Healing and Hope after Sandy Hook?

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

Please let me know what I've left out.

Together, we can make the world better. As Rabbi Tarfon said, It is not up to us to finish the task, but neither are we free to desist from it.

With prayers for strength and the light of dedication (hanukkah) to sacred causes,

Rabbi Debra Kassoff

The Thickening Around Your Hearts

The following is an adaptation of my d'var Torah from this past Shabbat.

Outside the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, last week
image found at msnbc.msn.com

The Sikh Temple shooting has received so much less coverage, so much less outcry, than the mass shooting less than two weeks earlier in Colorado. Is it the Olympics? Compassion fatigue? Or is it plain old racism, or xenophobia?

Or, is it something less sinister but more insidious than that? Is it simply that average Americans can’t relate because, as Robert Wright wrote in The Atlantic, “They can imagine their friends and relatives—and themselves—being at a theater watching a batman movie; they can't imagine being in a Sikh temple.”

As a Jewish community, perhaps we can relate better. We are, after all, a minority people and religion in this nation and all others around the globe but one. And so we have stories like this from JTA, and this press release and blog entries such as this and this from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Still, I wonder how many of us followed the news of the Wisconsin temple shooting with the same level of interest as the Colorado theater shooting coverage.  After all, Jews are not Sikhs. We get top billing in the great “Judeo-Christian tradition” so many Americans are fond of claiming, and thus strike most Americans as not nearly as foreign as our Sikh brothers and sisters, with their turbans and their saris and their little-known eastern faith. The Sikh temple shooting is tragic, sobering, but I can imagine there were a few of us out there getting back to business as usual after breathing a secret prayer of thanks that it wasn’t one of our temples.

Except that, essentially, it was.

The day of the Sikh shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, I wrote a prayer that concluded, “We’re all in this together.”

When things like this happen in our country, a nation that we celebrate for its embrace of “liberty and justice for all,” we’re all implicated. And we’re all in danger. Because when one group in our society becomes the target of hateful acts for who they are, everyone’s rights are in danger. And all of us are responsible for speaking out against such persecution.

Several media outlets and commentators have observed that there has been an increase in attacks on Sikhs and Sikh communities since 9/11, because many people mistake Sikhs for Muslims. Does that mean this shooting would have been less tragic had the white supremacist gunman shot down innocent Muslims instead, the presumed “proper” target of his attack?  

We’re all in this together. On Monday, the day after the Sikh temple shooting, a mosque was burned to the ground in Joplin, Missouri. It hardly received any press. Since then, mosques and Muslim worshipers in California, Rhode Island, and Illinois have been targets of vandalism or violence. I had to search for these stories to find them. It is an outrage, a string of events that should cause us to feel shame—as Americans, but also as Jews. Not because as Jews we are in any way more responsible for these events than anyone else, but because as Jews we are particularly warned against this sort of unconcern and blindness.

This week’s Torah portion, Eikev, chronicles one of Moses’ final speeches to the Israelites as they muster on the east side of the Jordan River, preparing at last to enter the Promised Land. Moses exhorts the people to remember how much they have been given:

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty...and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” (Dt. 8:12-14,17)

At one point in his discourse, Moses literally tells the people, “don’t think it is because of your virtue that you will possess this land” (Dt. 9:5) rather, he continues, it is because of the virtue of their ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and, moreover, it’s because of the wickedness of its current inhabitants. Try that on for size, and see how it feels. Did we choose our ancestors? Have we never behaved wickedly? Remember the Golden Calf, Moses reminds the people? See those people you are about to dispossess? See those people less prosperous than you? Poorly housed? Poorly fed? But for the grace of God, we are them. They are us.

Our Torah text continues: what does God want from us? God wants us to do the right thing. To remember that there is, essentially, no ethical difference between ourselves other people. Fortune? Misfortune? The luck of the draw. A turn of the wheel. God wants us to empathize with everyone:

Cut away, therefore, the thickening around your hearts, and stiffen your necks no more. For the Lord your God...shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing.  You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Dt. 10:16-19)

And, as we should well know, we might easily become strangers again. Befriend the stranger.

Can this feel overwhelming? Yes, it can. Can we solve all the world’s problems? Not alone, and not all at once. As Rabbi Tarfon taught, “Yours is not to complete the task; neither are you free to desist from it.” We can send letters of solidarity, letters to the editor, material and monetary donations, to help those suffering all around us. We can ask questions, vote, march, organize. We can talk about things we usually avoid talking about. We can look at faces we usually avoid looking at. We can seek out the stories we might otherwise not hear.

“Cut away...the thickening around your hearts” is a loose translation of the Hebrew umaltem et orlat levavkhem—literally, "circumcise the foreskin of your hearts." Remove that protective layer. Make yourself vulnerable. What have you got to lose? We’re all in this together.

How will you circumcise your heart?

The Temple Shooting: A Prayer For All Of Us

I can't think of today's shooting at the Sikh temple without feeling sick
and hopeless
for all of us:
victims, perpetrators, onlookers;
both physical and spiritual,
literal and figurative.

And so, a prayer.

For all of us, strength: to survive, to heal, to love, to change, to work.
To keep battling ignorance and hatred.
To find a better way.

For all of us, compassion: to forgive, to grow, to change, to love.
To heal.
To mend every broken heart.
Together.
We're all in this together.