In a stunning symbolic act, US airman Aaron Bushnell, declaring that he will “no longer be complicit in genocide,” on Sunday immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. The act stuns with its deafening echo of the incineration of Jews during the Holocaust. I feel certain that Bushnell was conscious of this association.

Bushnell’s choice was overwhelmingly tragic. But is it heroic – or insane?

At my parallel site, I will elaborate upon the redemptive goals of the Book of Jonah. Simply, Jonah was sent in response to a plea from the king of Ninevah for a prophet to lead his people into civic maturity. Jonah refuses to the bitter end and vanishes from history. Jonah’s importance is recognized in celebration of the Day of Atonement, with modern Jews sometimes building meditative huts, seeking to glimpse the understanding that eluded Jonah when he fled Ninevah.

It is this simple: the Israelites were an object lesson regarding the benefits of regulation by love. They were meant to inspire their neighbors to emulation. Instead, as exemplified by Jonah, they become ethnic zealots. This confusion is echoed in Netanyahu’s summation of his bombing campaign against Gaza, in which he proudly proclaimed, “The world will see what Israel can do.” Violence, rather than love, is taken as the sacred language.

Returning to Bushnell, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is said to have taught that redemption is achieved when we take off our clothes and trample upon them. This is not a literal reference to outer garb, but a metaphor concerning the relationship between the soul and the body. To “trample on clothing” is for the soul, upon death, to liberate itself from any future dependency upon bodily existence.

Given his calm tone in his videocast prior to his self-sacrifice, I have hope that this is how Bushnell conceived this event. He no longer wished to exist among leaders who used incarnation as a tool to wreck spiritual havoc.

What saddens me, however, is that I may have lost one who could have borne witness and facilitated the realization of justice in Palestine. Every innocent soul in Gaza is going to be reborn from its torment in Israel, filled with repugnance for ethnic prejudice. Israel will be redeemed by the victims of its own violence. Love makes all things new.