Time,history and mythology in the cultural construction of the “nature of pain”: positioning Jewish settlements' evacuation within the religious timeline

Abstract

The concept of cultural trauma serves as a useful analytical framework for analyzing social processes of the creation of trauma narratives. Following the conceptualization of “cultural trauma” by Jeffrey Alexander, this article focuses on representations of the “nature of pain” produced by mental health professionals who identified with Religious Zionism working Jewish settlers involved in the 2005 evacuation of from Gaza and the West Bank. Based on ethnographic and written materials collected during fieldwork at a mental health center that offered professional interventions to settlers, I argue that the “nature of pain” associated with the evacuation was represented by religious practitioners through reference to otherwise distinct contemporary and biblical events and characters. This specific narrative organization exposes the normalizing function of time in narrating trauma. The article demonstrates how, by framing the evacuation story within a religious timeline, the settlement evacuation was transformed from a painful episode of ideological and messianic failure to a crucial step in a long journey toward national redemption. I argue that the transformation of a narrative of failure into a narrative of redemption is not only a matter of homologation between contemporary and ancient Jewish history and mythology, but also an act of revitalization of collective identity.