Here’s my answer: everything in the story could have happened, even if it didn’t

You never know what you’re going to find when you start writing a story.

Oh, you have some vague ideas. You want to explore how the trauma of the Spanish expulsion informed the messianic fervor that swept through the Jewish world, culminating in the debacle of Shabtai Tzvi. How the golden era of Tzfat was born from the brokenness and destruction of Spanish Jewry.

As I wrote this serial — it’s a two-year process, beginning with research, and culminating with those two words that you can’t quite believe as you type: The End — I held some questions in my mind.

Can we heal after our trust in the world has shattered — and if so, how? Can we forgive ourselves if we do the unthinkable? What do loss, trauma, and failure do to a person? What we read about as a collective trauma — events that take place to us as a nation — is magnified in each person’s life, and becomes an individual struggle.

My three main characters reacted in vastly different ways: Bilhah, for whom displacement was mingled with abuse — physical, emotional, and spiritual — honed her survival skills. Leonora sought desperately for rectification, and failing that, longed to bring the Final Redemption, mirroring the communal longing for restoration and comfort. And Eliyahu, who was perhaps least affected, suffered his own losses, causing him to reject the world and spurn relationships until he was coaxed out of his literal cave by Yannai.

Bilhah

Some of the most difficult scenes for me to write were those of Bilhah’s childhood. The abuse she suffered encompassed every area.

In my other hat, as a therapist, if I had to give Bilhah a diagnosis, it would be CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Giving that diagnosis, while feeling foreign to me as a writer (I create people, I don’t lift them out of the DSM V), can be helpful to a survivor. It gives a label and sense of legitimacy to her bewildering array of symptoms: the moments of dissociation, her profound distrust in others and in life itself, her quiet anxiety that caused her to view the world as something that could rise up and pounce at any moment.

It would have been easy for me to have staged some kind of regret/apology/forgiveness scene: not just easy, but almost expected. The Western, Christian world puts a tremendous emphasis on forgiveness, but the Torah tells us that forgiveness is not always an obligation, nor even desired.

To have Bilhah forgive her father may have tied up the ending in a big pink bow (something I always resist, as you may have noticed), but I felt that doing so would be a betrayal of her story, the depth of her wounds, and the pain of all other abuse survivors. In fact, one of the most powerful moments, for me, was when Yannai affirmed Papa’s imprisonment. “Ah. Good,” he said. “The Almighty metes out justice, you see.”

With these words, Yannai has righted one of the most fundamental and painful aspects of Bilhah’s past: he has restored the world to its foundations of right and wrong, good and bad. The whole world might have told Bilhah that her father was a good man, a messenger of G-d who had printed the Talmud after it was all but lost in the Expulsion from Spain. But she knew the truth — and she was right.

It’s something I see in my therapy clinic: when the abuse is perpetrated by an authority figure, then the survivor’s trust in the world, in justice, in G-d Himself is shattered. Part of restoring that trust involves reinstating right and wrong. Acknowledging, bearing witness to what took place and defining it: this was wrong. He is wrong. This is evil.