crisis.
The verse around which our book on psychology in light of Chasidut, Transforming Darkness into Light is based is, “If there be anxiety in a man’s heart, let him suppress it, and a good word will turn it into joy.” As discussed there in depth, this verse has three interpretations, in the order of submission, separation, and sweetening: “let him suppress it”—the verse’s plain meaning; “let him ignore it”; and, “let him articulate it.”
The trauma, which we can identify as the “anxiety in a man’s heart,” can be a positive thing, from which positive growth emerges, as the end of the verse states, “a good word will turn it into joy.” For this, there is a need for a counselor, someone who can properly enable the individual with the trauma to “articulate it” to others. It is written in the HaYom Yom that the one who listens to your worries should be a close friend.
In psychological terms, this refers to a transpersonal relationship between the counselor and the one being counseled. This means that the counselor and the counselee must inter-include, or in other words, there must be an intrinsic connection between them (which, of course, comes from great love). Only then can the transformation from darkness into light, from trauma into growth occur between them. Only then can the counselor help the patient grow from the crisis.
A NEW LIGHT
What is the new growth? Researchers mostly discuss that a person who has gone through trauma gains new worldviews, sees the world with different eyes, has new meaning in life, and from this, he begins to fulfill the true mission that Hashem has given him. The sages speak of a person seeing a new world, connecting it with the word “was” (היה): “Anyone about whom the Torah uses the word “was,” saw a new world.” It is very telling that the word “was” (היה) is also related to shattering, as in the Torah’s second verse, “and the earth was chaotic and without form.”
The Midrash lists five people who went through severe trauma and grew from it into a "new world." The first was Noah, who experienced the destruction of the entire world and emerged from the ark into a new world. The second was Joseph who suffered as a slave and prisoner in Egypt and emerged as its ruler. Next was Moses who fled from Pharaoh and ultimately drowned him in the Red Sea. The fourth was Job who suffered unimaginable pain and ultimately, God doubled His blessing to him. Finally, there is Mordechai who initially went out dressed in sackcloth and ashes and was prepared for death by hanging and in the end hung those who plotted against him and came out before the king dressed in royal garments, as the greatest of all the righteous individuals of his generation.
This is, in essence, the order of the entire world. It is written, "In the beginning, darkness, and then light." When God first created the world, it shattered, it collapsed, “And the earth was chaotic and formless, and darkness was on the face of the abyss.” Only afterward did He create the light, “God said, ‘Let there be light,' and there was light." The light represents the post-traumatic growth of the entire world.
THE GROWTH OF THE ORAL TORAH
The phenomenon of growth specifically after trauma is noted by the Netziv of Volozhin as an inexplicable historical phenomenon in relation to the Oral Torah. He interprets the verse, “Moses speaks, and God answers him out loud” as referring to the Oral Torah, which is what “Moses speaks” in his own words, not in the words of God, as was the case with the Written Torah. Nonetheless, God instructs us to listen to Moses’ words—“and God answers him out loud”—and in the Netziv’s words, “He [God] will give strength to his [Moses’] words so that they be heard by all of Israel.” Although the transmission of the Oral Torah from Moses to all of Israel occurred later, this verse appears before the Giving of the Torah to emphasize that it is impossible to receive the Written Torah even for a moment without it being connected to and explained by the Oral Torah, through Moses our teacher in every generation. The Netziv elucidates this further:
Behold, [at the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai] the sound of the shofar was growing stronger and stronger, unlike the usual sound of the shofar, which starts off strong and then weakens, as it is explained in the Mekhilta. This was to reveal to the people of God the wonder of the Oral Torah, which is that as time passes, it becomes stronger and stronger.
However, this sound came from the terrible smoke to indicate that just as smoke is a metaphor for the darkness of troubles and no one can see what is happening within it, as we explained regarding the Covenant between the Shards on the verse, “behold, a furnace of smoke...,” so too, the intensity of exile will cause this voice [of the Oral Torah] to grow stronger. For if Israel had remained in peace in the Land of Israel, the strength of the Oral Torah would not have increased as much, as was the case during the First Temple period. It was only when King Josiah saw the imminent exile that he began to restore the Torah by instructing the Levites who understood it to aggrandize the Oral Torah....
Likewise, throughout the exile, the troubles cause the Torah to grow. And this is the survival of Israel, that they will not be lost... However, the human intellect cannot understand how the difficulty of exile causes the Oral Torah to grow. But we see that it is so.
The sound of the shofar that grows stronger and stronger hints at the fact that the Oral Torah improves, expands, and refines from generation to generation in such great leaps that when Moses hears the teachings of Rabbi Akiva about his own Torah, he does not understand them, and his strength wanes, until he hears him explicitly say that these teaching are the law given to Moses at Sinai. The novelty is that the major developments in the Torah occur specifically in response to the difficulty of the exile, a new light emerging from the smoke and darkness.
The post-traumatic growth is a new perception of the individual, a shift in his worldview. When it comes to the collective, the worldview of the Jewish people as a whole is the Torah. The traumas of the Jewish people generate a new worldview within us, meaning a new Torah perspective—which becomes a new layer of the Oral Torah—that reinterprets the Written Torah and the reality of the world around us (and from this, of course, the rectification of the world proceeds and advances—“God looked at the Torah and created the world, a person looks at the Torah and sustains the world”).
The nearest historical example of this can be found in the growth of Chasidut, through the Ba’al Shem Tov, after the Khmelnytsky Porgroms of 1648-1649, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The post-traumatic growth was not immediate—but it eventually came: the Ba’al Shem Tov was born fifty years after the pogroms, and his teachings were publicized over a hundred years later.
What is the example in our own generation? Those who advocate Zionist views will say it is clear—after the terrible Holocaust, the State of Israel was established (which they even define as "the beginning of the blossoming of our redemption"). There were those who initially wanted the previous culture of Judaism to be destroyed so that the dream of Zionism could be fulfilled, and indeed, this happened in the Holocaust. But the Frierdiker Rebbe, said about the establishment of the state that "they exchanged the Mashiach with a piece of candy," meaning that instead of the post-traumatic growth that could have occurred, they settled for something minor and anticlimactic.
In any case, it cannot be denied that there was truly a renewal that had not been seen in almost two thousand years—we were almost never in the Land of Israel and certainly did not have sovereignty—and it happened almost immediately after the Holocaust, within three years. This is physical growth, but true spiritual growth takes more time. If the publicizing of the teachings of the Ba’al Shem Tov took a hundred years after the Khmelnytsky Porgroms, the spiritual growth after the Holocaust—which was incomparably harder than the Khmelnytsky Porgroms—could take even longer. On the other hand, technological advancement today, which accelerates from generation to generation, shows that today’s generations are progressing faster.
Rabbi Isaac of Homil said before his passing that for the Mashiach to come, there must be a "new order" alluding to the order of the first three generations of Chasidut: the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Maggid of Mezritch, and the Alter Rebbe. Out of the crisis of the Holocaust, a new Ba’al Shem Tov must emerge.
