Social rejection turns people dark. It brings out their shadow. Everyone has negative personality traits, even if they’re only buried like seeds – but consistent social isolation waters them. And through this cycle, the Jewish People have become a sort of “receptacle” for humanity’s shadow archetype. We are carrying the intergenerational trauma of centuries of separation and ostracism – and have built up the mental defense mechanisms needed to cope with it.
Many of those mechanisms are fundamentally antisocial. And foremost among them is the idea of “Chosen-ness.”
The Nerdy Kid
It’s a classic pattern: when the nerdy kid gets rejected and has to spend his adolescence alone, watching others have fun, and being teased for being different, he builds up resentment, and a sense of specialness. “They’re not picking on me because they’re better – they’re picking on me because I’M better.”
To come
[Examples of how Jewish scripture and culture, both historical and contemporary, include this thinking.]
And then he might even start fantasizing about justice and revenge. Sitting by himself at the lunch table for nerds, maybe flanked by a few other kids with a similar experience, he plots a future of getting rich, buying a company, being the boss, and then giving orders to the jocks who bullied him way back in high school, and telling them “no, you can’t take a vacation.” Or even worse, building super-weapons to conquer the world, like a comic book villain.
And the comic-book part isn’t entirely a joke. Israel is at the forefront of building the super-weapons today – spyware, AI targeting systems, and weapons marketed abroad as “battle-tested.”
Evidence to add
[Israel's weapons and surveillance export industry – e.g., NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, AI targeting systems used in Gaza, and Antony Loewenstein's The Palestine Laboratory.]
Why I Empathize
But, being someone who has suffered social isolation myself, I empathize. I can’t blame the ostracized for resenting their ostracizers. And that’s why I’m not pegging Jews as the sole cause of the conflict. That would be flipping around to the opposite extreme from the current zeitgeist. “All of it is the Jews’ fault” is as extreme as “None of it is.”
Integrating the Shadow
I’m familiar with Jung, and I know you don’t beat the shadow by destroying it. You have to integrate it. That takes a whole lot of truth being learned and understood. So I’m asking Jews to learn about our people’s shadow, including the dark things done to other peoples.
And you don’t heal the shadow divide by destroying your shadow – on either side. It doesn’t work. The shadow has to be integrated.
But I also want the Gentiles to appreciate that the Jewish shadow is their shadow too. The Jews may be serving as the receptacle for the archetype, but Humanity as a whole is what’s been filling it up. Jews are still part of Humanity, and Humanity is what ultimately created this shadow, through a trillion little unloving choices (and a few big ones), repeated over centuries.
This is the Gentiles’ contribution to the conflict. Both sides have a reckoning to do.
Perhaps, in the end, the function of the Jews is to make humanity better, in a roundabout way, by mirroring the collective shadow to be integrated.
If the human race can figure this puzzle out, I feel that we “graduate” to a more whole and healthy form of civilization.