Absolutely horrible news out of France today. Painful, depressing, and maddening. It is incredible that unspeakable violence occurs on the other side of the planet and we can experience the trauma digitally in our homes. It hurts us too. But we are far away and we cant do much to solve the problems thousands of miles away, so what can we do? I spoke about this in a sermon at The Shul on the Beach last time tragedy struck away from home. My approach is that we must use the event as motivation to rid our own community of senseless violence and disunity. Thats something we can fix. Obviously we are not terrorists who murder others in the name of Allah to silence their critics, but we do hurt people in the name of Torah and God. We do silence dissidents and quash critical voices. Its not the same thing of course, but our violence and disunity may come from a similarly dark place. We cant undo terrorism and we cant easily reverse Muslim extremism, but we can work on the areas in our lives and our social environments that carry the same faint echo. Fix what we can fix, instead of throwing up our hands hopelessly and just condemning evil terrorists. We can fix violence and disunity in the name of religion. We can give the silent minority a voice. We must. Perhaps this video on domestic abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community is a good place to start. Listen to her story. Hear her say that she just wanted to be accepted. She just wanted to feel safe. She just wanted to be heard. Those are things we can fix. So when we see the utter destruction at Charlie Hebdo Officiel, we should also see the utter destruction in our world, and while we cant fix everything, we can try to fix some of our problems. At the very least, we can acknowledge our problems. Thats my plan. Join me.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 18:05:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015