This letter, written for the congregation I serve part-time in Colorado, says just about everything I have to say right now about last Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Dear Friends,
Over the weekend, still raw with anger and sadness at recent
events, surrounded by the children of our congregation who had come to
celebrate Shabbat and Hanukkah with us, we acknowledged briefly, and in general
terms, our own pain and confusion. We said prayers for the healing of those
families so senselessly made victims in the all-too-human disaster that
unfolded Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. We expressed our hopes that the light
of the Hanukkah candles, so incongruous with the mood of the day, might inspire
us to act, to build a world worthy of the joy they represent.
On Sunday we devoted our weekly adult chat to the question
we must all ask at times like this, “where was God?” It was an hour full of
emotion. Still the confusion. So many questions, so many different faces of
God, hiding from and seeking us; so few real answers.
Now a few days have passed. I have returned home, had the
opportunity to fold my own children into my arms with gratitude and relief
(relief that once again, this time, by chance, my family had literally dodged
the bullets). So many colleagues, friends, and strangers have helped me, in the
interim, to process my grief and outrage at this latest national tragedy.
Through eloquent
prayer, activism,
Torah,
personal narratives (I was particularly moved by this
and this), and professional
opinions, I have slowly begun to piece together my own response, my own
answer to the question of where is God, and a sense of what I believe we all
must do next.
Through all of this my thoughts were heavily informed by the
words of Rabbi Jonathan Blake of Westchester
Reform Temple , who has characterized the Newtown massacre as “this most recent image of a
world desperately in need of hope and healing.”
I carry Rabbi Blake’s phrase with me everywhere, now.
It lingers in the back of my mind as I read the opinions of
those who would direct their anger primarily at Friday’s gunman. A former
classmate, whom I love and respect, invokes Jewish custom to support his belief
that Adam Lanza, in the company of
“Haman, Hitler, and the like,” should “rot
namelessly and unlamented.” I cannot agree.
I do understand the problem with potential copycat murderers
witnessing the excessive, obsessive news coverage that in their minds glorifies
the perpetrator, and thus the impulse to quiet some of the noise now flooding
our global communications networks. I would argue, however, that the young man
wielding the guns on Friday was no Haman, no Hitler, no powerful despot with a
heart full of calculated hatred and a carefully constructed plan.
He was, rather, a deeply troubled, lonely, misfit child, making desperate and chaotic
choices; moreover, a child of God. Without dismissing the notion of personal
responsibility, which with the death of the gunman became a moot point in this
case, I think it is possible, and perhaps even desirable, to see Adam Lanza as
himself a product of “a world desperately in need of hope and healing,” as
Rabbi Blake has given it to us. To dismiss this aspect of the truth is to
dismiss our hopes of learning from the travesty of life and humanity we have
witnessed. If we cannot see that it is the world
that needs healing, the way things work in the world, the way we, as a society,
have structured our world, I fear there will be no healing.
On Sunday morning one of you asked whether I thought the
events at Sandy Hook were evil. I didn’t have a good answer then. I saw there
the results of evil, yes, but what was its source? We live in a country where
it is easier to acquire military-grade weapons and ammunition—legally!—than it
is to adopt a stray dog, or get a driver license. We live in a country that has
shuttered its psychiatric hospitals, slashed funding for public mental health
care, and left parents and other caregivers without resources to help those
children and adults who struggle with diagnosed or undiagnosed pathological
brain chemistry. As a result, the population
of mentally ill prison inmates has skyrocketed in recent years, and prisons
have become the largest providers of mental health care—such as it is—in this
country. This, my friends, is the source of the evil we witnessed on Friday, an
evil to which we are all party.
Sensible gun control, adequate mental health care, these are
things we can change, and only when we do change these things, will our world
receive some of the hope and healing it so desperately needs. In the meantime,
I for one do not wish the personal wounds we feel at the carnage we’ve
witnessed to heal up too soon. Forgive
me if this seems callous, but the pain we feel now pales in the face of 26
bereaved Connecticut families’ pain. It pales in the face of the pain we will feel
when this happens again, the pain we will feel if, God-forbid, it happens again but in our town; in our
school or shopping mall or movie theater; in our family. There will be time enough
for us to heal from the pain we feel now after we have allowed it to goad us
into doing something to promote the healing of our world.
Hope, on the other hand, we’ve got in spades: the hope
symbolized by the Hanukkah lights, a light which we must in turn bring into the
world; the hope that our democratic institutions may function the way they are
intended to if enough of us become unhappy enough about these wounds, our
wounds, to speak up and make our voices heard where it will make a difference. The hope that we can,
as President Obama said on Sunday night, do better. My friends, hold onto
this hope. And let us act together to make this hope real.
And where was God on Friday morning? God was in the teachers
and administrators who gave their lives to protect their schoolchildren. God
was in the activists who have for years fought to heal the ills that allow our
society to suffer such mass killings so regularly. And God was in the heart of
every survivor in Newtown, and in every one of us, who looked on, weeping. God
was weeping for what we have not yet done, and God is in us now, spurring us to
do everything we can do to heal our world.
This is a conversation we will continue as a community. In
the meantime, here’s what you can do:
- Sign the Sandy Hook Elementary School National Sympathy Card
- Sign this petition for people of faith calling for an assault weapons ban and background checks
- Call or write to President Obama
- Call or write to your federal and state representatives
- Visit the National Alliancefor Mental Illness to learn more about how to advocate for better public mental health care
With prayers for strength and the light of dedication (hanukkah) to sacred causes,
Rabbi Debra Kassoff
