Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: The Downside of Resilience
The Israeli media are replete with one word: Resilience (in Hebrew: khosen). It’s not surprising why, given what the country has been through this decade: Covid, the Judicial Reform/Revolution brouhaha, and then a couple of serious war campaigns with missiles galore descending on the population. Throughout all these challenges Israelis have held up quite well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’re over with, given the Iran War’s non-total-victory, not to mention ongoing bombardment from Hezbollah in the north.
So here’s an interesting question: can a person or an entire country have too much resilience? In other words, could resilience be counter-productive under certain conditions? The answer is yes!
Almost twenty years ago, social scientists studied a trait called “grit,” defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” A decade later a few other researchers asked whether “grittier individuals might incur some costs by persisting when they could move on” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2015.08.004). Their conclusion: “grit” could indeed be bad if taken to an extreme. Why? People with high levels of grit were more likely to continue dealing with issues or projects that were clearly unattainable from an objective standpoint. Metaphorically, instead of ceasing their efforts or trying alternative solutions they kept on banging their heads against the wall with greater intensity.
Is there a difference between grit and resilience? Not really; they’re two sides of the same coin. “Grit” is the willingness to continue pursuing the same internal goal with the identical tool; “resilience” is the ability to withstand external challenges. In both cases, however, there’s a similar limit to what a person (or society) can do or withstand. The question then becomes: where to draw the line?
Psychology studies agree on the same general conclusion; it’s called the U-shaped curve (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20939649/). Individuals who experienced some adversity in the past (the left-side slope of the U) exhibit better long-term mental health than those people who had no difficult experiences (the U’s bottom) or had too many difficult challenges (the right-side slope of the U). Given that societies are made up of individuals, much the same is true of large groups as well.
Undeniably, over its eight decades of existence, the State of Israel has had to face an inordinate number of very trying challenges. These were not only external – although such tend to be existential – but internal as well i.e., large social schisms that also take their toll on resilience. Thus, if many countries around the world in the 2020s had to deal with Covid, and somewhat fewer with the recent Iran War, not many (if at all) combined those two challenges with highly disruptive, internal disagreements such as Israel’s highly controversial Judicial Reform/Revolution policy, followed by the (anti)draft exemption legislation for the government’s ultra-Orthodox partners.
As a result of all this, by now many Israelis are on the wrong side of the resilience U-curve. For instance, internally many Galilee residents have not returned to their northern Israeli homes and don’t intend to until Hezbollah is completely neutralized one way (total destruction) or the other (political agreement with the Lebanese government to neutralize the Iran-backed terrorists).
And then there’s the external response. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, over 69,000 Israelis emigrated in 2025 – the second consecutive year of record-breaking leavings. And that’s after a sharp increase in 2024. More than half of these 2025 emigrants were native-born, many of them young families. At the same time, only 19,000 Israeli citizens returned from living abroad – resulting in an overall large, negative, net migration. In fact, since the present right-wing government came to power and almost immediately started pushing its Judicial Reform/Revolution program in early 2023, over 200,000 Israelis have left the country.
In 1970, the noted social scientist Albert Hirschman published a short but highly influential book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty. It would have made more sense to reverse the title’s order because most citizens start off being loyal to their country. When they think that things are going in the wrong direction, they then raise their voice (protest, etc.). It’s only when they feel that their efforts are useless that most head for the exits – either physically leaving the country or psychologically removing themselves from politics and withdrawing from the broader society.
Hirschman did not use the word “resilience,” but it constitutes the core of his analysis. “Loyalty” is a form of passive resilience – accepting the status quo; “voice” is active resilience – believing in change and acting upon that belief. But when resilience breaks, the only rational thing to do is “leave,” either physically or mentally.
Most Israelis today are somewhere on the “wrong” side of the U-curve. You can call it what you want – voice or quasi-exit – but their mental state goes a long way in explaining the consistent survey polling results over the past two years: they want to vote out of office this governing coalition that has been banging the voters’ heads against the same wall for much too long. Even for battle-hardened, tough Israelis, there’s a limit to their passive resilience.
