Bulgaria, Aurora, and Beyond...After the Destruction

Shabbat Matot-Masei

After the destruction

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

2012/5772

A storm of violence and destruction has plagued our world this past week.  Perhaps the amount of violence is no greater than any other week when things happen around the world outside the eye of cameras and reporters.  On July 14, a driver killed Paramus college student Gabrielle Reuveni while she was jogging in Pennsylvania during a family vacation.  On the 18^th anniversary of the bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, a homicide bomber detonated on a tourist bus in the Bulgarian city of Burgas on the Black Sea, killing 5 and wounding many more.  And last night a shooter opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora Colorado near Denver in an attack that reminds us of the fearful Columbine school attack that took place some 30 miles south and west in another Denver suburb in April of 1999.  The violence continues in Syria.

Waking up from these disasters we find ourselves now in the nine days before Tisha Be’Av, the ninth of Av, the summer season of mourning the way the Babylonians and the Romans destroyed our Holy Temples in Jerusalem, the way that we were expelled from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492, the mass deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto and more.  We are already in mourning, already in the darkest season of Jewish time, and still we are not prepared for terrible events that impact both our lantsmen and many, many more.

My reaction to all this is stunned silence, the same stunned silence that is the reaction of Aaron when his sons Nadav and Avihu are consumed by fire in front of the altar, the same silence that must consume Moses when God condemns him to die so close to the borders of the land where he has led the people since their liberation, the same silence that must fill the people as Moses will soon open his parting words to the people in what the great Rashi interprets as a rebuke for all their trespasses along the 40 year route from slavery to the eastern banks of the Jordan. 

And I turn to my community as well, to our kehilla, our holy pastiche of people that represents a small but faithful figurative reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Surrounded by our fellow community members we can join as one in the activity known as the ‘trust fall’, not literally, again in a figurative way.  I fall into, or lean on, my community when passing through a period of time like today where I feel I am stepping over so much rubble, where my soul feels bruised for all the gunshots, for the blast of the bomb, for the faces of parents filled with screams, tears, and shock. 

As we enter this second day of the month of Av, we recall the teaching of the Rabbis that when Av begins, we minimize our joys (as opposed to when Adar, the month of Purim, enters we increase in joy.)  We minimize joy – in a deliberate way we identify with past, and present losses by assuming a state of mind that we otherwise might wish to avoid.  And here, among the ashes, among the rubble, among the wounded, we lead each other gently through the tortuous and frightening path, holding hands, lifting each other up over the sharp edges of stones and broken glass, determined not to take anything for granted, neither the helping hand, the presence of loved ones and friends, nor the very breath that keeps us alive whether in our waking hours or through the nights of, hopefully, restorative sleep when we place our sleeping selves in God’s hand.