ORLEANS — In the days since Airman Aaron Bushnell died by fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. while shouting “free Palestine,” there has been a surge across the country in demands for an end to the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people, predominantly civilians, have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

The 25-year-old Bushnell was born and raised here in the Community of Jesus, a tight-knit religious commune in Rock Harbor with about 300 members, according to Tom Ryan, a longtime adviser to the group. Bushnell left Orleans in 2019 and joined the Air Force in May 2020; he worked in cyber-defense operations in San Antonio, Texas. Before his death he had transferred to a program in Ohio for Air Force members transitioning to civilian life, according to multiple news reports.

On Feb. 25, Bushnell live streamed himself with his phone as he approached the embassy, saying, “I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

He called his suicide “an extreme act of protest” but said that “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”

He lit himself on fire and died at a hospital hours later.

Bushnell became the face of the movement at protests and vigils held worldwide last weekend.

Jennifer Smith, a mid-Cape member of several peace and social justice organizations, called Bushnell’s self-immolation “such a horrific act, but that was the point.

“Most of us don’t categorize this as a suicide,” Smith said. “If you look back, people who have taken that dramatic step all had a compelling and urgent message to share with the world.”

Meanwhile, Bushnell’s family is waiting for his body to be released by the military.

Bushnell was a student at Orleans Elementary School between 2003 and 2007 and attended Nauset Regional High School from 2013 to 2014, according to the Nauset public schools.

Learning more about who Aaron Bushnell was has been difficult. Officials and members of the Community of Jesus have not spoken to the press or provided a statement in reaction to his act.

Reporters from many news organizations swarmed the community’s campus and surrounding neighborhood in the days following his death, even knocking on the door of the Bushnell family home, according to Ryan.

Sunday’s Eucharistic service, normally held on the group’s campus at the Church of the Transfiguration, was canceled because of concern that it would be interrupted by reporters or protesters. According to Ryan, church members instead gathered in small groups at their homes. Ryan, an Eastham resident and former Catholic priest, is not a member of the Community but has taken on various roles there for about 30 years.

In 1991, Ryan was hired by the Community of Jesus as a legal consultant and expert on zoning exemptions for religious buildings during the town’s review of the proposed Church of the Transfiguration. He also provided advice on the selection of religious art for the church’s interior.

“I knew Aaron since he was born, and I knew his parents before he was born,” Ryan told the Independent.

Bushnell was passionate about things he valued, Ryan said, but not unusually so. “He was idealistic, like lots of kids,” said Ryan, “but not in an exceptional, unreal way.”

According to Ryan, Bushnell didn’t “half listen” the way some people do. “When Aaron was with you, he was intensely with you,” he said. “He would listen to what was being said — not just the words but exploring the experience.” Bushnell was imaginative and curious, Ryan said.

Ryan has been involved in religious education programs at several Christian and Catholic parishes on the Cape. At the Community of Jesus, he was head of kindergarten-to-grade-12 religious instruction from 2010 to 2019, consisting of twice-weekly classes that all the students took regardless of which local schools they attended.

Ryan also organized youth group field trips, including a visit to the Holy Land in 2016 that Bushnell, a recent high school graduate, went on. The trip included going to Biblical sites and meeting with Christian groups, as well as visiting Bethlehem University in the West Bank, where both Islamic and Christian students studied, Ryan said. The group briefly visited a refugee camp run by the United Nations, Ryan said, but it wasn’t an experience that would have traumatized anyone.

“I haven’t seen or talked to Aaron since Covid,” Ryan said. “I think he left a little before that.”

Asked whether he viewed Bushnell’s self-immolation as reflecting a mental-health crisis or as an act to focus attention on the plight of the Palestinians, Ryan said it could be both.

“Many feel the need to cry out against the slaughter in Gaza, but he had in his mind that he needed to go on a self-destructive pathway,” Ryan said. “Millions who feel the same conviction don’t go to that.”

Bushnell would have been aware of self-immolation as a form of protest, Ryan said, such as the acts of Buddhist monks protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Bushnell had also recently become focused on alleviating poverty and homelessness, according to his friend Ashley Schuman, who spoke to the New York Times for its Feb. 28 story about Bushnell. Schuman, a Yarmouth resident who was born in the Community of Jesus and grew up with Bushnell, left shortly after he did, according to the Times.

It reported that Schuman spoke of the anxiety she and Bushnell dealt with as teenagers due to the high expectations and tight restrictions of the Community’s leaders and teachers. Schuman talked on the phone with Bushnell regularly after they had both left the community, according to the Times, and he appeared to her to be increasingly stressed, no longer expressing the enthusiasm he had back at school and during boot camp. The two fell out of touch in 2021.

Schuman did not respond to several requests for comment from the Independent.

While Bushnell’s self-immolation is viewed by many as a political act to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza, for his family, it is about the very personal and devastating loss of one’s child by his own hand, Ryan said.

“They’re not wondering if Al Jazeera had a story on this, or what they are thinking in Russia about this,” Ryan said. “It’s a suicide that cuts into your body and into your heart and your soul and mind in a way most other deaths don’t.”