[Previous sermon: "Shabbat Shemini - Imus and the Evil Tongue, April 13, 2007"] [Next sermon: "May 18, 2007- Parashat B’midbar"]
Shabbat Tazria Metzora- April 20, 2007
The warm and sunny weekend weather will, for most of us, wash away the sad week we have shared as a nation. When such horrible events occur, like those that touched Blacksburg Virginia, we are naturally drawn together, naturally struggling for understanding, and then naturally ready to move on. Truth be told, we will never understand the mind of the killer, because most people are not mass killers. So in a certain sense, for the average lay person to spend our time reading his writing, watching the incomprehensible video he created and inundating ourselves with television programs about him is an exercise in futility. Perhaps the experts will glean something, but we will never comprehend the depths of evil that allow a human being to carry out such an act. But living with tragedy and the pain of tragedy and the reminder that we live in an unsafe world are familiar tones in the music of all of our lives. That, unfortunately, we can all understand too well. Our Jewish calendar sheds wisdom for us on this account. Just as Sunday we remembered our people slaughtered mercilessly during the Holocaust, and how this Sunday we will remember those who died defending our homeland of Israel, on Monday we wake up to celebrations of Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. The wisdom of this cycle in our spiritual calendar is that after death, there is rebirth; at times we must endure tragedy before we experience the triumph.
Of all of the stories out of Virginia this week, the one that most touched me was of Professor Liviu Librescu, the mechanics and engineering lecturer who blocked the door with his own body as the shooter stood outside firing, allowing and indeed encouraging all twenty of his students to escape through the windows to safety, while he was fatally wounded. Could Professor Librescu have remembered in that moment how, when he was a child, the townspeople saved him from the Nazis sending him off a labor camp in Russia? Or was this final act of bravery one that was forged inside Professor Librescu when he refused to join the repressive Communist party of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and lost his job and livelihood, becoming a refusnik?
Or was his defiance in the face of this evil just like Librescu’s defiance when he continued to research and publish his work secretly despite strict prohibitions, research which caught the attention of Israelis who successfully lobbied for him to be allowed to emigrate to Israel where he raised his family? As extraordinary his act of courage and self sacrifice this past Monday, without a doubt Librescu led a brave life. Originally he came to the campus of Virginia Tech in 1985, on a well deserved sabbatical. His son said Virginia was a place that inspired him, so he and his wife settled here, built a house on the edge of the woods and enjoyed a quieter life until Monday morning. Of all the possible universal truths there are, the one that my Confirmands this year identified is that life’s not fair. After the hard life he led, it is supremely unfair that Professor Librescu died by hands of a madman in the freest country in the world. I am profoundly disturbed and saddened that what the Nazis, the Communists and the Anti- Zionists didn’t succeed in doing, somehow America did. There was a piece on NPR this week about how in Europe, the killer was constantly being identified as South Korean.
True he was here on a green card, but having grown up here since the age of 8, Cho-Sueng-Hui, was clearly steeped in and influenced by American culture and values. Despite his history of instability, he was able to walk into our guns stores and repeated and legally purchase deadly weapons. The poses with his ammunition and guns were right out of American movies and video games we all consume. References to Michael Jackson and pedophilia in his writing are goods manufactured and sold right here in the USA. So if there is something upon which to pause and reflect, something from which we are not supposed to simply move on from, something which can bring understanding, meaning and perhaps redemption from this tragedy, it is finding our own responsibility in this. Some would say if only gun safety laws weren’t so permissive, especially in Virginia, we could prevent a similar incident from happening in the future. Some would say we need to examine the fascination we Americans have with consuming violence and whether that is contributing to a society which doesn’t value human life, leading to more and more outrageous and public shooting sprees and murders.
Some would say we do not have adequate ways of dealing with mental illness and should be doing more to serve protect the sufferer and the community from its potential threats. I would say, we must search our souls about all these questions. In the great wisdom of Hillel, “If not now, when?”
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
