Jews aren’t allowed to be angry, but we are.

The Holocaust made Jews sad. October 7th and its aftermath made us angry. Two-thousand years of suppressed Jewish rage ends now.

photo: Yoav Aziz/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay written by Benjamin Kerstein, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and recipient of the 2024 Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary from the American Jewish Press Association.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1903, the great Zionist poet Chaim Nahman Bialik wrote his poem “On the Slaughter” in the wake of a hideous pogrom.

In it, he created perhaps the most incandescent expression of Jewish rage in history:

If there is justice, let it appear now!
But if justice appears
After I have been annihilated from beneath the heavens
Let its throne be hurled down forever!

This was Jewish anger taken to its utmost. Rather than embrace the passive stoicism that Jews had adopted for so long out of terrible necessity, Bialik called the entire world to account. He declared that if this is a world without justice, if it cannot or will not do justice, if its professions of justice are the merest hypocrisy, then it must be hurled down forever.

Bialik’s rage was metaphysical in scope. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that he used the term “throne.” Since Ezekiel’s¹ vision, God’s throne has been an archetypal image in Judaism, symbolizing divine majesty and power. Now, Bialik was saying that God must live up to himself, and if he does not…

Such words cannot be other than incandescent in light of the horrific events we have witnessed over the past week and, in many ways, the past year and a half. We have been compelled to recognize that a significant number of individuals, groups, and governments have joined with a genocidal terrorist organization in celebrating the slaughter of babies and children.

Worse still, they do this in the name of “justice” itself, believing themselves to be a caste of saints, the finest and most moral people in the entire history of the known universe.

So, we are faced with the question of how we ought to respond to this demented and satanic spectacle.

The only rational response is Bialik’s rage — rage taken to its utmost. At the moment, we are fully entitled to despise the world. To despise its hypocrisy, its horrific violence, its complete lack of the slightest moral consistency or integrity, and its disgusting inability to recognize the humanity of one of its oldest civilizations. We are more than entitled to say: “Let their throne be hurled down forever!”

Remarkably, however, the Jews don’t despise the world, not now and not ever. We take pride in the fact that, unlike our adversaries, we do not love death more than we love life. Our God told us thousands of years ago that there are two paths: life and death, darkness and light. “Therefore,” God said, “choose life.” Generally speaking, we do.

This might be one of our greatest strengths. Nevertheless, it has a tendency toward overcorrection, for which we have paid a very heavy price.

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Jews are not good at expressing rage. This is, in fact, something of an understatement. Indeed, one of the reasons Bialik’s poem is so powerful is that it is so unusual. He remains, in many ways, an outlier and an exception.

One can see this, for example, in our general approach to the legacy of the Holocaust. There is no doubt that a great many Jews remain very angry about the Holocaust — and rightly so.

By and large, however, our public and often private reactions are sadness and stoicism. As for our leaders, many of them say “never again,” but usually they are talking about working toward understanding, tolerance, diversity, and so forth. They have no intention of laying the antisemites low, let alone hurling down the throne forever. Anger is not on their agenda because, one suspects, they are terrified of it.

I believe such reactions are sincere, in their way. But I do not believe for a single moment that there is even one Jew in the world who is not blazingly angry at the perpetrators of the Holocaust and their debased heirs today. I am quite certain that all of us not only loathe antisemites, but also those who sit upon their makeshift thrones and weep crocodile tears over dead Jews as they display utter indifference at best towards living ones. We are angry because, as yet, little in the way of justice has appeared.

We observe, for example, that Germany has done rather well out of its penitence. Rebuilt by generous allies, it is now a peaceful and prosperous nation, safeguarded by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and preoccupied with relatively minor domestic matters — the most serious of which it has willfully brought upon itself.

On the other hand, Jews today (whether in Israel or the Diaspora) still struggle to assert our right to exist. We do so at the cost of a great many lives. And we are constantly subjected to the galling spectacle of a world that condemns us for succeeding. A world that was supposed to have learned its lesson eight decades ago.

In other words, Germans today live in something like a paradise disturbed only by their own stupidity. The Jews must continue to face down the armies of hell.

This is an absurd situation, of course, but it is also enraging. I do not think there is a single one of us who does not feel this rage, though many loathe to admit it.

This, perhaps, is the secret of Bialik’s power: He gives voice to our secret rage. That is, at least Bialik talks about it. He does what so many of us, especially in the Diaspora, refuse to do: He embraces the transcendent catharsis that comes from proclaiming, at long last, that this perfidious world has no right to exist. Certainly, it has no right to exist as currently constituted. By concealing this even from ourselves, we deny ourselves the power that comes from condemning the world.

Perhaps this does raise us to a slightly higher moral plane (though I doubt it), but it comes at a formidable price. I have often envied Black Americans for their ability and willingness to express their anger. They sometimes do so in destructive and self-destructive ways, but if they did not do so at all, they would likely be in a far worse situation than they are now.

In other words, it is not true that anger consumes the vessel. It is anger unexpressed that consumes the vessel. The anger is there whether you like it or not. You cannot suppress it forever if you want to remain even vaguely psychologically healthy.

This is the lesson that many, perhaps most, Jews have never learned. In the long term, such suppression can only lead to disaster. If we cannot unleash the corrosive bile that 2,000 years have built up inside us, it will erode us from within. We will destroy ourselves because we refuse to be angry. We forget that, whether we like it or not, it is human to be angry. And no matter what the world says, we are human too.

It is possible that suppressing our anger was an effective survival strategy at certain points in history. Certainly, eruptions of Jewish rage that were uncontrolled and unrestrained resulted in historical disasters, such as the revolts against Rome. But this does not mean that disaster will come every time, nor that it is guaranteed to do so today.

In fact, it is not impossible that finally expressing our anger will give us new life. As French orientalist Ernst Renan pointed out: “All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.” And what did Bialik do if not transform Jewish rage into an absolute principle? There can be no doubt that, in doing so, Bialik enabled himself to accomplish and inspire great things.

Those “great things” may be simply what Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called a “rebellion against history” — that is, a rebellion against the place to which the Jews had been forcibly relegated by a history shaped by non-Jews. If we cannot unleash our justified rage, we risk being relegated once again to that dreadful place.

In a strange way, then, expressing our anger is essential to our survival. It is time for us to admit as much: I rage, therefore I am.

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1. The Book of Ezekiel is the third of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel is known for his prophetic visions and oracles, delivered primarily to the exiled Jewish People in Babylon, during the Babylonian captivity.