Rabbi's Blog

Friends,

We woke up this morning to such terrible news and I have been feeling sick in my heart all day.  The brutal and viscous terror attack on people finishing their morning prayers, many of them still in their tallit and tefillin, in a Synagogue in a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem, leaves us speechless and stunned.  It is a shocking tragedy and an act of meaningless violence from which nothing good can ever emerge.

Our hearts burst open in grief for the mourners who have lost husbands, fathers, grandfathers, friends, teachers of Torah.  In a sense, at a time like this, we are all mourners; but later today I heard the additional, terrible news that one of the four rabbis killed, Rabbi Kalman Levine, was the brother of Boulder’s Shelly Bein.  Hamakim y’nachem – may God grant strength and comfort to Shelly, all her family and all the mourners in Jerusalem and Zion.

Four rabbis and a Druze police officer are now confirmed dead.  Peace on their souls.

As the violence escalates once again and we tremble in fear for what might happen next, let us pray deeply for our brothers and sisters in Eretz Yisrael; for their safety, their freedom, their healing, their compassion, their comfort.  Let us continue to have the chutzpah to dream that this bloodshed will stop and that we will know peace in our hearts and in our streets.

Blessings to us all on this sad day,

Rabbi Marc