Your editorial “America the Bloodied” (Aug. 9) aptly marks a shared time of secular and sacred pain.
El Paso and Dayton cry out from the mass bloodshed by loners using assault weapons to act out their visions of fear and hate. As a faith community we have experienced this pain directly in the past year in Pittsburgh and Poway. And yet we are shocked again by this latest slaughter and the efforts of various politicians awkwardly trying to dismiss their deranged fellow unravelers.
We approach Tisha b’Av as Jews mindful of its memorializing of collective tragedy, including two forced exiles from the Promised Land and our expulsion from Spain as a racial or religious minority. But this time our sadness as Jews mourning past expulsions and other losses is shadowed by our present sorrow as Americans that domestic terrorists are able to outdo foreign terrorists in targeting Americans. In three weeks our nation has been exposed to an ugly arc of contagion, unintended but foreseeable, from the expulsive campaign rhetoric of “send her back” aimed at four Congresswomen to mass murders in El Paso and Dayton.
Here’s wishing that the next seven weeks bring a return to secular as well as sacred consolation and shape a new year for our nation that will be both safer and more inclusive.
