The Hardest Mirror

The first three parts of this series looked at narcissism in individuals, families, and groups. This final part turns the mirror on ourselves and asks what healing would look like.

To look honestly in a mirror, you first have to remember what you used to look like. So allow me to start with something worth being proud of.

When the Romans crushed us, and then crushed us again after Bar Kokhba, we did something almost no defeated people in history ever did. We didn’t spend the next two thousand years grinding our grievance into a machine for conquest.

We turned inward instead. We became a people built around text, argument, and community. We had no army and no empire, so instead of conquering, we built.

And somehow we held it together with integrity, love, and respect for what we had made.

That is our inheritance. Now hold it up next to where we are today.

We have a state. We’re under siege. And for the first time in two thousand years, we have the one thing history denied us: power. Real power. Power to protect, and also power to harm.

Psychologically, power is the ingredient that turns ordinary human grandiosity into something genuinely great or genuinely dangerous.

I’ve lived most of my life in America and six precious years in Israel. Change doesn’t surprise me. What concerns me is change that doesn’t come from within us, but is pressed on us from outside.

I believe we are being changed just beneath our awareness. We are becoming a people defined by what we’re against.

Look at the texture of our political conversation, not any single party. It is saturated with enemies and antis, and there’s a strange comfort tucked inside. When we hold a foe in contempt, we never have to ask the harder question.

Who are we? What do we stand for, not against? What kind of people do we want to be in this land, toward each other and toward everyone who lives here beside us?

This is narcissism’s signature, in a nation just as in a single person. You stop knowing yourself and start defining yourself by what you hate. The enemy becomes necessary. The crown or the wound grows. Empathy thins.

And as long as there is an enemy, inside the camp or outside it, you never have to look in the mirror.

The antidote is a solid sense of one’s own worth. It is specialness without the need to feel superior, and injury without the need to turn the tables.

Notice the word need. When we are driven by need, we have lost ourselves.

There’s a term in my field for what may be happening to us. It’s called projective identification.

Someone treats you with enough hatred and contempt, for long enough, and one day you catch yourself hating too. You, in whom hatred was never native. You find yourself angry, objectifying, rigid, perhaps even impulsive.

And the one who provoked you has won.

He has reached inside and remade you in his own ugly picture of you. Our enemies call us callous colonial bullies. The real danger is that, exhausted and besieged, we slowly begin to play the part they wrote.

So let me be simple and urgent. No one gets to remake us. Not by killing us, which they have already tried. And not by turning us, psychologically, into the thing they always claimed we were.

That second defeat is the more unsettling one. It is the defeat in which we lose our center and start acting out a picture others have painted of us.

I first watched this dynamic on college campuses more than a decade ago. On October 7, we saw it in its most murderous form. If we’re not careful, it will change us.

We are already beginning to see it. When fear takes over, contemptuous cruelty starts to feel righteous, even within our own community. When our leaders stop holding themselves to ethical standards, something has shifted.

Our tradition knows this story well. Joseph was favored and brilliant, but he struggled to see how his elevation affected his brothers. They were injured and displaced, and they let their pain become a right to sell their own brother into slavery.

Each side acted as the important one, at the expense of the other. Neither could hold two truths at once. And both left a father grieving.

We never fully healed that break. We still live inside it, brother measuring brother: Israel and the Diaspora, left and right, haredi and non-haredi. It is the sinat chinam our sages warned us about.

And now we are heading into an election. Under this kind of pressure, elections drift away from practical policy and become tests of existential identity.

Us and them. With me or against me.

Our wound is the only wound that counts, and everyone else’s must wait. That is the smell of narcissism, wearing a flag.

So what heals this? Here is what I’ve learned from more than forty years in this work. A mirror only works when you trust the hand holding it.

Condemnation from outside just produces defensiveness and more digging in. Real change starts from within. It comes from someone trusted, someone who is implicated too, someone who can say, “Look at what we’re becoming. Look at what the best version of us actually requires.”

That is what I am trying to do here. I am no saint and no seer. But I love this precious land, and I fear what we stand to lose.

In Part Two, I wrote about lifnim meshurat hadin, going beyond the letter of the law and yielding what we are owed for the sake of something larger. For most of our history, that was a virtue we practiced without power.

Now that we have power, it becomes our test. Strength that chooses to yield is not weakness. It is the most mature use of power there is, and the clearest sign that no enemy has remade us.

Everyone is entitled to feel special, and the injured are entitled to want their wound set right. But once a wound becomes permission to treat human beings the way Narcissus treated Echo, it no longer matters how we got there.

We have stepped onto a path that betrays our tradition and our character.

We’re a small people in a large world. For two thousand years, our smallness kept us honest. It kept us building instead of conquering. It kept us turning the wound into wisdom rather than into a weapon.

We’re not small in that old sense anymore. But we can still carry that inheritance forward. We can choose to be the people who remember what it felt like to be the stranger, especially when nobody outside is asking us to.

This is the hardest mirror to pick up. Not because everything in it is bad. Much of it is extraordinary: a people who rebuilt a civilization, who created a culture of fierce argument and fierce love, who made something improbable and beautiful out of a hard land. That deserves real pride.

But the mirror also shows what we’re turning into under pressure. It shows where the wound shifts into contempt, where pride tips into cruelty, and where the hunger for certainty leads us to hand our voices to people who will use them against us.

We don’t have to become that. That’s the whole point. It always has been.

We know what the other choice looks like because our tradition handed it to us at the very start of this series. A young shepherd, who would later become Shimon HaTzaddik, bent over a spring and saw his own beauty. Pride rose up to seize him.

Instead of losing himself, as Narcissus did, he turned the reflection into a question: “Why are you proud in a world that isn’t yours?”

He used the mirror to become something better. He didn’t stop feeling special. He caught the moment specialness tips into superiority, and right there, he turned it into growth.

That is what owning your part looks like. It is not self-flagellation. It is the grown-up refusal to make the other person an object, even when you are frightened, even when you have been wronged, even when crushing them would feel like justice.

It is Micah’s charge, the one this series began with: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

The choice is still ours. But only if we’re honest enough to look.