My sense is that I’m not alone in feeling like I’m in a shock point—in shock, yes, but also, to quote Rabbi Sharon Brous, I feel like I’m in an upside-down world scrambling to find my bearings. (It’s worth reading, watching, or listening to Rabbi Brous’s sermon on October 14, which was quoted in The New York Times.) The ground feels shaky, where objective facts are now subjective, where a moral code that seemed to unite us feels…tenuous at best, fractured at worst. I am having a crisis of faith—not in some sort of higher power—but a crisis of faith in the social movements I have attached myself to. I was listening to this podcast interview with Father Richard Rohr yesterday when he remarked that the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certitude. What I am seeing and hearing is so much certitude, certitude mixed with outrage—all masking fear, rage, and grief.

And since so many of us are questioning each other’s humanity, make no mistake that I am devastated: Devastated for Israel and for the hostages; and devastated for the Gazans who are being used as human shields by Hamas, civilians who already had so little. Everyone deserves so much better than this, particularly the children. My heart breaks for the children. May saner and more humane heads prevail and broker peace and freedom, as far from that as we seem to be.

It feels that we’re at another cultural breaking point—and this one is breaking something in me. Idealism? Naivety? Belief in peoples’ better natures? It feels like our current systems can’t hold this much complexity, nor can our hearts.

To that end, I’ve been looking for models and maps in which to mark this moment of time—in part, for hope. My hope is that from this disorder—dysfunctional governments, rage, fear, grief—perhaps we’re on the precipice of a new stage that has the capacity to hold us together. And just maybe we can find ourselves in a system called Spiral Dynamics.