Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church

12^th of October 2025

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

This week I received a fundraising circular from Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. It began by saying, ‘Trauma doesn’t end when a crisis is over.’ This is undoubtedly true. People do not recover from war or disaster overnight. But how long does trauma last? Generations? Centuries? Millennia? Throughout this series on the prophecies of Jeremiah, I have been discussing the Book of Jeremiah as ‘trauma literature’, a way in which a traumatised community comes to terms with the loss of its political and religious institutions, territorial integrity, and unquestioned national identity. But how long is the community to remain traumatised? Will a time come when trauma and loss will not be central to their identity?

Last week, we listened to mourning poems created in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. This week, we have gone a short way back in time. Ten years earlier, in 597 BC, the Babylonians had defeated the then-King Jehoiachin, deported him, his household, and some of the population of Judah to Babylon, and installed the puppet King Zedekiah in his place. It is between the respective defeats of kings Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, between the first and second deportations of people from Judah, that Jeremiah writes the letter we hear today. At the time, the people of Judah were split into two competing groups: one that followed the exiled King Jehoiachin in Babylon, and one that followed the puppet King Zedekiah in Jerusalem. What both groups had in common was a belief, promoted by false prophets, that exile would be brief and that all God’s people would quickly return to God’s land. In response to these false prophecies, Jeremiah warns that the exile will last for generations. How, then, are those generations to live?

After the former Yugoslavia fell apart into violence, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan developed the concept of a ‘chosen trauma’. A chosen trauma is ‘the collective memory of a calamity that once befell a group’s ancestors,’ in which they faced ‘drastic common losses; alongside feelings of helplessness and victimisation by another group’. A chosen trauma creates a shared identity among the descendants of the traumatised group. We might wonder why any group would wish to remember the trauma their ancestors experienced, but Volkan argues that while both chosen traumas and chosen glories can create large-group identity, chosen traumas do this more powerfully than chosen glories, and are the ones that groups most often turn to in times of strife.[1] Volkan explains that in the late twentieth century Serbian Christian nationalists used the defeat of their ancestors by the Islamic Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as a ‘chosen trauma’ to create a shared Serbian identity. Some of them, particularly those living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then began to feel entitled to do to their Muslim neighbours what they believed the Ottoman Turks had done to Christian Serbs six centuries before.[2] Volkan says that a chosen trauma can create an entitlement ideology as a group seeks to recover what their ancestors lost in reality and in fantasy.[3] In the former Yugoslavia, that entitlement ideology led to genocide.

Chosen traumas are transferred down the generations when those who first experienced the trauma are unable to mourn their losses or process their humiliation. The trauma of many Holocaust survivors, for example, has been unconsciously transferred to their children and grandchildren.[4] This transfer is not always unconscious. Norman Finkelstein, both of whose parents were Holocaust survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of concentration camps, writes of the annual March of the Living:

In this Zionist-inspired spectacle with a cast of thousands, Jewish youth from around the world converge on the death camps in Poland for first-hand instruction in Gentile wickedness before being flown off to Israel for salvation. The Jerusalem Post captures this Holocaust kitsch moment on the March: “‘I’m so scared, I can’t go on, I want to be in Israel already,’ repeats a young Connecticut woman over and over. Her body is shaking … Suddenly her friend pulls out a large Israeli flag. She wraps it round the two of them and they move on.”[5]

The March of the Living deliberately passes on the chosen trauma of the Holocaust to create a particular large-group identity.

The Babylonian Exile was a chosen trauma. Archaeologists and historians tell us that only a tiny proportion of the population of Judah was deported to Babylon, and yet the Bible as we have it is written for exiles, by exiles. Those who returned, the descendants of the exiles, defined themselves as the true heirs of Israel and argued that the descendants of those who had remained in the land were foreigners;[6] which is also why the Jews did not accept the Samaritans, who were simply the descendants of the people who stayed in Israel when it became an Assyrian province. Last week, in the mourning poems of the Book of Lamentations, we did hear the voices of those who remained in the ruins of Jerusalem. But most of the story of the defeat of Judah by Babylon is told from the perspective of the exiled minority, the priests and scribes who had the literacy to write their tradition and the social power to have it accepted. Eventually, all the people of God began to identify themselves as those who had been exiled and returned, even if that had only truly happened to a minority of them.

Most of the Book of Jeremiah, as edited by the exiled scribes, promotes a traumatised exilic identity. But we do also have the letter we hear today, which provides an alternative. Rather than encouraging people to hold on to their trauma, to retain their identity as the people of God by isolating themselves in an enclave, nursing the sort of hatred against the Babylonians that we see in Psalm 137, Jeremiah tells those in exile that God wants them to seek the welfare, the shalom, of Babylon. They are to intermarry with their captors: ‘take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters’. God told the first humans to ‘be fruitful and multiply’; now the exiles are to ‘multiply there, and do not decrease’ in Babylon. When God first gave the people of Israel their land, they found ‘a land with fine, large cities that [they] did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that [they] did not fill, hewn cisterns that [they] did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that [they] did not plant’. Now they are to ‘build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce’ in a foreign land.

To use Volkan’s definition, the descendants of the exiles are not to base their identity on the collective memory of the calamity that once befell their ancestors. They are instead to base their identity on their continuing relationship with God, wherever they may be living, and they are to promote the shalom of the city to which that God has led them.

How long does trauma last? Médecins Sans Frontières is right, trauma does not end as soon as a crisis is over. But once a crisis is over, we have a choice, in both our individual lives and as members of groups. We can choose to remain trapped in the trauma, basing our identity upon it. Or we can seek to overcome it, perhaps with the help of the psychologists and mental health workers that Médecins Sans Frontières’ fundraising letter encourages me to support. Those of us who have experienced trauma can nurse our hatred against those who harmed us, singing the words of the Psalm: ‘O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’ (Psalm 137:8-9) Or we can seek the shalom of the city, the well-being of those who once persecuted us.

We can divide the world into Us and Them, Exiles and Babylonians, Jews and Samaritans, or we can recognise that we are all human beings who have been created by the one God to live on this one fragile and wonderful planet. We know which choice Jesus, who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, wants us to make. Amen.

[1] Elizabeth Boase, Trauma Theories: Refractions in the Book of Jeremiah (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2024), pp. 135-140.

[2] Vamik D. Volkan, ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina: Chosen Trauma and Its Transgenerational Transmission’ in Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States (2002), pp. 86-97.

[3] Boase, Trauma Theories: Refractions in the Book of Jeremiah, p. 142.

[4] Boase, p. 140.

[5] Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflection on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2024), p. 136.

[6] Caralie Cooke, ‘Controlling the Narrative: The Babylonian Exile as Chosen Trauma,’ in In the Shadow of Empire: Israel and Judah in the Long Sixth Century BCE (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2021), pp. 61-76.