I have resisted the need to write since the great tragedy at the Boston Marathon. In the nearly forty years of my ministry as a Rabbi I have had to respond either in writing or orally, in person or from my desk, to horrible tragedies that have killed and maimed innocent, beautiful people, young and old, children and elders. They have fallen from the sky from the space shuttles and were murdered on the streets of Jerusalem, on buses and in schools in the Galilee. Ruby and I have been under fire in Safed and I recited Kaddish in Monroe Park for the slain of Virginia Tech. I have led our community in mourning following 9/11 and on its fifth and tenth commemorations. I have lost count of the tragedies and my mind cannot even recall all the names. When my mind says that I should cry, sometimes my eyes are dry and tears cannot fall. And sometimes, just looking at a blue sky, my tears water the grass at my feet for no good reason. So it is today, contemplating Boston, a city whose streets I have walked as my brother went to school there and I visited numerous times, even attending Red Sox games at Fenway Park. Now the additional tragedy in Texas adds to the innumerable dead for whom we mourn and wounded for whom we pray.
Judaism and all religions seek to explain life, to make an equation that includes humans and includes God. What should we say? Should I place the onus on God and say that when I die and go to heaven, positing that is what happens when we die and also positing that I go to heaven and not to hell (whatever that might be), then and only then will it all "make sense?" Should I defend my sanity by saying that this all fits into some divine plan for humanity and that plan is beyond our understanding as humans? I listen to others who preach from Jewish pulpits and those who preach from others because my mind is always open, because I am always learning, even if it is just to reaffirm what I believe as opposed to other ideas. I can't fathom a representative of religion when they declare that somehow the death of an eight year old child fits into some divine scheme, how heaven needs the soul of a university graduate student preparing to improve the world, more than we needed her down here. I want to scream, yell and shout that all that is insane. God can't want the death of the young, the innocent, the beautiful, and the dedicated. He can't "need" them in heaven. What do they think goes on "up" there? In all the hundreds upon hundreds of eulogies that I have written, I have never written such a sentence. I want God to love the dead, just as I believe that He loves the living. I want God to embrace the souls of the dead, even as I want to feel His love during my lifetime. I even believe that instead of our suffering unbelievable pain and agony, in a mystical way, God releases our souls from our bodies. The pain of today, heaped upon the pain of all these episodes that I remember in my lifetime and those I have learned about, like the Holocaust, like the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the only people who have endured the atomic bomb, wants me to have my soul flit between olam hazeh, this world and olam habah, the next world so I can understand. I want to understand all this. And I can't.
Should I ignore God completely and say that all this is just the evil in mankind, that the beautiful blue sky is just a mask upon the hatred in the human heart, that instead of a peaceful day on Boylston Street, that the normal condition is that we will live terrorized lives? Perhaps it was the naïveté of my youth, but somehow the end of the 1950's until the assassination of President Kennedy seemed like a different world, even with the Cuban missile crisis, that pales by comparison to the turbulent, violent, malevolent world that I have lived in ever since. It all seemed so peaceful, so untroubled, so unthreatened. I long for that world and I mourn for the generations that only know strife, who emerge from childhood too soon, with violent video games, violent movies, violent television shows, gun violence – don't get me started yet, that strip away quietude, tranquility and serenity, which maybe returns only in my senility when I know from nothing. Who is responsible for all this? Who declares war? Who builds bombs, big and small? Who preaches hatred about others? Not God. Humans do.
I want God to change the world. I want God to wreck punishment upon the guilty. I want the 'hand of God' from the Sea of the Exodus from Egypt to intercede and protect us from destructive elements in the IEDs. As I have grown older, time after time I am buffeted by the awareness and wracked by the pain in knowing that the world doesn't work that way, that God doesn't work that way. We do.
The onus on this world is on us. Maybe not each one of us, because most of us only do "little bad things." We don't make war or bombs. We just want peace and quiet; we love our spouses, our partners, our children, parents, siblings and friends. But human beings bear the responsibility of what happens to human beings. Whether it how we treat the stranger, give charity to organizations that help the needy, teach our children and grandchildren to show respect to others, refrain from patronizing purveyors of violence, we can make things better. We can accept into our hearts the belief that as we mirror God, human beings are equal, that being in God's image means that human beings are holy [in my mind until they destroy their holiness by the evilest of deeds], that we have the power to be reflections of the image of Perfection. We can embrace the Jewish belief that the highest level of human existence is peace, that the narrative of the Garden of Eden in the Torah, before Adam and Eve disobeyed God, is the idyllic condition for humanity for which we should strive. We can dedicate ourselves that even from a distance we can contribute money to pay for the medical needs to sustain the wounded because we are obligated by God to love our neighbor, love the stranger, as much as we love ourselves. And we can demand that justice be executed swiftly upon the perpetrators of such evil, justice executed mercilessly, just as the bombs' projectiles reaped havoc upon human bodies.
My heart cries out for just revenge upon those responsible for such killing, for such destruction of innocence, for robbing the young and the old of a beautiful world, of sullying the purity of a gorgeous April day.
My heart cries our for healing of the wounded, even as I know that some healing will never be complete, that some scars will last a lifetime, that the spiritual and psychological healing can be more difficult that that of the physical. I pray for healing – that closing of wounds that we enable the wounded to continue to live. I don't pray for cure. No one is ever cured of this day; this event; this terror; this memory. It is part of our history forever.
My heart prays for all of us, the old, the older and especially the young. We have to protect them as best we can. Our children are all adults and they find their ways to cope with such a day. Each does it differently. But I want to protect my grandchildren, not only from physical threat, but from spiritual chaos and destruction. I want them to laugh uninhibitedly. I want them to play unrestrictedly. I want them to have every moment of innocent childhood and youth possible. Once they grow up, they are grownups forever. There is no going back.
May we cry.
May we pray.
May God give us strength, even as He allows us to do good, even as He allows us to do bad.
May justice be swiftly done.
May we discover a moment of peace.
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