I find myself caught up in the reporting, following the news, seeing the blatant and intentionally deceptive coverage….and I just want to take a step back – shut off the news and just cry, or at least TRY to cry and mourn the loss of 4 Jews who all lived on the same street. Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky (who happened to have lost his 13-year-old daughter two years ago) and now his family no longer has a father and his wife no longer a husband, 68-year-old Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg made aliyah in the early 1990s, and has six children. Rabbi Kalman Levine, 50, has nine children, and five grandchildren. 59-year-old Rabbi Moshe Twersky, the grandson of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Rav”, and was the head of a yeshiva in Jerusalem.
These, my friends, are indeed “our brothers” and us who mourn, mourn like brothers and sisters. Many lives, far beyond what we understand, have just been shattered, and irreparably so . Let us not get lost in the coverage, and forget what has just happened. 4 men walked into a shul early Tuesday morning to daven….now we must take a moment to pause and send out our prayers to their families, community, and klal yisrael. As we said at the dinner for Lone Soldiers this past Shabbat – Jews need to take revenge, and revenge in Jewish terms means to mourn and bond together like Jews do, to pray that this never happens again – and just be as Jewish as we can be. ask art . Sometimes we sing and dance to the words of Am Yisrael Chai, and other times we sing it in a painful slow dirge…but we always know that no matter how hard some of the people might try – we will always live the words Am Yisrael Chai in the face of such catastrophes. Hamakom Yinachem Etchem Btoch Shaar Avlei Tzion V’Yerushalayim.