I was hit by a thought today that surprised me. Since blogging on WordPress, I have come across a lot of Christian mental health blogs. Sometimes there’s a kind of conversion narrative of a fall from the world into a pit of suffering and despair (this is particularly the case when substance abuse features in the narrative), followed by the turn to religion and the feeling of grace and salvation, which leads to renewed success (if that’s the right word) in the battle with mental illness or addiction.
The surprising thing is that this kind of writing does not really exist in post-Biblical Judaism at all. I mean very deeply personal introspection of the long, dark night of the soul and the religious journey from suffering to redemption. Judaism is a non-missionary religion and the vast majority of Jews were born Jewish even if they did not have a religious upbringing, so it’s perhaps not surprising that there are so few literal conversion narrative, but there could be narratives of suffering and despair leading to faith and joy, but by and large there are not.
There are Tehillim and Iyov (Psalms and Job) in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). In post-biblical literature there are some of Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav’s teachings that deal (directly or indirectly with his suffering). Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik deals a little with this in The Lonely Man of Faith and parts of Halakhic Man . There are bits in the Sacred Fire of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, the Piaseczno Rebbe where he approaches this, but his focus is not so much the personal journey as the communal experience of Nazi persecution.
I am not familiar enough with the Holocaust literature to see how that fits in. I think you might find something there, but not quite the same as the Christian type, not least because of the presence of clear villain figures in the Nazis, not to mention the fact that many Jews lost their faith in the Holocaust rather than finding it. I’m not sure that I would class the writings of Elie Wiesel, for example, in this category. I don’t think it is really that personal, inner type of despair, rather the despair from being dehumanised by an outside force.
I don’t know the Medieval poetry of the paytanim (liturgical poets) to know whether they dealt with these feelings. Possibly they did (they did right rather erotic love poetry, something airbrushed out of the biographies of some major figures).
I have a few Judaism and depression books which include personal narratives. The Road to Resilience by Sherri Mendell is a fairly practical book about overcoming loss. I remember very little of Healing from Despair by Elie Kaplan Spitz, although it probably is the closest to what I’m looking for, in that it deals with the author’s despair in detail (but by a Reform rabbi, not an Orthodox one, tellingly). It might be worth me re-reading that soon. Some of the personal stories in the anthology book Calling Out to You edited by Tehilla Edelman fit in this category at least partially, but as I recall the focus is more on the practical story of mental illness and recovery than the spiritual crisis. Some are definitely what I have in mind e.g. “I had to unravel all of my preconceived notions about Hashem. I used to think that G-d only loved me if I behaved. The idea that Hashem loves me like a father didn’t work for me, because with a father like mine [abusive] it didn’t mean much. I also didn’t understand how Hashem could let abuse happen to children, and I didn’t know if I could ever trust Him… After much soul-searching, I came to believe that Hashem does care about me and that it doesn’t matter if I can’t call Him Father.” (From My Journey to Hashem through Depression and Addiction: Miriam’s Story in Calling Out to You.)
That’s about all I can think of, in a three thousand year tradition.
It’s worth comparing with the narratives I’ve seen written by people who became Orthodox Jews in adulthood, either non-Jews who converted to Judaism or ba’alei teshuva, non-religious Jews who became Orthodox. These seem to be largely calm and peaceful narratives that start by laying out the writer’s initial antipathy to and/or ignorance of Orthodox Judaism, the story of how they encountered it close up for the first time, their experience of the beauty of Torah and mitzvot (commandments) and how they overcame a few sticking points (e.g. Torah/science conflict or gender and sexuality issues) to become devout Orthodox Jews. There is occasionally tension with friends or family members who do not like the religious change, but there is no sense of suffering or trauma here, the dark night of the soul to which religion is the solution. The truth is that if I was writing my own ba’al teshuva narrative, it would also be largely separate from my mental health journey, which did not really start in earnest until I was some way along my religious journey.
It’s just interesting that we don’t really have the vocabulary to express this kind of narrative. I am experiencing that first-hand, in the difficulty I have expressing my inner religious life here and, fictionalised, in my novel. I do not have a model to use. It’s doubtful how much anyone could model themselves on Tehillim (Psalms) nowadays without falling into self-parody, let alone the difficult, complex poetry of Iyov (Job). But there are few more recent models to look to.
I wonder if this is another reason why “leaving Orthodoxy” narratives, fictional and non-fictional, are so much more common than “joining Orthodoxy” narratives, as I have discussed here before. It’s not really a genre that we promote (not that Orthodox Judaism encourages the writing of fiction or memoirs, or creative writing generally).
Doubtless part of the reason is that Christianity is a religion based on the personal salvation of the individual through the personal sacrifice of Jesus and mediated through the introspective writings of Paul in the New Testament. Whereas Judaism is a communal/national religion based, at the very least, on creating communities based on love and mutual aid, building together to a nation state built, ideally, on love and compassion and eventually an example for a new world order built on love and compassion through monotheism. There isn’t much room in that narrative for the individual’s long dark night of the soul. It’s just not relevant. It took some fairly unique circumstances to produce figures like Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav or Rav Soloveitchik who can let us peek a little at what a kind of Jewish dark night of the soul literature might look like.
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As for Yom Tov (the festival), it was OK, but I struggled to connect with the religious ideals of the festival (hence, in part, this post). I prayed a lot, studied Torah a lot, ate a lot, slept a lot. I had a lot of aches and pains from my workout on Wednesday. I think I’ve pulled a lot of muscles in my arms, legs and torso. I did still go for a couple of walks despite the pain. I also woke up in the middle night with a migraine yesterday. My mood was mostly OK, but dipped a bit this afternoon. That’s about all there is to report, though, aside from continued irritation at the illegal minyan (prayer quorum) next door. I think I’m getting a better idea of why that annoys me so much (aside from all the obvious reasons), but it’s too late to deal with that now and this is a long enough post already.