Rabbi Tow's Window: Vayeshev 2015/5776: Remembering the victims of the San Bernadino shooting

*I am catching up on posting - now going back a few weeks - Shabbat Shalom!*

Robert Adams

Isaac Amanios

Bennetta Betbadal

Harry Bowman

Sierra Clayborn

Juan Espinoza

Aurora Godoy

Shannon Johnson

Larry Daniel Kaufman

Damian Meins

Tin Nguyen

Nicholas Thalasinos

Yvette Velasco

Michael Raymond Wetzel

We remember them, the 14 individuals murdered at a holiday party in San Bernadino California this past week.

In the Kabbalstic tradition, the number 14 stands for what is infinite, so vast that we cannot measure it, a lesson reinforced by our Rabbis Whoever destroys a life, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world. — Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9; Yerushalmi Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 37a.

A whole world exists within each of us. On Wednesday, 14 infinite worlds, were brutally ripped from the world.

There have been emotional and heartfelt calls for prayer – the moving scene of people holding hands in a circle outside the building where the attacks happened.

We must not forget these individuals, their significant others, children, and larger families and their friends. Lately I find that in thinking of the victims of Paris, of the planned parenthood center, of students on a California college campus…that as soon as the next tragedy happens, I struggle to remember when and where the last scene occurred and who the victims were.

Being forgotten is a painful prospect for any of us, even when we, God willing, have the chance to live out the length of our lives however many years we may live.

Our ancestor Joseph, Yosef, the seemingly favored child of Jacob, is someone we cannot forget. Wearing his multi-colored coat, victim of his brother’s plot, the dreamer, sold into slavery in Egypt, who eventually saves his family from a famine – how could we forget him?

But when he is imprisoned along with the baker and the cup-bearer, and Joseph predicts the cup-bearer will go free and return to his position, this same person does not remember Joseph and does not mention him at all.

“Velo zachar sar hamashkim et Yosef va’yish’ka’che’hu”

The chief cup-bearer did not think of Joseph; he forgot him.

This is not the typical forgetting, not the daily question of where did I leave my keys? Not the intentional overlooking of past wrongs to mend a broken relationship.

No, according to Ibn Ezra the cup-bearer wipes the memory of Joseph intentionally from his heart. In an eerie way, this moment of forgetting foreshadows the moment when a new Pharaoh will sit on the throne and willfully forgets Joseph and all the help he gave to Egypt during the famine.

The difference is we do not willfully, we do not intentionally forget the tragedies of the past. We are programmed to get back to life as usual as soon as possible. We return to work and life after shivah. After a simcha we come down from the emotional high and settle back into life. Though in both cases the experience of the loss, or the simcha, changes us.

Ba’al Ha’Turim reads the situation differently, and teaches us the cup-bearer forgets Joseph not willfully but due to the overwhelming happiness he felt at his release. The goodness of the moment blinds him.

As with the Holocaust and other tragedies of the Jewish past, we do our best to keep the memories and names of victims alive. And we keep alive the memories of the miracles too, the miracle of the way Judah and his family organized, fought back, and rebuilt a Jewish nation – the last sovereign Jewish nation prior to 1948.

And we pray that these attacks, these senseless and brutal attacks on people in parties, at restaurants, driving in cars in Israel, walking on streets in Israel, and elsewhere, that they will not blind us to what is most important, as the Ba’al Ha’Turim explained that happiness blinds the cup-bearer. Instead we pray they will change us, drive us to demand sensible reforms in the sale of weapons, preventing guns from being sold on the secondary market to unknown buyers, making sure that weapons are safely kept in homes, and taking the fight to where our enemies operate and making sure we shut down their networks here and abroad.

And most of all, we cannot despair, cannot give up the spark of life that animates us, that animated the 14 individuals who attended a party in celebration of being co-workers, of creating community.

When I started studying Talmud, the first sugya we studied the first teaching dealt with lost objects. And a question came forward about whether the one who lost the object had experienced ye’ush, had despaired of ever retrieving the object, and given up on it such that he or she would never come to look for it, such that possession of the object would pass into the hands of the person who found it.

Let us not forget these 14 names and the names of other victims of recent months – and we cannot despair otherwise our enemies have won by destroying the soul that animates us, the living embodiment of God inside us that pushes us to live, to give, to breathe, to pray, to question, to grow and with God’s help to reach our potential that we might have the chance to in turn give back to others and to this world.

How can we help fulfill their dreams? The shattered dreams that their friends and families now are picking up their pieces and wondering what the future will be like without them.

Each of us will make a choice about what is right and appropriate to do. First though learn about them, find out who they are, feel emboldened by the sense of connection with them to live each day of life with one more layer of kedushah of holiness and hoda’ah, thankfulness that this perplexing, this often violent and gory, often surprising and happily overwhelming world exists at all.