Jung describes a “complex” as a fragment of the psyche, emotionally charged and buried in the unconscious, that seizes control of perception when activated. These complexes are not chosen. They emerge unsolicited, often from unexamined pain, fear, or inherited narratives.
No one escapes them. I certainly haven’t. They explain how otherwise decent people can behave in baffling and morally catastrophic ways. It is the transformation of the beloved into the stranger, of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, or Walter White into Heisenberg. We all live in tension between who we hope to be and what stirs beneath.
If I were to hazard a careful speculation (not an indictment), it would be that two powerful complexes have been activated in those I once trusted to see clearly. Their convergence has created a kind of moral short-circuit, the fallout of which I experience as abandonment disguised as principle.
The first complex is ancient. Antisemitism has sedimented over three millennia, shaping instinct, imagination, and judgment long before reason arrived. The Jew has always been the collective scapegoat, so naturally, we appear as “oppressor” in the false binary of modern moral imagination.
The second complex emerges from my peers’ self-image which is empathic, righteous, and principled, upon which their sense of meaning and virtue depends. Anything that threatens one’s self-image (regardless of construction) doesn’t just feel like criticism, but annihilation.
Their empathy flows to suffering, but more keenly to the symbolic innocent. Gazans are framed as the archetypal oppressed (stateless, brown, and grievable) while Jews, especially Israelis, are cast as hardened white-passing survivors-turned-state-builders. In a reductionist culture that equates power with guilt, Jewish strength not only erases Jewish pain, but is recast as villainous. //
I recall, perhaps bitterly, that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened so that God might deliver him a lesson he would never forget; that we are commanded not to hate the Egyptian, for we were strangers in his land; and that Christ, in his agony, still prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It is not my job to bring friends or enemies to consciousness. But for their sake and for mine, I can no longer remain silent. The Torah commands: “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.” (Leviticus 19:17)
This rebuke is not vengeance. It is an act of spiritual hygiene. A way to prevent my conscience from curdling into complicity.
Empathy that never reaches the particular is not empathy, but abstraction. Jews, if nothing else, are particular. We are not asking for guilt or allegiance. We are not asking to be centered. We are simply asking to be seen. //
Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” A reckoning may come to my friends, as it often does, and often with great cost.
I pray it brings not ruin, but reflection. Not shame, but conscience. Not performative solidarity, but the real thing.
