October 4, 2017
Dear Friends,
I want first to thank the many people who took part and who, in so many ways, contributed to our High Holiday services at Temple Aliyah. From our staff to our lay leaders, the list is enormous. Cleaning, polishing, putting up signs, leading children's services, babysitting our toddlers, coordinating security with our local police force,
leading us in davening, reading Torah or haftarah, ushering, singing with the choir on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, ... I could go on and on. The spirit of generosity and mutual support was uplifting.
I also want to thank those who helped our shul's sukkah arise on a spot where, only a day earlier, there were only parking spaces.
I am looking forward to davening, eating and socializing in our
sukkah
in the days ahead.
I wish that I could devote this letter exclusively to such expressions of gratitude and hope. But these past few days have been marred as we have absorbed
the evolving horror story of the massacre in Las Vegas. I for one am left heartbroken and frustrated.
The heartbreak is obvious. How could one not be terribly upset, in the wake of the awful loss of life, and the hundreds and hundreds of wounded men, women and children?
The frustration is more subtle. That one man could kill and wound more than 500 people so quickly and so easily ... seems outrageous. Couldn't this tragedy have been mitigated?
*****
When I was a child, my parents had a set of furniture in their bedroom: a bed, two dressers, and two end tables. Curiously enough, even though it took place long before I was born, I can tell you the date and the circumstances under which they purchased that set. Ordinarily, I wouldn't think to mention this odd information in a letter to the congregation. But I'm doing so now, because it may have something to do with what happened in Las Vegas the other day.
The date was
Tuesday, September 6th, 1949.
My parents were engaged to be married six weeks later. Early in the morning (or so I recall my father later telling me) they met up and travelled across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey. (At the time, Camden was apparently the place Philadelphians went to buy furniture.)
Some time after they arrived in Camden, a man by the name of
Howard Unruh
began a methodical shooting spree there that eventually took the lives of thirteen and wounded three others. You can read all about it in a recent, gripping,
Smithsonian.com
article
here
, or in the classic
New York Times
story filed by the indefatigable Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Meyer Berger,
here
.
Somehow, the news spread quickly that day to Philadelphia, and both my father's and my mother's parents were frantic. This being well before the era of cell phones, they had no way of reaching my parents, and ascertaining whether or not they had been hurt. Though it now seems implausible, I got the impression that my parents shopped for a while that day without knowing what had happened. And for some reason -- I could never quite clarify the details -- my parents couldn't call their folks from a pay phone. It wasn't until much later in the day that my grandparents stopped worrying -- when my parents returned home safe and sound.
That shooting in 1949 has been described as
the first mass murder in U.S. history. Think about it: thirteen people were killed. Three were wounded. Now, those are not small numbers, and at the time, the assault was considered a rampage. But it pales in comparison to what happened in Las Vegas.
What's the difference? The killer in Las Vegas had many rifles, and several had the capacity to fire many rounds of ammunition very, very quickly. That gave the assailant the capacity to inflict far more pain and suffering than Howard Unruh ever could or did. It's been said that guns don't kill people; people do. But many killers make use of guns, and the more high-powered those guns are, the more they can kill and wound with them.
I have a vision of the future: I hope that the time will come when it will be far, far more difficult than it is today to acquire and to make use of weapons of mass destruction such as those acquired by the assailant in Las Vegas. As a consequence, I hope that should such tragedies occur again in the future, fewer will be hurt and killed. When will such a day come? It's hard to say. But I am convinced that the more that this vision is shared, the sooner that day will come.
*****
Only days ago, we were standing united in shul, hoping and praying for a better day, a better year. One could ask: What's become of those prayers? Just a few days ago, we were anticipating entering our sukkot, our flimsy shelters, on the upcoming holiday.
How can we go into them now, so soon, when we feel so vulnerable? Shouldn't we, mightn't we wait a while?
A colleague and friend, Rabbi Michael Bernstein, brought to my attention a poem by Yehuda Amichai. As he so often does, Amichai captures the challenges of living in the "real world" so clearly and so well:
A person doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
Doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
We need to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
So, according to Amichai, we don't get a break. Even though we may feel we need one. As Rabbi Bernstein puts it, "we are called to embrace each moment -- and shelter in our places."
What a stirring image! I hope that as we celebrate the upcoming holiday -- as I hope we all will -- and as we carry our heartbreak and concern with us into our sukkot (for how can we not?), we will also allow it to be leavened with hope.
Let me conclude, as did Rabbi Bernstein, with some words of hope:
May those wounded in this terrible tragedy recover.
May the bereft one day find comfort.
And may the memory of those slain be a source of blessing.
May God's shelter of peace, God's SUKKAT SHALOM, be stretched across the vulnerable, and across our entire world.
Amen.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Carl M. Perkins
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