On Disintegration and Return (part 2)

Large Scale, AKA Crash Theory

Jan 28, 2025

This is the second in a three part series; you can find the first post here.

Cycles of history

According to Benay Lappe, rabbi and founder of SVARA, the “Traditionally Radical” queer yeshiva in Chicago, every culture and society since the dawn of civilization has been grounded in what she calls a “master story.” This master story comes into being for the sole purpose of effectively responding to the big existential questions of life that eventually confront every person: why am I here? What is my purpose? What will I become? What will become of me?

This master story lives in both the recesses of a culture’s collective subconscious and in the expressions of its daily life. If you look for it, you’ll find this master story embedded in a culture’s history, its norms, governance, philosophy, art, song, myth, literature, and architecture.

“But every story,” Benay says, “will ultimately and inevitably Crash.” Put another way: the assumptions upon which the story is built, the answers the story provides, will disintegrate.

How does it happen? A more compelling story will come along with answers that speak more deeply to you, Benay explains, or an event will occur that clarifies all the ways in which the original story does not explain reality. Or something inside of you will shift and the answers of the old story simply won't feel true anymore.

The illustrative historical example of a Crash is the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70AD. For at least half a millennium before that destruction, the master story of the people of that land—then called Judea—centered around worship at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the home of YHVH, the unpronounceable name of the “one true god.” The answers to those core questions of purpose and becoming, the answers that provided frameworks for action and making sense of whatever happened in the world, would have all existed through the lens of worship at the Temple. A cyclical calendar of pilgrimages to the Temple where ritual sacrifices took place created a structure for time. A clear hierarchy of power with kings, priests, and levites—the helpers of the priests—created a structure for communal organization. Underpinning this whole system of life was the master story of those Temple Jews, one about ancestors being liberated from slavery by the one true god and the mandate to follow the covenantal instructions of that god as thanks for that liberation, instructions that included making that god a permanent home in a holy structure in the holy land which that god had bestowed upon his people as a blessing.

Imagine it: a person has the above master story embedded in their consciousness. When they are young, they are taught the importance of the pilgrimages to the Temple and to witness the sacrifices done by the priests there. When there is weather that destroys the crops, they are taught it is because of something gone awry at the Temple; when there is weather such that the harvest is bountiful, it is because all is well at the Temple. Likewise when there is personal tragedy or personal success.

And then that Temple is destroyed, decimated to rubble by an army the might of which they have only imagined from stories of the distant past.

What are they supposed to do? The Temple is no more. They and their fellow people have been dispersed from the promised land. How are they supposed to think, to make sense of their lives? Without the Temple, with the trauma of conquest and utter destruction in living memory, it’s easy to imagine the vast and deep internal formlessness washing through the survivors. A mass disintegration occurs.

The consequences of a Crash

“There are three and only three possible responses to any Crash, ever,” Benay explains.

Deny the Crash. Hold firm to the master story in spite of all that’s happened. Indeed, hold even tighter to it in defiance of all that’s happened. Believe with all your heart that if you hold tightly enough to the story, and if you recruit enough people to hold tightly to it with you—recruit them by sword if they do not come voluntarily—the force of your collective, zealous willpower will return you to the circumstances of your life before the Crash.
Accept the Crash and reject the master story. Jump feet first into a brand new story. The Romans have destroyed the Holy Temple? Okay, well that story’s over, time to move to the Arabian peninsula, or to a Greek island, or into the herd of a new prophet, where I will find a new story to explain the world in full, give me new answers, purpose, understandings. Benay describes this as “the baby with the bathwater option.” “Remember,” she says, “every story will ultimately and inevitably Crash, so this story too is going to Crash, and you're going to have to jump off of it into another story, and yet another, and on and on and on.”
Accept the Crash, embrace the Crash, but go back to the tradition, mine the master story for its wisdom in the face of this disintegration and use that wisdom as the building blocks for an evolved story. “Mix the old with the new and create a radically new tradition,” Benay explains.

Option three, Benay argues, is what those people called rabbis did in the centuries following the Roman destruction. These “fringey, strange, queer guys,” says Benay, “created a radical new Judaism that would have been unrecognizable to a Temple Jew.”

To Benay, a successful option three always begins on the fringes of a society before the actual Crash. With those who feel in their guts that the master story isn’t sitting right, that its assurances and certainties don’t actually explain their world and hold the answers it claims to.

Every culture and society needs its fringes to be the mining pioneers of the next evolution of its story for option three to work.

Wisdom of the wilderness

In the time of a culture’s disintegration, while the majorities regress to option one or jump ship to option two, how are those folks on the fringes, the ones attempting an option three, supposed to navigate the present? While they mine the Crashed story for its wisdom, how are they supposed to live?

Dan Libenson, founder of Judaism Unbound (and host of its eponymous podcast), president of Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, and Benay Lappe’s longtime study partner, says that this is when it becomes vital to embrace what he calls “the wisdom of the wilderness.”

Demonstrating an option three mindset, Dan mines this idea from the Torah story of the Israelites after the Exodus—specifically, their forty years of wandering that came as a consequence of the spies' fearful report about the Promised Land. There’s a beautiful display of the cyclicality of disintegration and return in the story of that generation, which was born into slavery in Egypt, experienced the return that came from freedom, and then disintegrated again at the prospect of achieving its divine charge.

So what was it they had to learn? What actually is the wisdom of the wilderness? When Dan talks about it, I believe he's pointing to a particular kind of consciousness that we can cultivate in the wilderness, one that combines humility before an unknown reality with activated curiosity. Those who are wise in the wilderness ask: what might we discover out here that, when combined with the mined wisdom of our crashed story, will lead us to a new return, to a renewed, working story?

In the story of the spies in the Torah, after hearing the fearful report of giants in the promised land, the Israelites become so terrified that some of them begin requesting to return to Egypt—better the devil they know, they seem to say, than the one they don’t. A wisdom of the wilderness begins first, then, with a determination not to go to backward, to say "no" to those who would lead us back to Egypt, back to a place that while familiar, only offers the illusion of certainty with its chains. (Today, we might consider this notion a precursor to Timothy’s Snyder first rule of not succumbing to tyranny: do not obey in advance.)

But this determined resistance isn’t enough on its own. The decision to enter the wilderness in the first place, to embrace the disintegration is, indeed, only an initial step. From there, we will find that to cultivate the adaptability, humility, curiosity, and innovative mindset we need demands a particular quality of attention and presence as we move through the uncertainty around us. Eyes open, hearts receptive—the wisdom we seek will come from unexpected places. In times of Crash, as Benay explains, truth often speaks through distant voices that have been long overlooked. We have to find the quiet to hear across those distances, to discover the ones who have been living in the wilderness for a while yet, doing their experiments inside the disintegration, extrapolating new patterns in reality that will help us find our way to a renewed return.

Where are we now?

It often feels to me like we are experiencing overlapping circles of disintegration in our reality, each one amplifying and complicating the others. Within Jewish life, traditional institutions and the frameworks of communal organization have become less and less compelling to more and more Jews. A greater awareness of the reality of American history is leading to a cynicism about the ideals at the heart of the American story, and globally we watch the rise of so-called “strong” leaders promising simple answers to complex collapses if only we hand over to them more and more power. And all of this plays out against the backdrop of climate change, which isn't destabilizing just ecosystems but the very foundations of how we organize human society.

What strikes especially painfully is how, in each of these spheres, we're watching option one responses gain momentum. Trump's return feels the most immediate and pressing example of this as its happening right here in America, but we see the ascendence of option ones echoing across these overlapping circles: in religious communities clutching ever more tightly to rigid interpretations of tradition, in nations worldwide embracing authoritarian promises of renewed greatness, in what feels like our collective inability to face climate reality without retreating into either denial or paralysis.

Remember the Buddhist insight that delusion, masking as the truth, is one of those “poison” paths to suffering. What comfort it offers in the face of all this uncertainty.

What do we do?

Jericho Vincent, rabbi and founder of Temple of the Stranger in Brooklyn, hosts a podcast and writes a newsletter called, “Survival Guide for a Spiritual Wilderness.” As part of this survival guide, they write, “You were put here in this historical moment for a reason. There’s lots of things you don’t have, but there’s also so many resources that you do have that would have staggered any of the billions of human beings who lived before the modern era. Be ambitious. Put your resources to work. Find your role to help heal our world and birth a better tomorrow.”

If you're anything like me, you may spend hours—unquestionably too many hours—consuming analyses of our current predicament. I often catch myself in a kind of compulsive cycle: reading articles, listening to podcasts, scrolling social media feeds, scanning Substack newsletters, seeking in every medium some crucial insight into what's happening to us. I return to these voices again and again, seeking what? Understanding, yes, but maybe more honestly, the comfort that comes from feeling informed, from having a framework to contain the vastness of our uncertainty.

It's vital, I think, to allow ourselves these moments of comfort, these attempts to make sense of our changing world. But perhaps we can use these moments not just for understanding, but as waypoints in our journey—each analysis, each perspective offering fragments of wisdom that help us navigate forward with resolve, resilience, and curiosity.

There is clarity to be discovered in times of disintegration. By slowing down to listen for those quiet voices who have long dwelled in this wilderness, pointing us toward new paths, we just might find our way to a new return.

Up next

In the last post of this series, I’ll share some of my own practices for navigating disintegration and return.