Remembering Shira Banki z"l

I don’t know much about Shira Banki except that she attended this year’s pride parade in Jerusalem to support.  I know she was 16 and that she died as a result of stab wounds inflicted by an assailant who had committed the same crime ten years ago at the same event.  I now know that at her funeral her parents spoke about how she was an amazing young woman, “intelligent, beautiful, intelligent, gentle, curious, musical girl… Even adolescence had passed over her with grace, and she blossomed like a beautiful flower.”

And though I only learned her name today, I am heartbroken for her parents and siblings and angry that the alleged assailant could perpetrate the same crime at the same event when his rhetoric and threats apparently had not changed at all during his 10 years in prison.

These days, after Tisha B’Av and prior to Rosh Hashanah, are supposed to be days of comfort.  Seven weeks of comforting messages from the prophets that lead up to Rosh Hashanah.

And now there is bitterness and there are tears, again, as we sing a kinah (a dirge) for Shira, meaning “song”. 

And we also remember another lesson of the Rabbis about the way we should treat people.  The ideal relationship is “What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is yours.”  We do not all have to agree, and we must not seek to inflict our opinions and worldview on others.  We can explain ourselves, lobby for our views, even offer to teach them, but violence is so beyond the boundaries of any thoughtful rebuke or criticism as taught by the Rabbis.  To attack with a weapon, to inflict pain and death on innocents, is to believe that one is God, and that is one of the most blatant and disgusting blasphemies against Jewish faith and tradition that there is.

This coming Shabbat I am going to dedicate E—L Adon, a song about the beauty of creation, to Shira Banki z”l, to a young woman whose name means ‘song’ and whose song and presence, I pray, will be a forever light and inspiration to everyone who seeks to support the freedom and dignity of all our fellow Jews.