In recent years, reports of political corruption, abuses of power, and the promulgation of lies have dominated contemporary news and social media. The accusation of “false facts” and the growing perception of the distortion of events has led many scholars to turn their attention to the ways in which truth is created and the public manipulated. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated the nature of social and psychological modes of propaganda in antiquity. Drawing upon the fields of trauma studies, propaganda theory, and rhetorical criticism, in this paper I explore the social-psychological mechanisms the early rabbis employed in order to fashion their vision of reality. My analysis revolves around a pair of passages in Mishna and Tosefta Sotah in which references to the deaths of the founding rabbis are interspersed into descriptions of the destruction of the Temple and the proliferation of murders. I argue that this rhetorical construction establishes the demise of the rabbis as global traumas, which serve as conceptual echoes of the catastrophic epicenter of the collapse of Jewish sovereignty. My examination of these early rabbinic passages draws upon the foundational work of Cathy Caruth and Greg Forter in trauma studies as well as Richard Hidary’s recent work on rabbinic rhetoric, and stands in dialogue with Julia Watts Belser and Jill Salberg’s recent syntheses of gender, trauma, and rabbinic literature. While my analysis builds upon discussions of the rabbinic construction of authority, this paper charts new territory by focuses on the psychological dimension of rabbinic propaganda and by asking how non-rabbinic Jews of the early rabbinic period might have encountered and reacted to the rabbinic rhetoric of trauma.