I am sad. I am scared. I am angry.
Like many of you, over the last few weeks, I’ve been following the news about the kidnapping and murder of Naftali, Gilad and Eyal, followed by the revenge killing of Muhammed, followed by increased rocket attacks by Hamas towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, followed by military response from Israel into Gaza. And I am particularly sad, scared and angry about what might follow next.
But what has been most challenging for me personally has been the internal tension between my liberal values and my loyalty to Israel—and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way.
Last month, I mentioned how much I value Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: How Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. He uses a framework that has helped me understand why I have felt so torn these last few days.
Morality, Haidt argues, isn’t just one thing. It has five main different facets to it—care for others, justice and fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity. Liberals, he notes, tend to focus mainly on the first two (care and justice), and feel much less strongly about the other three (loyalty, authority and sanctity).
Most of the time, liberals are deeply focused on caring for others, so when people are in harm’s way, we simply see that they need our support. When we see Boko Haram kidnap girls in Nigeria, or genocide in Darfur, or millions of immigrants unable to enter the United States, we feel motivated to act.
But when it comes to Israel—especially when it is under attack—many liberal Jews also embrace a sense of loyalty, as well. And the result is that our “care” foundation comes into direct conflict with “loyalty” foundation.
On the one hand, our sense of care is aroused when we see the citizens of southern Israel under constant rocket attacks from Hamas, as well as innocent Palestinians who are caught in the crossfire. On the other hand, when we see how poorly the media portrays Israel, or when we feel like other Jews are not rallying to defend Israel, our sense of loyalty rises to the forefront.
And that’s the reason why so many liberal Jews are feeling so torn about what is happening in Israel right now—two of our foundational beliefs are in conflict.
Now, we may never resolve this conflict within ourselves, let alone the conflict in the Middle East. But when we do feel this tension, we need to remember two things.
First, both care and loyalty are strong foundations for our sense of morality. Indeed, if you are feeling torn right now, that’s a good thing, because it means that you have a broad and deep sense of what right and wrong might entail.
Second, care and loyalty are not the same thing. They motivate different types of actions, and different people may prize one over the other. So when we get angry at people because we think they are being either disloyal or uncaring, we need to recognize that they may be valuing a different element of their morality than we are.
Ultimately, when we are feeling torn between our loyalty to Israel and our care for others, we should remember the words of Walt Whitman, ““Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
May we be large enough to embrace both our sense of loyalty and our sense of care, and finally create the peace that we all so desperately want.
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