Israel’s “word of the decade” is Resilience (in Hebrew: khosen). It certainly has been necessary and well displayed through Covid, the Judicial Reform/Revolution brouhaha, a couple of serious war campaigns – the challenges kept coming, and Israelis have held up quite well through it all. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re finished, given the non-total-victory on the Iran War coupled with ongoing bombardment from Hezbollah in the north (notwithstanding last night’s 10-day cease fire).

Which brings up an interesting question: is there such a thing as too much resilience? In other words, could resilience be counter-productive under certain conditions? The answer, perhaps not so surprisingly, is: yes!

Two decades ago, several serious social scientists studied a trait called “grit” that they 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 was that indeed “grit” could be bad if taken to an extreme. How so? People with high levels of grit were more likely to continue working at undertakings or projects that objectively and clearly were unattainable. Put more colloquially and metaphorically, instead of stopping or trying alternative solutions they kept on banging their head against the same wall with greater intensity.

Is there a difference between grit and resilience? Yes, but they are really two sides of the same coin. “Grit” is the willingness to continue pursuing the same internal goal with the same tools; “resilience” is the ability to withstand external challenges. In both cases, however, there’s a similar limit to what a person (or society) can withstand. But where to draw the line?

Many research studies in psychology have come to the same general conclusion regarding what’s called the U-shaped curve (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20939649/). Individuals who in the past experienced some adversity (the left-side slope of the U) exhibit better long-term mental health than those people who had no adverse experiences (the U’s bottom), or conversely, faced too many such 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.

One cannot deny that over its 78 years of existence, the State of Israel has had more than its share of difficult challenges. These are not only external – although those tend to be existential – but internal as well i.e., large social schisms that also take their toll on resilience. Thus, if many countries 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 huge vituperative, internal disagreements such as Israel’s highly controversial Judicial Reform/Revolution policy, and then the (anti)draft exemption legislation regarding the Haredim.

Clearly, 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 do so until Hezbollah is completely neutralized one way (total destruction) or the other (political agreement with the Lebanese government).

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 with a sharp increase in 2024 compared to previous years. More than half of these 2025 emigrants were native-born, many being young families. At the same time, only 19,000 Israelis returned from 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 back in early 2023, over 200,000 Israelis have moved overseas.

Several decades ago, the noted social scientist Albert Hirschman published a short but highly influential book entitled: Exit, Voice and Loyalty. It would have made more sense to reverse the title’s order. 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 leaving the country or psychologically removing themselves from politics and withdrawing from the broader society.

Hirschman did not use the word “resilience,” but it is actually 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 far too long. Even for battle-hardened, tough Israelis, there’s a limit to passive resilience.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)