Becoming Yisrael: Wrestling With Fear, Trauma, and Freedom

I have had many conversations with friends about the unhealthy levels of anxiety so many of us are carrying in post–October 7th Israel. PTSD is a reality many soldiers are confronting after battle, and while it is not comparable, civilians too are experiencing the long-term psychological strain of living in a war zone. Some fear terrorists may invade their homes; others jump at every unexpected noise. A few weeks after October 7th, I caught myself imagining terrorists entering my house. My heart pounded; my breath became thin and shallow. I realised I needed to recalibrate.

Our survival mechanisms are hard-wired to respond instantly to threat. Fear triggers the classic fight, flight or freeze response. But today—when many of our fears are anticipatory rather than immediate—we must learn to manage fear and anxiety in healthy, grounded ways.

Anxiety is the fear of the future; fear is the fear of the present. Fear responds to a tangible threat. Anxiety—what Philosophers, Heidegger and Kierkegaard, call Angst—is a pervasive unease about ourselves and our existence. It arises from recognising the vastness of our freedom. Anxiety feels like vertigo—peering over a cliff’s edge—knowing that the choices we make now have consequences we cannot fully predict. As a way of avoiding this anxiety, we narrow our prism by clinging to the past, reducing our choices, or imagining our freedom to be smaller than it truly is. Even physiologically, anxiety constricts us: the breath shortens, the heartbeat quickens, vision contracts. But the right response to fear and anxiety is not fight, flight, or freeze. It is friendship—turning toward our fear rather than away. Sitting with it, getting to know and understand it. Only then can we widen our vision and see our freedom for what it is: a gift, an offering, an opportunity.

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Yaakov: Frozen Between Past and Future

In this week’s parsha, on the precipice of an anticipated encounter, Yaakov embodies this tension between fear and anxiety. He stands at a threshold—between the place of his exile and his covenantal homeland, between his past and his future, between the brother he deceived and the man he has become. And the Torah describes his state with two distinct terms:

“וַיִּירָא יַעֲקֹב מְאֹד, וַיֵּצֶר לוֹ”“

Jacob was very afraid, and he was distressed—(narrowed).” (Genesis 32:8)

“Afraid” speaks to the immediate threat of Esav’s approach. “Narrowed” points to the paralysis of anxiety.

Yaakov uses strange language when sending a message to Esav:

“עִם־לָבָן גַּרְתִּי, וָאֵחַר עַד־עָתָּה”

“I have sojourned with Lavan, and I have been delayed until now.” (Genesis 32:5)

The word אחר can be read as delay but also as  ‘other’. What Yaakov suggests is that this delay is not merely chronological; it is existential. Yaakov here describes a feeling of angst. Anxiety freezes choice. It traps us between who we were and who we fear we might become. Yaakov’s acher - delay is also —the “otherness” within himself, the parts he repressed—kept him suspended. We see this in the realm of trauma as well. Someone who has endured deep, consuming trauma may find that—if left unprocessed—it slowly erodes their capacity to choose, to act, to exercise agency over their life. Unintegrated experience keeps a person psychologically suspended. When parts of our story remain unacknowledged or exiled, we become stuck: unable to walk into the future, compelled to relive the past.

Yaakov experiences a childhood trauma when he is compelled to leave the security and safety of the tent, deceiving his father and brother at the behest of his mother.  Thrown suddenly from the protected tent of certainty into the stormy sea of human decision-making, Yaakov entered a world of freedom—of consequence, responsibility, and moral agency. Freedom is frightening precisely because it makes us authors of our lives; autonomous agents in a world of moral complexity.

Yaakov’s journey begins as an escape from Esav (Bereishit 27:41–28:9), but more truthfully—as Erich Fromm might suggest—it is an escape from freedom. In Haran, Yaakov allows life to happen to him: Lavan deceives him (29:23–27), Rachel “sells” him to Leah (30:14–16), and he delays fulfilling his vow to God (28:20–22). True to his name, Yaakov lives at the heel of others’ choices rather than the forefront of his own.

It is only when his life and family are in danger does ירא - fear force him to confront the deeper anxiety ייצר he has long avoided. Only after wrestling with the mysterious ish at the riverbank does he begin to look forward—Yashar-el, Yisrael—and step into the role of protagonist in his own destiny.

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Yaakov Wrestles With His Self

On the night before meeting Esav, Yaakov wrestles with a mysterious ish. On one level it is physical; symbolically, it is Yaakov wrestling with the parts of himself he has long avoided—the shame, guilt, and fear of becoming someone he did not intend to be.

When the ish asks his name, Yaakov replies:

“Yaakov is my name.” (Genesis 32:28)

Years earlier he had said, “I am Esav.” Now he longs to return to that moment and make it right.

The stranger responds:

“לֹא יַעֲקֹב יֵאָמֵר עוֹד שְׁמֶךָ, כִּי אִם יִשְׂרָאֵל” 

(Genesis 32:29)“Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel.”

Literally: Not Jacob you shall call your name anymore, but WITH Israel.

In other words: Walk WITH all parts of yourself. You cannot go back. You can only go through. Healing is not erasure. It is integration. Only then can Yaakov say his own name without repression, receive the name Yisrael—moving forward in freedom rather than being imprisoned by the past—and demand a blessing from the very force that wounded him. When we search for blessing or redemption outside ourselves, we often return empty-handed. Only when we realise that true blessing comes from within do we discover that we are the source of our own redemption.

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Becoming Whole: Befriending v Betraying

After the struggle, Yaakov limps away—wounded, yet blessed.

After his encounters with the ish and with Esav, the Torah tells us:

“וַיָּבֹא יַעֲקֹב שָׁלֵם.”“Jacob arrived whole.” (Genesis 33:18)

Wholeness does not mean the absence of difficult emotions. It means befriending them—learning their contours, their origins, their impact. Wholeness demands integration and the courage to draw meaning from our pain.

Yaakov becomes shalem not because his limp disappears but because he learns to walk with it. He transforms fear into fortitude, anxiety into inner strength.

Facing an external enemy—on the battlefield or in a war zone—can easily turn us into strangers to ourselves. We are thrust into morally compromising situations, forced to use our freedom to make decisions we never wished to confront. Trauma is not only the result of physically treacherous events but also of morally complex moments in which our choices are freighted with impossible consequences.

The way home—the way back to ourselves, both as individuals and as a nation—cannot and must not circumvent these experiences. We must learn to make friends with the complexity of our situation and integrate it in a way that allows us to remain a blessing: to ourselves, to others, and to the world.