Iran and Emotional Whiplash

Cross-posting on both my Substacks.

“Emotional whiplash” refers to sudden shifts in mood, typically triggered by scrolling social media and reading different stories that are happy, sad, funny, tragic and enraging in the course of a few minutes (or seconds).

The last (nearly) two years have felt like that constantly for me, even offline, and I imagine for many other Jews and Zionists too. From the dark days of 7 October and the early months of the war and the heavy casualties taken by the IDF through the ups and downs of spiking global antisemitism, Hamas and Hezbollah missiles, hostages mistakenly shot, hostages released in prisoner exchanges, hostages daringly rescued, Houthi missiles, growing international condemnation of Israel, the pager operation, Iranian missiles and blood libels repeated by senior politicians from supposedly “allied” countries, not to mention the ongoing captivity of about twenty live hostages and many dead bodies, the last 616 days have been the emotional rollercoaster to end all rollercoasters.

And then the coup de grace: Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear programme, having run a days-long deception programme in which President Trump appeared to oppose the operation, while secretly approving it.

I saw a lot of triumphalism on Substack Notes today and, to be honest, I joined in, but I held back from sharing some of my thoughts and jokes, not because I think rejoicing over the death of the truly, genocidally, wicked is wrong (it isn’t; in fact, the Torah mandates it), but because this isn’t over. We don’t know how much further the rollercoaster is going to take us and what twists and turns will happen before the end.

Already, I’m worried about further Iranian reprisals. The IDF is still warning Israeli citizens to stay near bomb shelters so they can take cover at short notice if necessary. Israeli planes are still bombing Iran; we pray their pilots and navigators will return unharmed. We do not know (and, as civilians, we may never know exactly) how badly the Iranian nuclear programme has been damaged – certainly badly, but how far has it been put back? The Iranian government may take revenge through terrorist attacks on Jews or Israelis outside Israel, as they have several times in the past. And there are still the remaining hostages and ever-growing global demands for an end to the war in Gaza with no clear “day after” plans for stopping Hamas or a similar organisation taking over again.

The rollercoaster continues. What are we to make of it while we’re stuck on it?

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, perhaps the greatest Modern Orthodox Jewish thinker of the twentieth century, spoke of the difference between moods and emotions. Moods are uniform and simple. Emotions are complex and often contain opposites. Judaism, he argues, wants us to experience deep emotions, not simply moods. That is why our festivals often have a paradoxical element. On Yom Kippur, we feel closeness to God and forgiveness, but also guilt and contrition for our misdeeds. On Pesach, we experience the joy of liberation, but we remember and even experience (through eating matzah and maror, unleavened bread of slavery and bitter herbs) the oppression of slavery. HaShem wants us to be sit with complicated emotions and experience reality as multifaceted.

Although Rav Soloveitchik does not say it, it is this multifaceted aspect of life that makes people take refuge in simplistic ideologies or to resort to violence to reshape the world according to their own desires. It takes moral courage to face the world as it is, to resolve to work morally for its improvement and to learn from mistakes and to take setbacks in your stride, without giving in to hatred or despair. I do believe that the Torah equips us as Jews to do this and that together we will reach the end of the terrible rollercoaster that we got on nearly two years ago.

Am Yisrael chai