#but currently in the worry-that-i'm-standing-at-the-grave-of-the-nation phase myself!

[dvar-trek]

Scour the nonmedical literature and you’ll find various arguments linking anxiety and the Jewish mind. In a 2012 interview, the author of “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety,” Daniel Smith, said the talmudic tradition is “one of constant, interminable questioning and turning things over and analyzing. It’s endless exegesis.” Others attribute our anxiety to the bias and anti-Semitism Jews have long encountered. In 1937, the rabbi, essayist and founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan, wrote, “The average Jew today is conscious of his Judaism as one is conscious of a diseased organ that gives notice of its existence by causing pain.”

Elsewhere you’ll find the idea that our anxiety stems from certain irreconcilable conflicts at the heart of Jewish life. In a roundtable conversation featured in Moment magazine in 2013, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach describes the competing forces forever acting upon Jews: “Since Abraham said, ‘I am both an alien and a resident among you,’ the Jew has experienced an inescapable dualism. On the one hand, we are the most influential nation that has ever lived, delivering to the world its God, its commandments and its belief that all human life is equal and of infinite value. On the other hand, we are perennial outsiders, shunned and misunderstood, vilified and ostracized.” A second rabbi, Laura Novak Winer, ties anxiety to our God-given free will: “As conscious and conscientious human beings, we all face potential anxiety about our work, about how we are perceived, about our capacities. When we experience those feelings, we are witnessing the struggle between our yetzer tov, inclination to do good, and yetzer hara, evil inclination. Anxiety is the expression of our fight to choose to do what is right and our worry about not reaching that goal.”

In his 1948 essay, “The Ever-Dying People,” the philosopher, author and professor Simon Rawidowicz draws a line of anxiety through essentially the entirety of history of the Jewish people. The fear he describes is something deeper than mere hypochondria; his thesis is that, for centuries, Jews have collectively been dogged by the sense that we’re moments away from extinction.

“He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora that did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain,” he wrote. “Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up. There was scarcely a generation that while toiling, falling, and rising, again being uprooted and striking new roots, was not filled with the deepest anxiety lest it be fated to stand at the grave of the nation, to be buried in it. Each generation grieved not only for itself but also for the great past that was going to disappear forever, as well as for the future of unborn generations who would never see the light of day.”

In the centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple, almost every leading Jewish poet and scholar considered himself the last of his kind, and Rawidowicz wrote: “His Torah was the end of Torah; he had written the concluding page in the great book of learning of the nation; when he will have recited the shema for the last time, the Torah will either return to Sinai or be discarded as a useless object in the corner.”

This trend is visible in “deep and incessant lamentation that fills our literature of the past 2,000 years,” and in the “feeling of frustration, waste, and hopelessness” that “has persistently harassed the minds” of generations of Jewish thinkers. Certainly, similar feelings were present in the cultures of ancient Rome, and in Christianity and Islam, he acknowledges. “Yet… it has nowhere been at home so incessantly,” he wrote, “with such an acuteness and intensity, as in the House of Israel.”