Israelis at a Tel Aviv beach on a hot winter day, January 21, 2023. (Avshalom
Sassoni/Flash90)
In the 2024 Gallup poll on happiness and well-being, Israel ranked fifth in the world. Having experienced the horrifying atrocities of October 7th, with 1200 of its citizens mutilated and murdered, with over 200 of its citizens taken hostage, in the midst of a war in which their young men and women are dying, when hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, when most of the world is against them, when the International Criminal Court of the Hague issues an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister as a war criminal, when hundreds of thousands of American university students have lost their minds in a frenzy of antisemitic venom, calling for the death of Jews – in the midst of all this, Israel ranks fifth in happiness globally.
Why? Surprisingly, Israelis are not outliers. Nations often react to the misery of invasion and death with positive feelings
During the London Blitz of 1941-42, when Great Britain stood alone against the Axis powers, forty-three thousand Londoners were killed, while another fifty-five thousand were injured by the end of the war. For fifty-seven consecutive nights, Germany bombed London. A million buildings were either damaged or destroyed. The fabled “stiff upper lip” of the British remained intact. In the midst of the bombing, with destruction all around and sirens wailing, an English psychologist observed, “Small boys continued to play all over the pavements, shoppers went on haggling, a policeman directed traffic in majestic boredom and the bicyclist defied death and the traffic laws. No one, so far as I could see, even looked into the sky.”
Another observer, British sociologist Richard Titmuss, reported an “unsettling vista of smiles” amongst Londoners during the blitz. Ogden Tanner wrote, “Perhaps the most notable change in behavior of these wartime populations” was a sudden increase in “spontaneous communication. Exchanging jokes and war stories with virtual strangers became widespread…many Londoners later had an odd sensation of being more fully alive during the war than at any other time in their lives before or since.”
Malcolm Gladwell, writing in David and Goliath, provides this diary entry from a young woman whose house was shaken by an explosion during the blitz.
I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. ‘I’ve been
bombed!’ I kept on saying to myself, over and over again – trying
the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. ‘I’ve been bombed!..
I’ve been bombed – me!
She continued. “It seems like a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.”
Every evening for fifty-seven nights, Londoners could reasonably expect to be dead by morning. Surviving unscathed would likely elicit feelings of relief and happiness. Yes, we would be crushed by the deaths of friends and loved ones, yet to have survived would be a cause for wonder. Emerging from the bombings intact, bruised but still standing, they overcame the terror, and were relieved and proud of having made it through.
Sebastian Junger, a writer who covered the terrible Serbian war in the nineties, returned to Sarajevo twenty years later, “to find people talking a little sheepishly about how much they longed for those days. More precisely, they longed for who they’d been back then.” He spoke to a taxi driver who recalled his wartime experiences with a special unit that slipped through enemy lines. “And now look at me,” he said, waving disdainfully at the dashboard. Why did he long for those days? Because yesterday was heroic; today is prosaic. Yesterday his life was vital, today he drives a taxi.
Despite being severely wounded in the Bosnian war, Nidzara Ahmetsevic, “missed being that close to people, I missed being loved in that way…In Bosnia…We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you.”
Asked if people had been happier during the war, Ahmetsevic answered, “We were the happiest…And we laughed more.” Did she miss anything from the war? “I do miss something from the war. But I also believe that the world we are living in – and the peace that we have – is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do.” Actually, it’s not “f-d-up” at all. In spite of its horrors, nostalgia for war is predicated on the moral clarity, camaraderie, social connection and sense of purpose war provides.
So - Why are all these people so happy? Why did Londoners during the blitz have the “odd sensation of being more fully alive during the war than at any other time in their lives before or since.” In normal times, in our day-to-day living, we don’t feel “triumphant.” When the rhythms of life are predictable, we don’t describe our lives as “pure and flawless happiness.” When we head off to work on Monday mornings, we are not likely to feel “more fully alive” than any other time in our lives. Londoners weren’t defeated by struggle; they were energized by it. Perhaps they had just grown used to the danger, inured to the fear and death. Was the woman who survived the bombing happy because she survived, or happy because she went through a unique experience? Or both? War galvanizes people into an intense and powerful community, “a brotherhood of pain.” During the blitz, as citizens hunkered down in subways, old statuses faded in what once had been a rigidly stratified society. Yes, we are suffering, but we suffer together. Shared struggle fosters equality and close human bonding.
For thousands of years, right up to this moment, the Jews have known they were alone in the world. Israel has experienced this in-group solidarity since the moment of its inception in 1948. Sometimes God helped them, sometimes He didn’t. Oh, they blended into the secular world across the millennia, across the continents, maintaining their identity, but also fitting in culturally. They spoke Latin, Greek, Arabic, German, French, Spanish and Russian, and English, and even strongly identified with the various cultures in which they were embedded. But they always knew, as they scattered around the world, they could only rely on themselves.
Israel has always been a western democracy; readers may recall from my May 20th piece, (1) MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO IS THE HAPPIEST OF THEM ALL (substack.com) that freedom and happiness are two sides of the same coin. The freest people are the happiest; the happiest people are the freest. Writing in The Jewish Chronicle in March, 2023, Miriam Shaviv pointed to social support, income, health, freedom, generosity and the absence of corruption, as reasons for Israeli’s life satisfaction. Social support was the most important.
“For all its internal divisions, Shaviv wrote, “Israel is still a country driven by family and community connections to an extent that is rare nowadays in the West… Even secular Israelis will have Friday night dinner together regularly and come together to celebrate festivals, Independence Day, births, bar and bat mitzvahs and huge weddings.”
Rabbi Yishai explained it this way: “Why is a person happy? Because he knows why he wakes up in the morning, he knows what his role is in the world…
“We, the nation of Israel, we wake up in the morning, we say ‘Modeh Ani Lifanecha.’ [I give thanks before You]. “We have a mission, to make the world a more spiritual place, a purer place with Torah and mitzvot. Therefore, we’re happy.”
With due respect to the rabbi, Israel has another mission: to survive. Israelis are happy because struggling and overcoming even minor problems, gives life satisfaction, purpose, substance, and psychological gratification; in short, a reason to be.
What is the conglomerate mission of the United States in 2024? In the past it was Westward expansion. To make the world safe for democracy. To give hope for a solution to the Depression. Defeat the Axis powers. To fight the Cold War. Today it seems to be, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. To make everyone equal? To stop Donald Trump by any means necessary.
Or is it to survive as a nation?
Postscript – Nostalgia for past struggling is not uncommon. It manifests itself in many areas of human life and will be the subject of the next piece to be published in five days.
Michael, the Bertrand Russell comment said it perfectly. I guess the point of those zombie shows is that in chaotic times, bad people will take advantage of the chaos; bad people will always be bad. I guess Hobbe's world of war of all against all, is based on human self-interest which seems universal. Interesting that the left is fine imposing order, yet Antifa, BLM , the leftists, antisemitic useful idiots on the campuses, seem to love chaos.
In all apocalyptic novels, as soon as the zombies attack or whatever, instead of helping each other, people distrust and turn on each other. That isn’t reality.
"People do not, at most times, love those whom they find sitting next to them in a bus. But during the blitz, they did."
Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual (1949)
Hobbes was wrong about the default human nature being for human beings to attack each other. And yet I still see his “truth” being used to justify the leftists’ claim that the only alternative to the iron fist government control is chaos. Voluntary cooperation and the invisible hand of spontaneous order work better in most cases.