Jewish Author Aviva Rahmani Uses Inherited Grief as a 'Trigger Point' for Healing and Change

In 'Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea,' Aviva takes readers from NYC to the Golan Heights, exploring how small actions at the right time can change the world.

Howard Lovy - Jewish essayist. I'm former managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and my work has appeared in the Forward, Jerusalem Post, JTA, and many other publications. I am also a book editor, podcaster, and best friend to a dog. Original article here.

Howard Lovy: There's a lot to your book. It's history. It’s science. It’s art. It’s autobiography. It's a little bit of everything for everyone.

Aviva Rahmani: You were such an enormous help in teaching me how to write. Thank you.

Howard: Oh, no. You already knew how to do that. I just helped to help you focus it and give you other ideas that you already had.

I think there's a Jewish undertone to your work, but maybe you can help guide me through a little bit.

Aviva: First of all, thank you again for the opportunity to talk with you about it now. The first answer is that Tikkun Olam is an important idea in a lot of eco-art. And it's notable that many prominent eco-artists are Jewish women.

The second issue that I was conscious of in my book, and that I think about a lot, is how the victims and the perpetrators become interchangeable. For example, in Israel, with the Palestinian issue, exactly who's the victim? And who's the perpetrator? There's this great TV series out of Israel called Fauda. Have you seen it?

Howard: I've seen a couple of episodes. I haven't seen the whole series, but it's like a spy thriller kind of thing. Right?

Aviva: Well, I think it's more than that. It's brilliantly produced. And you may know that it was based on a real memoir and became a hit in a lot of Arab countries. The reason was because the Arabs felt that the conflicts were fairly represented. And what's represented are a couple of things that I think are fascinating. One is that a relatively simple mistake can perpetuate these horrors. And the second was that people do switch roles. First, they're the victim, then they become the perpetrator, and the perpetrator becomes the victim. And so, in many ways, to me, it was a beautifully produced study of human nature in conflict.

Howard: You’re talking about trigger points. I don't know if you've been following this, the killing of this Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Nobody knows who exactly pulled the trigger. But it almost doesn't matter. The Israelis are saying they didn't do it, or if they did it, it wasn't on purpose, and the Palestinians are saying she was targeted. But that's a trigger point. It’s ballooned into almost the opposite of what you're talking about, though. You talk about trigger points in a positive sense—for positive change. And I think this is almost the opposite, where a butterfly flaps its wings, and there's an explosion a few days later.

Aviva: And the difference between the butterfly effect in Fauda and my trigger point theory is trigger point theory is directed. There's a concept of how to deliberately build a complex adaptive model and then look for the trigger point. And in effect, nurture it by paying attention. In Fauda, the trigger point is absolutely random. And, in a way, so are the consequences.

The other thing that I was thinking about that I think is relevant is that I've become increasingly aware of my own terror, personal terror, as the politics unfold around the world and fascism rises. And I was talking about it with somebody this morning. And I said, “You know, my real terror is for the grief I feel.” There’s a part of me that really wants to resist or deny the grief, and the grief is a combination of post-traumatic stress disorder and epigenetics, which I touch on in my book. It's the grief of my father's hopes for what Israel might have been, for both my parents, for that matter.

As I stood at the Golan Heights with a military attache, my father was with Menachem Begin. Although we never discussed it, I suspect my father was arguing with the future Israeli prime minister about what was about to happen: pitting hope for peace against grief over circumstances that had long ago escaped control.

Howard: Can you elaborate on what you mean by your “father’s hopes” for Israel?

Aviva: You helped me through a passage in my book describing an afternoon at the Golan Heights in Israel hours before war broke out in 1973. As I stood at the Golan Heights with a military attache, my father was with Menachem Begin. Although we never discussed it, I suspect my father was arguing with the future Israeli prime minister about what was about to happen: pitting hope for peace against grief over circumstances that had long ago escaped control. You admonished me to bring my reader to the site with the sensory memories I had. In my account of that afternoon on the Golan Heights, all I vividly recall was my inner shiver as I said, “I smell death,” and the view of vulnerable settlements far below. My shiver of apprehension was more persistent in my awareness than my understanding of the actual history of the Golan Heights.

Writing my book forced me to reconsider my relationships with my family of origin: my father was so active, my mother, as one reviewer of my book put it, so submissive, so bound by their fairy tales about gender roles. And yet, in the end, I could also see and tried to recount how, with age, my father softened, and my mother took courage to resist his authority. Writing a book is a consuming process. It has only been since my June launch that I could contemplate the content of my own narrative, what my family’s relationship with Israel meant to my own life. As I divined what I sensed so long ago on the Golan Heights, I now think all human life in this world we inhabit is: a long dance between what is and what we hope reality can become. That may entail accepting a great deal of grief. Perhaps, if we could abandon our assumptions, that’s the trigger point where we can begin to heal.

Howard: Are there other areas in which grief can be a trigger point for healing and change?

Aviva: Another source of grief that I thought about a lot was how the process of assimilation masks grief. For those of us who look more Aryan, for example, it's easier for us to assimilate. For those of us who take on a different name, it's easier to assimilate. And what exactly are we assimilating to? And what are we covering up? And that's been a theme in my life.

And then, the final thing that I thought about was the relationship between that generational experience of grief and how resilient the Jewish people are. And ironically, I thought that it's exactly the persecution of white supremacists and fascists that has strengthened our resilience, like the resistance in Ukraine. And then I went a little bit further, and I thought, well, wait a minute, if that's true, the sad irony is that white supremacy is completely dependent on our strength and resilience. If they didn't have that to define themselves against, what would they have except their hatred?

When they say something like, “You will not replace us.” Well, actually, we replaced them before they existed. They've already been replaced by people who want a more inclusive world. It's just that they can't admit they're dead.

Howard: Yeah, I mean, antisemitism isn't based on any action that Jews take. It's just our mere existence. We could be resilient or not resilient. It doesn’t matter to them. But are you saying that our resilience confirms their fears about us?

Aviva: Exactly, or at least that's part of it. It confirms their fears, and it gives them a benchmark when they say something like, “You will not replace us.” Well, actually, we replaced them before they existed. They've already been replaced by people who want a more inclusive world. It's just that they can't admit they're dead. They can't admit that. All they have is this mantra of who they think they are. And they really have no idea who they are. Because when they talk about, “Oh, we're the white race,” and so on, all they have to do is do a genetic analysis, and that goes right out the window.

Howard: The victim and perpetrator becoming interchangeable. That could be a controversial idea, depending on your political views.

Aviva: I would expect. It's an issue. My mother's family had been killed in the Holocaust. The whole time that I was growing up, my mother wouldn't have anything German in the house, and nothing Polish. And she had a great fear of the Germans. And so, at some point, I had to pass through Germany professionally. And I realized that I had internalized her fear. So as soon as I was in Berlin, I felt this great fear of the crowds. And as I looked at people, I thought, “Oh, that person's father or grandfather could have been the murderers.” And then, at some point, I had to ask for directions, and somebody was very nice and very kind. And all of a sudden, it dawned on me: Any of us could become these fascist monsters. It's pure denial to think that any of us is exempt. And equally, any of us can be the great rescuer. And at that point, I realized this is about human nature.

Howard: Right. And there's nowhere in the world where that is turned on its head than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict right now.

Aviva: Right now, the Germans have been the good guys for a while as they are taking refugees from Ukraine. But Ukrainians were once the bad guys.

Howard: That's interesting how that turns around. Ukrainians were notoriously antisemitic. Now they're led by a Jew, who Putin is calling a Nazi. It sometimes makes your head spin. Maybe it takes an artist to help us make sense of this.

My mother's family had been killed in the Holocaust. The whole time that I was growing up, my mother wouldn't have anything German in the house, and nothing Polish. And she had a great fear of the Germans. And so, at some point, I had to pass through Germany professionally. And I realized that I had internalized her fear.

Aviva: I think I had to think through the implications of assimilation and connect all the dots to white supremacy, through ecocide and patricide, patriarchy, and femicide, for that matter.

Howard: And we're seeing that in real time with the overturn of Roe v Wade.

Aviva: I would say they all come back to the same pattern of the reification of the impunity of the alpha male.

Howard: What is the answer? What is the conclusion? Your life's work involves trigger point theory. So how do you move it beyond an artistic context? How do you reverse what's happening?

Aviva: I do think that paying attention to how patriarchy plays out is critical. And that is not gender-based at all. I think the antidote would be in a complex adaptive model in which the various genders are just various agents in a larger system, and then you look at the relationships. And it's through looking at the relationships that you can discover predictive outcomes. But we don't do that. We reify the alpha male, what I call the fairy tale of the white knight on the white horse rescuing the damsel in distress. There's something wrong with that as a model for people to aspire to, either being the damsel or to be the white knight.

Howard: Bringing this all around to the beginning, do you see a similarity with Tikkun Olam? With the whole concept of repairing the world as you look at these complex models?

Aviva: So, the simple part of the answer is that we infer entitlement on people. Or some people simply presume entitlement—Trump is a perfect example. Or some people, like white supremacists, grab entitlement. But if we want to have a truly democratic world, if we want to really solve our problems, we have to do what I identify in trigger point theory as layering the information. You can't layer the information if it's only one tribe. Right now, when they ban books in Texas, they’re saying there's only one tribe whose point of view counts. We know that unless you have the information that black people and indigenous people, and many other groups of people can provide, we don't know how these parts can fit together. It's an untenable system to have a small group of people in power over a great many people. And at some point, the pitchforks are going to come for those people in power.

The thing that you taught me, most of all, in the writing was how to bring in the empirical sensory experience of whatever the story was—the fundamental experience of antisemitism and assimilation, for that matter in what we’re discussing now. And this whole history is just the experience of grief. How hard it is to just sit with the grief of the consequences of the worst parts of human nature. Justice. And that's what Tikkun Olam comes down to in my mind. It's ultimately about a passion for justice.