Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint
Rabbi Menachem CreditorA Rabbinic Reflection on the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again, Season 2
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Last night two things happened. The “Daredevil: Born Again” Season 2 finale aired on Disney+, and Antizionist protesters once again chanted for Israel’s demise outside Park East Synagogue in New York City.
Let’s start with Daredevil. (Major spoiler alert.)
In the season finale, Dr. Heather Glenn, a disturbed and corrupt mental health professional, testifies in court while cloaked in the authority of her expertise, by reading from her own book, “Men in Masks: The Psychology of Vigilantes” (Chapter 2, Page 35 - the level of constructed detail in the Marvel miniseries is remarkable).
“The mask does not conceal, it reveals. The vigilante’s true self, she argues, is not the one hidden behind fabric and shadow, but the one that emerges when accountability is stripped away.”
In cross-examination, Attorney Matt Murdock’s, himself the hidden vigilante known as Daredevil, asks Dr. Glenn,
"Does a vigilante need a mask, if she never cultivated an alter-ego?"
His question lingers in response, almost like a quiet challenge to the premise itself: what happens when there was never an alter ego to begin with?
The show does not leave that question in the abstract. It answers it with images. A crowd gathers, animated by a sense of justice, fueled by righteousness. The target is clear (the Mayor of NY, also known as Kingpin), the moral lines feel clean, and the energy builds with a familiar and dangerous momentum. A powerful element of the crowd is that they’ve donned cardboard Daredevil masks in solidarity with their champion. (They also wear gaiter facemasks, from the neck to the middle of their faces.) And then, when they’ve got Kingpin cornered, the crowd becomes a mob and attacks him violently (the scene is gory and not easy to watch). The masks remain, but something else is revealed. Not just anger, but permission. Not just protest, but chaotic release. Without giving the ending away, suffice it to say that Daredevil intervenes and demonstrates actual heroism on the deepest level, especially according to the rabbinic maxim that true might is restraint.
It would be easy to dismiss this as comic book storytelling, as the genre’s reliance on presenting and challenging stark binaries of hero and villain. But that would miss what feels uncomfortably close to the surface. The visual language is not accidental. The gaiter masks, the slogans, the sense of collective moral clarity, all of it echoes scenes that have become part of our own civic landscape. In cities across the country, including here in New York, protest has increasingly taken on this aesthetic and this psychology.
The rationale for the masks is the fear of being recorded, identified, and harassed (“doxed,” in today’s parlance). The instinct toward self-protection in a hyper documented public square is understandable.
But masks do more than protect. They can also transform, creating distance between the individual and their actions. They lower the cost of escalation, inviting a kind of moral outsourcing, where responsibility absorbed into the anonymity by the group, removing personal accountability through collective identification.
What we witnessed outside Park East Synagogue last night, where protesters rallied outside for the second time in six months, including some scuffles between the police and Antizionist demonstrators was not an isolated eruption. It was part of a pattern that is becoming harder to ignore. A crowd that sees itself as righteous can begin to act as if self-determined righteousness itself is license. When Israel, and the Jewish commitment to national self-determination in Israel more broadly, are cast as embodiments of evil (a this-worldly stand-in for Kingpin, as it were), the complexity of reality is flattened into something far more combustible. Social media accelerates this, feeding narratives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance and truth.
And then there is leadership, or the absence of it. The recent veto by Mayor Mamdani of the city-council affirmed buffer zone bill which was designed to safeguard houses of worship and vulnerable communities, sent a message that the line between protest and intimidation is negotiable. That the burden of navigating that line falls not on those who gather, but on those who must endure the gathering.
The most unsettling part of the Daredevil sequence and most Antizionist protests is not only the violence itself. (I speak from personal experience, not only as the rabbi. Of UJA-Federation of NY during the last 3 years of incessant attacks on our local community but also having served as a congregation rabbi in Berkeley, California for 11 years, where such intense dynamics have long been at play.) The true danger is the self-perception of the crowd. They do not see themselves as a mob. They see themselves as a force for justice, as necessary, even heroic. That is what makes the moment so resonant. The danger is not only in what people do, but in what they believe they are justified in doing.
A mask can hide a face. It can also reveal a willingness to act without being seen, without being known, without being accountable. The question is not whether protest is legitimate. Protest is an essential response to the abuses of power. The question the mask represents is what happens when the structures within the protestors’ worldview that sustain nuanced, moral thinking begin to erode.
We are living in a moment when the line between conviction and absolutism is under strain. The language of “good and evil,” “hero and villain,” has its place, but when it becomes the only language available, it leaves little room for restraint. And without restraint, even the most deeply felt sense of justice can tip into something else entirely. Quickly.
Antizionist crowds, who scuffled with the NYPD last night and seem to see themselves as a vigilante army, ready to violently battle their perceived arch-enemy, are not a demonstration of justice. They are misguided and dangerous, vigilantism barely concealed behind ubiquitous masks.