I try to be guarded about my private/family affairs, so you may not know much about my upbringing and early life.  I was raised as a protestant, but that in itself was a close call. My mother’s father was born Italian Catholic but married a protestant and eventually left the church. My father’s father was an atheist, but my father had a religious experience in college and joined my mother in the Episcopalian Church.

I could a see parallel life in the family of my mother’s brother. He married a Hungarian Catholic and converted to Catholicism, so my five cousins on that side of the family are all Catholics. I don’t know exactly what I took from this beyond the fact that there are options, and not a lot is riding on your choice. Good people take different spiritual roads and there’s no reason to get exercised about it if they take a different one from your own. I guess perhaps the most unique thing about my experience is that I never got the sense that you’re simply born into a religion and stuck with it. But that’s probably the case for most human beings, at least if we’re being honest about it. There are usually severely high prices to pay for straying from the path of your family.

My childhood friendships were equally unusual. My next door neighbors were Irish Catholic and I was close to the three kids, but of the lasting friendships I made growing up, almost all of them involved kids with one Jewish parent and one Christian parent. One of my dearest friends had two Jewish parents but he tragically he took his own life, so it didn’t turn into a lifelong friendship. The one lifelong fully protestant friend I made had an English father and a Swedish mother, so his family was not like mine at all. Plus, his parents were atheists.

And my adult friendships followed a similar pattern. My podcast partner Brendan has a Jewish father and a Christian mother. Most of my other adults friends are fully Jewish. And the thing about this is that it’s the kind of thing you don’t even realize as it’s happening. It’s only afterwards that you look back at it and realize, “Hey, I guess there’s just a certain kind of person that I’m drawn to or that is drawn to me.” And then maybe you try to figure out if it has any kind of meaning.

But I know there’s at least one consequence. Because almost everyone I’m close to has at least some connection to Israel, I take an interest in what goes on there that is more personal than almost any other foreign country. And it’s complicated. It’s complicated for one thing because some of the harshest criticism I have ever heard of Israel has been uttered by my Jewish or half-Jewish friends. They are definitely not in the Israel right-or-wrong camp, and their feelings are all over the place…a mix of contradictions and sadness, anger, worry, torment and love.

I don’t have any friends who would support Benjamin Netanyahu or his political movement. I don’t have any friends who have hate in their heart for Palestinians. I believe most of them blame Netanyahu for destroying the chances for peace.

I’ve watched things deteriorate in Israel with great sadness, hoping against reason that the rightward shift would halt and reverse, but I think demographics are driving things there more than reason. I’ve found less and less in their political culture that I can support, and while the particulars of Hamas’s attack surprised me, I’ve been concerned for a long time that Israel’s hardline policies were creating a powder keg and Israelis were suffering under a delusion of security.

But I’m not in a told-you-so mood. I’m not in the mood to pile on blame. I’m also not a kneejerk person, and so much of the early analysis I’ve seen is so predictable as to be boring. There are the people on the left who defend Hamas because of the conditions Palestinians are living under in the Gaza Strip where their children don’t get to dance carelessly in the desert at all-night raves. And, yeah, I can see the disparity there. But how can you excuse the slaughter and rape of concert-goers?

On the right, this behavior justifies the most brutal violence and retaliation imaginable, including the death of millions of Gazans. Introspection is weakness and appeasement, and thinking about an end-game is for nerds when we need men of action.

Of course, the end game is the first thing people should think about before they start shooting. One thing almost everyone seems to agree about is that Hamas was motivated by a desire to derail any deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia to normalize relations. I think they’ll be successful in that because I can’t imagine a response from Israel that won’t outrage the Muslim world and make it impossible for the Saudis to continue negotiations.

Still, much like America after 9/11, the main thing Israel has in their favor right now is sympathy from much of the world, including many erstwhile critics. America foolishly squandered that good will, and Israel should be mindful not to senselessly repeat the mistake. I know they will want to deter a repeat attack of this nature, and they think a disproportionate response is the only way to accomplish that. I also know that concessions in the near term are both politically difficult and run counter to deterrence. But cool heads are needed.

Israel has to shore up its border and defenses, and it has to see about getting the hostages back. But it should realize that a time will come when the path they were on needs to be reassessed. And it is going to need some good will and some allies, so the response now has to allow for that. They should not go out and do things that perhaps are justified to them but are indefensible to everyone else.

As an American, I struggle with my government’s right-or-wrong support of Israel, and I know I have my personal limits. I understand there will be a violent response to these attacks, but it still has to be humane. And it has to be smart, which is probably asking too much.

I worry that anything I say about this tragic situation will offend people I care about, which is a strong incentive to be silent. I hope I’ve conveyed my thoughts in a way that avoids that, but probably not. I’m just tremendously sad about what’s happened and what’s going to happen in response, and I wish I could wish it all away.