Saturday February 17 2018 – Shabbat Terumah
The choreography of pain and outrage is by now familiar. Even in the early hours of Wednesday evening before our fears were realized, all over the social media the usual stances were taken, the charges and castigation. I don’t participate – I don’t see the point in responding to these events by shaming each other. But many did not hold back, driven by anger that is completely understandable. I apologize for the indirect use of profanity but I think people need to be aware of the terms through which the debate is being conducted. Several friends, and not a few rabbis wrote on their social media accounts “F— Your Thoughts and Prayers – Your prayers without action are an abomination to God – He doesn’t want them.” This seems to be a popular sentiment.
I make no apology for praying. I make no apology for turning to the words of our tradition, to our wisdom from ages past when it is dark outside my house. And I make no apology for suggesting that we honor each other in our conduct towards one another and not only when we are in agreement. As Jews we believe that the souls of the departed are judged by the conduct of those left behind – that’s why we say Kaddish. Our words and conduct should be to the honor of the innocents who were cruelly killed.
Many of us have spent since Wednesday in a daze, attending to what we need to but with our concentration elsewhere. Passages of psalms and scripture pass through the head, wishing comfort for families who are going through suffering we don’t even like to imagine while feeling ourselves bereft of a sense of security. I think many of my colleagues at once turned to a single powerful and terrible text. The spread of trauma from a high school in Florida across a country of millions is described powerfully in a modern psalm, the well-known and devastating poem by Yehuda Amichi – The Diameter of the Bomb.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
And the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
With four dead and eleven wounded.
The clinical beginning of the poem describes our fascination for details, we can’t turn away from explanation when even exposure to the terrible news is traumatizing. We look fervently for the explanation, for any small detail that is going to place us outside The Diameter of the Bomb. “Tell me this won’t be us.” “Tell me this can’t be us.” But we cannot escape the bomb’s circumference.
And around these, in a larger circle
Of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
And one graveyard. But the young woman
Who was buried in the city she came from,
At a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
Enlarges the circle considerably,
And the solitary man mourning her death
At the distant shores of a country far across the sea
Includes the entire world in the circle.
Florida is not that far away. A colleague of mine buried one of the victims yesterday. He sat with the parents of a girl that was killed as they clung to hope – until there was no hope. Another classmate stayed up all of Wednesday night with survivors and rescuers. They will never be the same for what they have seen. Most of us probably knows someone who knows someone at the center of the circle. A woman who survived the massacre of students at Virginia Tech in 2007 wrote very movingly in the Washington post of what it is like to be a survivor of such an attack, the way in which the trauma bleeds into every aspect of life. She never feels safe. Hundreds have been killed in the acts of violence since Columbine in 1999, thousands and thousands more walk through the world with scars not everyone can see. The circle emcompasses everything.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
That reaches up to the throne of God and
Beyond, making
A circle with no end and no God.
It is impossible to isolate religious life from the fact of suffering. Our prayers are not a retreat, our attempts to place what we know into our relationship with God and our history are not reassuring speculation. Everytime we stand to pray we have to come to terms with our vulnerability and fear and we do not come to synagogue to excuse God. God doesn’t want lies, and we dare not lie in our prayers – not to heaven nor to ourselves about the circle of grief that engulfs, about the suffering that we dare not close our eyes to. But pray we must. Not because prayer substitutes for action or excuses indifference, but because as Jews we do not believe that we can evade the requirement to stand before God, to organize our souls, and to express our thoughts, our wants and our fears in the words and texts of our traditions. This is what Jews do.
On this last Thursday and Friday religious Jews celebrated Rosh Chodesh (the beginning of the New Month). As part of the less modern psalms for Rosh Chodesh we recite the line Lo HaMetim Yehalluyah – “The Dead do not praise the Lord.” What a terrible thing to think, much less proclaim after Wednesday horrible killings. There are people who think that the point of religious life is to offer refreshing bromides for the weak in spirit, to give a little reassurance so that the mentally timid don’t fear death so much. With due respect, they don’t know our tradition. To say such a line rips our souls apart when we think of the children and their teachers who have been silenced. We pray not for relief or to escape but to articulate our brokenness, and to turn with determination toward our responsibility to speak for those who no longer can.
Prayer and study are the moments when we put the broken parts of our souls together – where the man who broke into tears at Planet Fitness watching the news meets the Dad who feels more blessed than anything for just one more Friday night dinner with his family. “God I am grateful.” “God I am angry.” “God I am scared.” As Jews, we seek to order everything that we are and need to be when we stand before God three times a day.
I do believe that these shootings show a great brokenness in our society. I think that more children are hurting today, and hurting in ways that were not even possible when I was young. Our youth are subject to tremendous pressure to achieve, to relentless social sorting, and to enduring forms of stigmatization that did not exist 30 years ago. I cannot control our nation’s gun policy, but I can be kinder than necessary. There were troubled children in my town growing up – they did not as far as I know have the opportunity to purchase military-style rifles, smoke bombs and gas masks. That a 19 year-old with an extensive history of trouble could gather for himself an arsenal does not seem right – and it seems to me this is something that can and must be addressed. The security needs of schools and of our synagogue need to carefully considered, given the ready access to weapons and anger. I pray that as we address the causes of the extreme alienation that our children experience, and our responsibility to ensure their safety that we turn to each other with love, recognizing the vulnerability that each of us carry as creatures that walk within the circle, as people who live within the Diameter of the Bomb.
