Candlelight Vigil for Boston Bombing Victims

The Rock, Northwestern University

April 22, 2013

On July 31, 2002, my girlfriend was killed in the cafeteria bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Even before I lost Marla in that terrorist attack, I had spent the year living in Israel, and I already was familiar with a poem by Yehuda Amichai, the first national poet of the modern State of Israel.  The poem is called “The Diameter of the Bomb”:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

After the bombing at Hebrew U, I spent the year grieving in Jerusalem, then decided to return to a place where I felt safe and comfortable, a place where my brother and his wife and three children already called home.  That place was Boston, and over the next seven years it became my adopted home.  During that time, the woman who would become my wife, Claire Sufrin, joined me in Boston, and we danced at our wedding in Newton, just a few blocks from the marathon route.  My parents also relocated to Boston, and my father is now buried there.  My brother and his family, my mom, and many dear friends are all still there.  For me, Boston is a place of joy, a place of family and friendship, a place of love.  For me and for so many others, that was shattered last Monday.  But not only if you’re from Boston, or if you’re a marathon runner.  For all Americans, for all caring human beings, this was a shattering moment.

In the Jewish tradition, the week following someone’s death is a time of intense mourning called shiva, or “shiva”.  During “shiva”, the mourners sit on low chairs, they do not bathe or shave, they forget vanity and concentrate on their loss and the person who has been taken from this realm. These mourners are visited by friends and loved ones who say to them, “Ha-Makom yinachem et-chem betoch sh’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim”.  May the Omnipresent One comfort you among all of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.  Tonight, we say to those in Boston who are mourning, Ha-Makom yinachem et-chem – May the Omnipresent One comfort all of you.

At the end of shiva, Jewish law tells the mourners to get up – literally – from their low chairs and walk outside.  The mourners walk around the block, making a circle to symbolically re-enter society.  They come back into the world, but they see the world with a slightly different lens.

After coming out of this unprecedented week of terror and resilience and further terror and further resilience, of pain and suffering, of love and joy and heroism – our world is different.  We now invite the city of Boston and the people most deeply affected and hurt by this attack, those who are injured or who have suffered immeasurable loss, to come out from shiva, to re-enter the world, and to know that we will walk with them around the block, we will be here to comfort them, and we will help them to walk again and to run again.

I want to close with a psalm. 

For thousands of years, the psalms have offered a liturgy of comfort.  In the Jewish tradition, we recite psalms in moments of peril or fear, we recite psalms when we are sitting with a dead body before it is buried, and we recite psalms for those in need of healing.

One psalm in particular has often brought me a measure of comfort during times of fear and grief and pain.  It is Psalm 121, which I will read first in Hebrew, then English, and then close with a Hebrew melody from its opening lines.  I recite it here and now with the hope for the speedy and complete recovery of all those who were wounded last week in Boston.

Psalm 121

A song of ascents.

I lift my eyes to the mountains - from where will my help come?

My help will come from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot falter; your guardian does not slumber.

Indeed, the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.

The Lord is your guardian; the Lord is your protective shade at your right hand.

The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul.

The Lord will guard your going and your coming from now and for all time.

Yom HaShoah Reflection at the Rock, Northwestern University

Remarks for Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 8, 2013

I am not a Holocaust survivor, let alone even the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. 

Though I have experienced painful, even horrific loss, my personal loss is not connected (at least not directly) to the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime 70 years ago.

Still, as a caring, thinking human being, and as a committed Jew, I have felt a connection to the devastation of the Shoah since I was a little boy.

But until two months ago, I had never set foot in Poland, site of the largest Nazi death camps.  I went in the cold and gray month of February as part of a group of 50 men from the Chicago Jewish community on a weeklong educational tour.  Touring the Polish cities of Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, our days followed a somewhat regular cycle.  In the morning we would visit the empty remnants of what had been thousand-year-old Jewish communities, and then in the afternoon we would tour the nearby sites where the people from those communities and thousands of others were murdered – Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, the Warsaw Ghetto. 

At Auschwitz, we walked through a barrack that now displays relics from the Holocaust.  In one room, an entire wall contained stacks and stacks of human hair, shorn from prisoners and ready to be converted into rope.  At Majdanek, we entered a barrack that is now a ghostly consignment area for thousands and thousands of shoes. If you have visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or Yad Vashem, you may have seen exhibits of shoes and hair, on “loan” from the camps and used to illustrate the depravity of the Nazi Final Solution.

Though these displays were viscerally jarring and are seared into my memory, I find my thoughts cycling back to an empty place. 

At Majdanek, we walked through a building that housed a gas chamber where prisoners, freshly arrived from transports, were sent for immediate extermination.  The chamber is there, intact, a concrete room with a low ceiling, a ceiling streaked blue by the stains of Zyklon B, the gas used in these halls of murder.  A ridge around the doorframe of the gas chamber is now a reminder of a special seal once imported from Berlin, where the brightest engineering and scientific minds of the Nazi regime had been working not to cure disease or alleviate suffering, but rather to ensure the maximum lethality of these gas chambers.  Near the entrance was the post where two Nazi guards would watch men and women and children being suffocated, making sure that no one survived each time the door was sealed.

I stood just outside the chamber, peering into that dark, dark place, and closed my eyes, both afraid and compelled to imagine the horror that extinguished infinitely precious human life in this place.  I felt—or imagined—hands reaching out from the darkness, saw—or imagined—mouths twisted into a silent but pressing plea, asking “Why” and demanding of us, these later generations: “Do not forget”.

I am not the grandchild of Holocaust survivors.  But my wife Claire is, and our two-year-old son Jacob is the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors. 

So, now that I am home, I ask: how do I help ensure that Jacob is safe from ever experiencing such horror?  How do I help him understand that even “normal” everyday people can be caught up in an orgy of evil and dehumanization?

How do I answer why? 

And how do I make sure that we never, ever forget?