The Shooting at The Gay and Lesbian Center in Tel Aviv… much more than just bullets!

Before I begin to write the words that I really want to write, I want to take a trip down memory lane. Let me warn you though, these are not pleasant memories. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

I was a rabbinical student at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Shabbat Nov. 4, 1995 seemed to be just like any other Shabbat; it turned out to be a day that changed the fabric and soul of the Jewish People forever.

I will never forget that Saturday night. I remember turning on our TV just to find out that Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin had been assassinated. I also recall with absolute horror the first words I uttered after I heard the news. “I have this horrible feeling that it was a Jew who shot him!” When my wife heard the words come out of my mouth, she stood there in complete and absolute disbelief. After we learned what happened, we as a People also stood lonely and shaken, feeling betrayed and disgusted. That was just the beginning of something we had no idea had been set in motion.

Our Sages of blessed memory warn us constantly and profoundly in their writings about what happens when we turn on each other. We know for a fact that the destruction of The Holy Temple in Jerusalem was caused by the deep divisions and hate that separated The Jewish People at the time. One needs to look no further than the writings of Josephus to understand that the hate we held for one another was very real, intense and yes, it was deadly.

Very often I wonder how it is that we can’t learn from our own history. For centuries, we taught our children how to read and write even when other cultures wasted no time in what seemed to be a trivial matter. For centuries, we grappled with history knowing full well that Sinat Hinam, baseless hatred, spreads and kills more accurately than the most modern of weapons.

Hate triumphs because it is championed by fanatics, it triumphs because it preys on people’s ignorance. Back in 1995, the Rabin assassination was not an isolated act, it was the result of hundreds of hateful speeches. It was the result of careless and irresponsible behavior of many. It was the result of a perverted use of our Torah to justify murder and bloodshed. It happened then and it happened this past Shabbat, again.

Last Saturday night, a gunman made his way into the gay and lesbian youth center in Tel Aviv. He opened fire, killing two people and wounding many others. WHY? I think we all know the answer but refuse to understand it. Judaism is a tradition of light and life but just like any other religion, it can turn into a deadly weapon if perverted or misunderstood. It doesn’t matter who you are — liberal, conservative, orthodox, reform! It doesn’t matter what your political views are.

We were tasked by God with being Or L’Goyim, a light unto the nations. Is that the way in which we are behaving? Just like Rabin’s assassination was not an isolated act that happened in a vacuum, this shooting won’t be either. One needs not to dig too deep into the recent past and listen to the speeches or read the writings of many of Israel’s leading Ultra Orthodox Rabbis. When speaking about homosexuality, they all have a common thread running through them, an unbelievable hateful and primitive understanding of homosexuality. They seem to ignore, time and time again, that all of us are created in the image of God.

So what happens now? Something like this shooting is not only barbaric but has no place in an enlightened society like Israel. What happens when wolfs in sheep’s clothing use The Torah to hide their ignorance and turn it on its head to justify hate?

No one knows what happens next, but I sure hope that we don’t turn the other way. It is unbelievable that having been the subject of hatred, torture and so many false and calamitous accusations through time we allow this to happen again. I hope the criminal who perpetrated this cruel act will be brought to justice and locked up in the deepest of pits that exist in the Israeli Judicial System! I hope that we understand that hateful speech in Israel needs to be stopped! I hope that all of us understand that Rabbinic Ordination is not a license to use your tongue for evil! I hope we understand that unless we STAND UP to this type of hate, it will not be stopped by anyone.

I read a beautiful prayer by Bradley Burston who writes for The Haaretz newspaper. I will include it here because it is a beautiful way of understanding how we all should be feeling after this horrible tragedy.

_____________________

For Liz Trobishi, 17, and Nir Katz, 26, of blessed memory, and for the recovery of the 15 young people wounded late Saturday by a gunman in a Tel Aviv club for gay teens.

_____________________

Lord, teach me to stand naked before you
And, in so doing, learn the meaning of modesty.

Let me stand naked, which is to say, stripped to my humanity,
And mourn these young people shot
For having chosen to practice
Their own humanity.

Cause me, Lord, to shed this defective armor,
Which we call clothing, respectability, convention,
The mask which we mistake for loyalty to tribe.
The mask which keeps me from seeing the face behind the mask of the tribe we have come to call enemy.

At the close of this dark anniversary, this time when tradition tells us, the worst of calamities were wrought by sinat hinam, hatred unbound, hatred for its own sake, teach me what I need to know about my true enemy.

Force me to see that what I am so certain that I hate, the clear, familiar targets of my fury, are already inside me.

Help me heal of this contagion, this cruel disease which scars and hardens the soul, which cores and blackens and blinds the heart, this affliction which feeds on self-righteousness and the conviction that God plays favorites, that the person whose behavior and appearance, and ways of speaking and dancing and loving are foreign to me, has less right to a true self than I.

Rock me awake, O Lord who invented the mosaic, the patchwork, the universe.
Force me to see the miracle of every life on the threshold
Of what we have come to know as
Real life.

Let me know that in the beginning, real life is created through ahavat hinam, love unbound, love unfiltered, love unselfish, love shorn of armor and unkindness and judgment and ancient rage.

Lord, whose business it is to give life, shock us, cajole us, manipulate us, bring us to heel, force us in this terrible moment to know the enormity and the necessity of chesed, lovingkindness.

Lord, whose great gift and whose most murderous creation was the human being, help us find the human in the Other, hated from habit and from afar. Help us up, the mourning, the remnant, those whom tragedy has in cruelty and in lovingkindness left alive. Teach us to honor the slain by honoring the living, their own behavior and appearance and speech, the dancing and the loving of those doing nothing more banal and nothing more extraordinary, than living a genuinely real life.

© Rabbi Felipe Goodman

Share on Facebook

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Israel, Torah, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.