Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint

Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

A Rabbinic Reflection on the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again, Season 2

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.

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Antizionism Is Not Normal, Nor Should We Normalize It

Antizionism Is Not Normal,

Nor Should We Normalize It

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

I am a child of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

 

List College, class of 1997. The Davidson School, 2002. The Rabbinical School, 2002. My father walked those halls. My sister did too. My family’s story, like that of so many American Jews, is braided into the sacred mission of JTS since its founding in 1886. My family dried pages of books, one by one, from water damage after a fire ravaged the JTS library stacks in 1966. So for me to speak of JTS is not to speak of an abstraction. It is to speak of a living covenant between generations of Jews who believed that Torah, peoplehood, and the Land of Israel are inseparable threads of an enduring, unbreakable fabric.

 

So let us speak plainly.

 

The decision by JTS to honor President Isaac Herzog as a commencement speaker is not a betrayal of Jewish values. It is an affirmation of them.

 

The recent controversy, amplified beyond all proportion, tells us far more about the current moment than it does about JTS. Six graduating seniors signed a letter opposing Herzog. Six. Twenty-four, four times as many, signed in support. Four JTS rabbinical students, none of them even graduating this year, added their names to the protest letter. This is not a groundswell. It is not a generational rupture. It is a small but loud dissent that is being misrepresented as something larger, something normative.

 

It is not.

 

And we must not pretend otherwise.

 

JTS has never been neutral about the Jewish story. Nor should it be. From its earliest days, shaped by figures like Rabbi Sabato Morais, himself heir to the trauma of Iberian exile, the Seminary understood what too many now forget. Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile. Jewish dignity without a homeland is contingent. Jewish learning untethered from Jewish peoplehood is incomplete.

 

Zionism was not an ideological add-on to Judaism. It was from its inception and remains its historical and spiritual unfolding.

 

To deny that is not nuance. It is willful amnesia.

 

There is a dangerous confusion taking root in parts of our community, a claim that one can stand within the tradition of serious Jewish learning while severing Judaism from Zionism. That one can graduate from institutions built on the covenantal relationship between people, Torah, and land, and then declare the Jewish state a moral aberration.

 

This is not intellectual courage. It is a rupture with the very foundations of Jewish existence.

 

No serious student of Jewish history can miss the pattern. From the destruction of Jerusalem to the expulsions of Spain and Portugal, from the ghettos of Europe to the ashes of the Shoah and the Shavuot 1941 Farhud in Iraq, Jewish vulnerability in exile is not theoretical. It is the central fact of our past. The founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination. They carried its urgency in their bones.

 

And now, in a moment when Israel is under sustained assault, militarily, morally, rhetorically, we are told that honoring the President of the Jewish state is somehow beyond the pale.

 

No.

 

As current junior at JTS’ List College Noah Lederman put it, “commencement is not a “safe space.” It is a sacred space. It marks the transmission of responsibility from one generation of Jewish leader to the next. To invite the President of Israel is to remind graduates that their learning is not detached from the fate of our people. It is bound up with it.

 

President Herzog does not represent a political party. He represents the State of Israel and the Jewish people. To refuse to hear him is not an act of conscience. It is a cowardly refusal to engage the complicated reality of Jewish sovereignty itself.

 

We can and must debate policies. We can and must wrestle with moral complexity. That is what Torah demands of us. But there is a line, just as rooted in the Torah and tradition, that must not be crossed. When critique becomes a denial of Israel’s legitimacy, when it echoes the language of those who seek not reform but eradication, it ceases to be Jewish discourse.

 

It becomes something else.

 

Let us be honest about the stakes. In a world where antisemitism is resurging with terrifying clarity, antizionism offers a convenient vocabulary through which ancient hatreds can be reframed as moral virtue. When Jews lend their voices to that project, even in the name of justice, they do not purify it. They legitimize it.

 

We dare not offer that gift.

 

Zionism is not political preference. It is the modern expression of ancient covenant. It is the insistence that Jewish life, Jewish memory, and Jewish destiny require a home in the world. To strip Judaism of that commitment is not to refine it. It is to hollow it out.

 

JTS knows this. It has always known this.

 

That is why it sends its rabbinical students to study in Israel. That is why Israel remains central to its mission. That is why honoring the President of Israel at commencement is not controversial in any deep sense. It is consistent.

 

The real danger is not that a handful of students dissent. Dissent has always been part of our tradition. The danger is that we begin to treat antizionism as just another legitimate Jewish position, one among many, equally rooted, equally valid.

 

It is not.

 

Antizionism is not normal. Nor should we normalize it.

 

To the graduates of JTS, I say this with love and with urgency: You are heirs to a tradition that refused to disappear, that commits to a Jewish evolutionary tradition. You are beneficiaries of generations who dreamed not only of surviving, but of returning, rebuilding, renewing Jewish life in its fullness, the deepest meaning of three words that have become, once again, defiance: Am Yisrael Chai!

 

Do not be the generation that forgets why that dream mattered.

 

Stand in the fullness of your inheritance. Study deeply. Argue fiercely. Care about justice. But never sever yourselves from your people. We were once denied our national identity as the cost of emancipated thinking. Do not imagine that Judaism can be disentangled from the reality of Jewish sovereignty without losing something essential, something irreplaceable, something necessary.

 

Zionism is not an accessory to Jewish identity.

 

It is one of its core expressions.

 

And JTS, in honoring the President of the State of Israel, is not betraying its mission.

 

It is fulfilling it.

 

 

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