Israel Breaks People's Brains
I have an aunt who is super Zionist. I have to confess this has interfered with our relationship somewhat. She unfriended me on Facebook years ago, when I called her patronizing for saying that my opinions about Israel are because I don’t really understand the situation — a button that does not work with me because, in fact, I do. This is the one whose granddaughter’s wedding I went to last year, where they did a five-minute prayer for the hostages under the chuppah and brought the Israel flags onto the dance floor during the Jewish dancing.
She eventually friend-requested me again; I didn’t accept it but I didn’t deny it, so she is a follower, and gets in her feed anything I post up as public. She has commented a couple times, the most recent one being when I celebrated Mamdani for his election victory. She just could not understand how I didn’t recognize the danger Mamdani poses to Jews. I said I didn’t agree with her analysis of the situation.
I should probably mention that said aunt has been a Democrat her whole life, like basically my entire family.
Last week my brother texted me and said, have you looked at Said Aunt’s Facebook page? I said no, and he said, I might want to. And on her page she had a bunch of MAGA-adjacent bullshit, decrying “woke” and reposting an LGB-but-not-Q reel. In other words, she has succumbed to the dark side.
I have been saying in my sermons since October 7 that when dramatic, tragic, disorienting things happen, we have to hold especially tightly to our sacred values, because the winds of change can blow us off our feet. Holding to sacred values helps us stay orientated. But we have seen over the past couple of years how many Jewish people, and virtually every Jewish organization and institution, are so shocked by Oct. 7 that they have completely forgotten their previous moral positions, for the sake of defending anything and everything Israel does. The paradigmatic example is the ADL, going so far as to jettison its broader civil rights platform in favor of a full-time focus on “antisemitism,” by which it mostly means anti-Zionism.
People have decided that loyalty to the Tribe is more important than literally anything else, including every other value they’ve always held dear. Israel has broken a lot of people’s brains, not just my aunt’s.
As someone who somehow escaped the clutches of my childhood and early adult Christian nationalism, I know all too well the moral enforcement mechanisms that kick in when someone steps outside the bounds of conformity.
Communities under stress often close ranks. Questioning becomes betrayal. Moral clarity gets replaced by loyalty tests. And then, as you say, people start making exceptions for what they once knew better than to defend.
Speaking as a Catholic, the same moral blindness has occurred with abortion as a single-issue Catholic cause. Fortunately we acquired Pope Leo.
Actually, though, white Christian nationalism is as far from the Gospel as morally possible.
So I understand.