Be a Partner in the Pulse of Beis Mevakesh Lev - For almost 20 years, B’chasdei Hashem, this space has been a home for seekers—a place where Torah is accessible to everyone, everywhere, without a paywall. We’ve shared over thousands and thousands of pages of learning together. But to keep the lights on and ensure this library remains free and growing for the next generation of Mevakshei Lev, I need your partnership.
Your contribution isn't just a donation; it's the fuel that keeps these shiurim reaching hearts across the globe. Whether it’s the cost of a coffee or a monthly sponsorship, you are making this Torah possible.
[Donate via PayPal/Zelle: alchehrm@gmail.com] Thank you to my beloved friends for standing with me.
I have long admired Gabor Maté. His writing on addiction and trauma is some of the most compassionate and clarifying work in the field. He reframes addiction not as pathology or crime, but as a response to pain, a way of trying to regulate what feels unbearable. That insight alone has helped thousands of people find dignity in their struggle.
Which makes his views on Israel all the more difficult to stomach.
Maté was born in Hungary in January 1944, at the very height of European antisemitism. Within months, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews would be deported to Auschwitz. His grandparents were murdered. His own survival was a statistical anomaly. That he emerged from such a beginning with an ethic of empathy is remarkable. But trauma, even when it softens the heart, does not always lead to clarity. Sometimes, it distorts.
Since October 7, Maté has not just criticized Israel, he has compared it unfavourably to Hamas. “Whatever you can say about Hamas,” he claimed, “multiply it by a thousand and it still doesn’t match Israeli repression.” He has said the attack was “inevitable,” and has called Zionism “antisemitism.” He has suggested that real Judaism lies in moral universalism, and that those who defend Israel are chauvinists clinging to a militaristic identity.
When Jews push back on this, he accuses them of weaponising antisemitism to stifle dissent, a tactic he has called “an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews”. If you’re Jewish and Zionist, you’re deluded. If you’re Jewish and critical, you’re righteous. These are the terms of the moral binary Maté now inhabits.
What drives a Jew to turn so publicly against his own people?
It’s tempting to dismiss Gabor Maté as simply misguided. But the truth is more complex, and more painful.
Assimilation and the need to belong. Firstly, there is the subtle pressure of assimilation.
In elite academic, cultural, and activist circles, it is not enough to be Jewish. You must be the right kind of Jew. The Jew who disavows nationalism. The Jew who apologizes for Israel. The Jew who insists that Judaism is only about universal ethics, not peoplehood, not land, not sovereignty.
For younger Jews, like Maté’s son, who is equally, if not more scathing of Israel, this conditional belonging is especially seductive. Zionism becomes a liability, a moral stain. To cleanse oneself, one must denounce it. Loudly. Publicly. Repeatedly.
This isn’t new. The Jewish left has long held internal critics who saw their own people through the lens of shame or guilt. What’s different now is the algorithmic reward structure: the more aggressively you condemn Israel “as a Jew,” the more moral authority you are granted. Not only by others, but by yourself.
Moral narcissism and the politics of purity. There’s a narcissism embedded in all this as well, one Gabor Maté exemplifies.
By placing himself above “militaristic, chauvinist Zionists,” he casts himself as a moral paragon: the ‘good Jew’ who dares to speak truth to power. But this posture only works by flattening Jewish identity and erasing its complexity.
Maté insists Judaism is about “relating to the divine,” while Zionism is a secular colonial project. This is a false dichotomy. Zionism is not separate from Judaism, it is its political expression. A return not just to land, but to agency. To reduce Zionism to militarism is to erase thousands of years of Jewish longing, exile, and persecution.
To call Zionists the “real antisemites” is not clever rhetoric. It is gaslighting on a historical scale.
The trauma loop. And, it’s worth asking: could Maté’s moral absolutism be its own kind of addiction?
Not in the chemical sense, of course, but in the psychological pattern. A compulsive, reactive return to the source of injury. A need to control, explain, moralise, and externalise. He cannot stop telling the story of Jewish power gone wrong. In doing so, he relives the trauma of powerlessness, but now with himself as moral judge rather than helpless victim.
In Maté’s case, the trauma of surviving the Holocaust did not deepen his bond with Jewish peoplehood, it ruptured it.
Instead of drawing the lesson that Jews must never again be defenceless, he absorbed a more universalist message: that power itself is dangerous, and those who wield it, even in self-defence, risk becoming the very thing they fled. This helps explain why Maté can compare Israel to Hamas and find Israel worse. Why he can call the Jewish State a “lunatic” regime and propose a one-state solution, which would effectively dismantle the only homeland the Jewish people have ever had.
This is not political analysis. It’s trauma misdirected.
This pattern often includes what psychoanalyst Anna Freud (1936) first identified as identification with the aggressor: a defense mechanism in which victims reclaim a sense of control by unconsciously adopting the perspective or values of those who once threatened them. If antisemitic Europe saw Jews as greedy, manipulative, and dangerous, some Jews internalised that view and now project it onto Israel. “See?” they say, “We are capable of cruelty too.” It becomes a form of self-punishment disguised as universal ethics.
In this sense, identification with the aggressor becomes a kind of self-harm, not of the body, but of identity. Much like addiction, it offers temporary relief from inner torment by reenacting the wound. It soothes guilt by affirming the oppressor’s narrative: they were right about us. And like addiction, it creates a cycle, each performance of moral purity deepens the disconnection from self, history, and peoplehood, requiring a louder, harsher performance next time.
There is a tragic irony in all this: Maté is doing precisely what he critiques in addiction, repeating pain in search of healing, but creating more of it instead.
The uses of Jewishness and the ‘self-hating Jew.’ Maté’s Jewishness is central to his public credibility. He leverages it not as a source of solidarity, but as a kind of permission slip. “I’m Jewish, therefore I can say the unsayable about Israel.” But what he’s saying isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s often historically and morally incoherent.
To say, for instance, that Zionism is not part of Judaism is to ignore thousands of years of Jewish yearning for return. To claim that Israel’s creation was a “grievous wrong” done to Palestinians, full stop, is to erase the genocide from which Jewish statehood arose. To call October 7 “inevitable” while failing to call it evil is to participate in a profound moral collapse.
And to portray Jewish power as uniquely dangerous, to weaponise your Jewish identity against the Jewish State, or to deny Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty, is to step into the role historically known as the self-hating Jew. That term isn’t a clinical diagnosis, and it isn’t always useful. But when these patterns repeat, it’s hard to call them anything else.
The self-hating Jew is not just angry. He is alienated. Alienated from history, from family, from belonging, from himself. He seeks redemption not through reconnection, but through renunciation. He wears his dissent as a badge of moral elevation. And in doing so, he unwittingly provides cover for those who would see Jews erased.
Jews like Maté claim they are rescuing Judaism from the grip of Zionism. In truth, they are draining it of its backbone, its body, and its lifeblood, dismantling a people’s identity while publicly flogging themselves for its existence.
Compassion Without Confusion. Gabor Maté is not a monster. He is a wounded man with a brilliant mind and a deep heart. But his story is a cautionary tale. Trauma can illuminate, or it can distort. It can open us to others’ suffering, or bind us to our own.
When Jews like Maté turn against the Jewish collective, they believe they are transcending tribalism. But too often, they are just reenacting an old pain: trying to purify themselves by renouncing the people who remind them of their fear, their guilt, their inherited vulnerability.
What Maté misses is that Jews do not need to be perfect to deserve safety. And Jewish nationalism is not inherently oppressive, it is a response to 2,000 years of statelessness, exile, and slaughter.
It is possible to grieve for Palestinians, to critique Israeli policy, to want peace, and still believe that Zionism is not a sin but a necessity. A nation of survivors should not have to apologize for surviving.
To Gabor Maté, I would say: your trauma is real. Your compassion is needed. But your moral maths is broken.
And it is costing your people dearly.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Substack
