Some 180 Israelis from a wide variety of fields, locations and positions gathered in Tel Aviv’s Anu — Museum of the Jewish People on Wednesday to learn how the stories we tell ourselves can help people overcome traumatic experiences, both personally and as the Jewish people.

For the team at Anu, developing and appreciating these narratives in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terror attacks and the ensuing rise in global antisemitism also serves as a critical step toward its goal of uniting Jews around the world.

“Oct. 7 was not an Israeli event, it was a global Jewish event,” Na’ama Klar, the director of the museum’s Koret International School for Jewish Peoplehood, told the attendees. 

The program, the Jewish Resilience Project (JRP), was created and is run by the museum’s Tisch Center for Jewish Dialogue, based on on the work of Marshall Duke, a psychology professor at Emory University, following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. According to Duke, ascending narratives — things are getting progressively better — and descending narratives — things were once great and are getting worse — are far weaker than so-called “oscillating” narratives: Sometimes things are improving, then they’re getting worse, then they’re getting better again and then worse and so on.

It is the knowledge of both the ups and the downs that builds resilience, as people know that when times are tough, they tend to improve, and it isn’t so jarring when bad things happen during good times because there’s historical precedence for that kind of downturn and even those bad times tend to give way to better ones.

The Tisch Center had begun developing programs around this oscillating narrative concept before Oct. 7. It was workshopping the concept and rolling it out during the turmoil around the Israeli government’s contentious plans to overhaul the country’s judicial system, in a bid to encourage unity among Jewish people during that divisive period.

Immediately after the Hamas attacks, the Tisch team developed its existing narrative dialogue into a program known as “The Hope Kit.” Over time, it expanded it into the Jewish Resilience Project, which it has disseminated to Jewish organizations and educators around the world through an off-the-shelf curriculum.

Tracy Frydberg, the director of the Tisch Center, told eJP that nearly 4,000 people have gone through the Jewish Resilience Project so far, most of them from outside of Israel, and that roughly 500 of them have been trained to administer the program.

The participating organizations have included, among others, BBYO, Young Judaea, the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and the American Jewish Committee.

The event in the Anu museum on Wednesday is meant to kickstart JRP’s deployment in Israel. The attendees included teachers, representatives from the military and police, informal educators and other professionals involved in Jewish peoplehood activities.  

“The numbers will start to quickly rise as we work more in Israel following today,” Frydberg said.

The event opened with an address by Sarit Zussman, whose son, Ben, was killed in battle in Gaza in December, leaving behind a poignant will that demanded of his family to have a joyous and not mournful shiva.

Zussman described her son as quirky and caring and curious and driven to be the best version of himself that he could be. “We thought he was the most perfect boy in the world, just like every parent thinks, but in our case, we were right,” she said with a tearful smile.

She recalled the moment that she learned about her son’s death while sitting on the sofa, not crying out or shouting, but “sitting straight up.”

“The next morning, people gathered in the street with Israeli flags to pay their respects to Ben and to us. Zvi said, ‘Let’s go say thank you.’ I said, ‘I can’t be polite right now.’ Zvi said, ‘But we have to,’” Zussman said, then adding the punchline: “Zvi was born in America; I was born in Jerusalem.”

“I listened to him, and when we went out and I saw the flags, it was clear to me that what the Jewish people need right now is to have the tears, to cry them, but also to stand upright, “ Zussman said. “Because we are in a war, because we are good. We need to be strong, and we will win. Because our story is much longer than this painful and difficult period that we are in right now.”

Zussman said that since her son was killed, she has taken to speaking in schools and other fora, spreading a message “that I don’t hear on the news: That our story will have a happy ending, that am yisrael chai (the people of Israel live) forever — for ever and ever, until the end of the end, to be specific — and that we need to live up to the greatness of the moment, all of us.” 

In her presentation, Klar discussed the two distinct Jewish worldviews that emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the more Diasporic notion of a universal “Never again,” that Jews will be protected if they work to prevent another genocide against anyone, and the more Israeli focus of “Jewish sovereignty,” that Jews will be protected so long as the Jewish state is strong. Both of these concepts were challenged, if not disproven, on Oct. 7 with the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

She called for a new, unified and unifying narrative that is centered around the Jewish people and Jewish peoplehood, and which makes room for Jews in and out of Israel.

The Jewish Resilience Project, which treats Oct. 7 as a global Jewish event, is meant to facilitate that narrative. It is, however, adapted to the specific, different realities of Jews in and out of Israel. For instance, Klar told eJP, a program for Diaspora Jews can ask the question, “Where were you on Oct. 7?” For Israelis, who may have experienced the horrors of the attacks firsthand or lost loved ones in them, that can be a traumatic and dangerous question to ask so bluntly.

Following Klar’s presentation, the attendees broke up into groups to experience the oscillating narrative concept, first by identifying the highs and lows in their own lives, then by thinking of the highs and lows in the generations preceding them and finally by considering what they are leaving for the next generation.