Jake Tapper is one of the talking heads for CNN. He is one of my favorites as he always treats people with respect even in the midst of hard exchanges. He is direct and pulls no punches. At the same time, he has a great deal of sensitivity about him, but something happened as he was conducting an interview just after the beginning of the Israel and Hamas War. Jake is Jewish.
There was a photograph of a young person who was killed by Hamas. His mother was telling Tapper what her son was like. I noticed that Tapper was uncharacteristically at a loss for words as he was always the professional at all times. But this time, he was different. He couldn’t find the right words or speak as he was choked up. It reminded me of times when someone was giving an address in Chapel and became overwhelmed by emotion. I would give them time to recover on their own but I often wanted to go to them and provide them with comfort. I felt the same way about Tapper in that moment. I wanted to climb into the TV screen to help him keep moving forward with his remarks. When he finally got his composure back, he said, “That could have been my son. He looks just like him.” Two Jewish boys, one killed by Hamas and one living the life of a teen in America.
There is a key learning here provided by Tapper’s response. Antisemitism, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobia attacks are now out of control across the world and in our nation. They are the product of our inner child of the past which is also the title of a book by Hugh Missildine, a psychiatrist. The essence of the book is that we take the various manifestations of our childhood and carry them with us through life. There are ten examples of what happens. For example, if your parents emphasized perfection, then you will have an emphasis on physical, intellectual, and social accomplishment.
I believe that we carry our younger years with us particularly for those who experience hardship such as people who are marginalized like Jews, Palestinians, people of color, or those who have had to overcome a great deal of challenges regarding classism.
I think that Jake Tapper surprised himself when the sight of someone Jewish who looked like his son had been killed. This touched his own struggle with antisemitism in his life. He attended a Jewish Independent School as a young person. It was near our old campus. I believe he came face to face with his own Jewish identity or he wouldn’t have been overcome with emotion when he saw someone who was killed who “could be just like his son.” That could be a hot bottom for him for it was an emotion that he couldn’t avoid. Hot buttons are formed when we are young. When certain conditions arise, in this case with Jake touching on his inner child as a Jewish student, can stop us in our tracks as was true for Jake Tapper.
That is true for all people, but given the time in which we are living, it is the world the Palestinians and Jewish people are responding to in a dramatic way. For many they have grown up hating one another as the status quo. My concern is what will the children of Israel and Palestine take with them into their future? Your identity as a child plays a huge role as Jake Tapper discovered in that moment when he proclaimed that a dead Israeli lad looks just like my son. A Palestinian parent is confronting this harsh reality where they too are overcome with grief for the same reason. That awareness of our inner child is the engine around current hatred across our country and our college campuses. It is a group dynamic that we studied in ethics class. Philia, the Greek word for friends, acquaintances, and colleagues has many dimensions including that it makes good intentioned people better, and ban intentioned people worse. It is how groups work! AA is an example of Philia working for the good!
There are others who have joined the chaos who are not Jew or Palestinian. We see this as anonymous messages of hate cover our land. If you don’t sign something or a petition, then your voice is singing the song of cowardice. There is that turn of phrase, “put your money where your mouth is.”
But there is more that I call the paradox of prejudice. You can’t take a stand for or against any group without making it a movement that you can’t control. All groups have a moral or immoral code. Peace is a threat to hate. Hostility is the only world some people know. But what about the children and adults who need and want a different world of peace and good will? To stop too much hatred and prejudice, we have to start with dialogue. Hamas is not going to permit that to happen and neither is Netanyahu who, like Trump, is one step away from jail. “This will be a long war,” said the Israeli prime minister. He coupled that comment that there would be no “cease fire.” He texted others last night that said that he was not responsible for not being aware of the attack by Hamas. When feedback came back to challenge his view, he quickly took the posting down.
I learned a different kind of decision making that may be helpful here. I had Todd Carmichael, founder of LaColombe coffee and adventurer, speak to our community about back-end decision making. He pulled a sled with wheels across the Sahara in Africa and Death Valley in our Southwest. Actually, the heat caused him to stop that adventure. He practiced for these adventures by pulling a truck tire behind him on his home town’s streets. He had other adventures as well going to places where coffee beans were being grown for his company. His wife, Lauren, was in remission from cancer when Todd was attempting to be the first person to cross Antarctica pulling his sled behind him. His goal was to be the first person to do that, and he succeeded, but people didn’t realize that he carried a cellphone with him and called Lauren each night. That was his focus. His question to himself and his wife was what would make me stop this adventure even if I were one mile from the finish line? His answer was if I called and she had relapsed. That was the guiding principle. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised when he brought me a box of the different varieties of his coffee which are served at the Ritz and the Four Seasons. I love the taste of coffee.
Right now, everyone is focused on how to win this unwinnable war, but nobody is asking, “What would it take to stop it? Don’t stop there. What would it take to have a two-state solution? Put that energy of hate into an energy of peace. What is the inner child of a Jewish or Palestinian child experiencing now and how will that inform their future?
I don’t pull a sled around a desert, but I assure you that I have used Carmichael’s decision-making model in some high-stakes situations, and it works! The people who heard him shared with me that they were starting to think in those terms as well. Instead of the “means justifies the ends” (the Machiavellian Notion), try the “ends justify the means.” Focus on stopping something so that you can be more ethical and responsible.
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