A Poem for my Fellow Humans

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Martin Luther King, Jr

I am thousands of miles away and I feel your pain. Your aching. Your cries. The shame. The deafening silence of the world community as you were pulled from your beds, from your homes, last Shabbat and brutally hunted down, literally and figuratively.

I cannot watch the videos. I am living them inside my body. The stories. The sounds. The smells. I am trying to feel them. To bear witness in my own small way.

I am waking up in cold sweats, imagining images of ISIS style torture and beheadings and picturing my child or her friends as victims. The agony. The fear. The insanity.

In my lifetime I have not truly felt the pain of being a Jew until now. Of being hated so deeply that you could become nothing overnight. I’ve been teased, I’ve been mocked and I’ve been laughed at. But I’ve not felt the pain of a massacre in my bedroom. My home. My town. My Synagogue. My most precious spaces.

As bomb threats in the US reverberate online… “you all need to die. If you die, I’ll be happy.” Likely a child who wrote this. A child who has learned to hate. Hate that starts at home. With the jokes and the taunts and the jeers. How young do they start to feel this? Our children. Our babies. How young is a child who feels hate towards a people they do not know. Towards a human who could have been their friend.

What has the world become? That we could feel so desperate, to not just take a life, but to savagely dehumanize a life into mere ashes, in front of their family. Where do we go from here?

A friend sent a quote to me this morning, “the Giants of our past have taught us how to be brave. Jewish persecution is as old as time, but Jewish valor is eternal.”

Shabbat shalom, my friends. May we not rest completely until humanity is restored and our children are safe.