Yesterday,  when I heard the news of the tragedy in Squirrel Hill, like all of us, I was in shock.  With feelings of helplessness, like the Torah portion of the day that was being read in every synagogue in America, we relived the slaughter of Issac, the Akedah.  However, this time it was different. Though Jews were in prayer in the synagogue praying to God, God did not stop the sacrifice of his children as he did in the Book of Genesis for the  child Issac.  Children simply died. And to make the tragedy more compelling to study, it took place during a Bris, bringing another child into the covenant of Abraham; as Abraham had circumcised his son Isaac on the eight day just as these people gathered to circumcise their son to celebrate life, they found death .

As a rabbinical student,  I remember reading a book a that  Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, a rabbi in Pittsburgh had written many many years  ago, entitled After Auschwitz.  In the book,  the rabbi blamed God for not responding to the Holocaust.  He felt that God  was not dead; but that God had  simply abandoned  this planet because of humanity’s cruelty to his fellow man.  Where will it all end? It is a time to mourn and then react. Please vote on election today for leaders and propositions  that you feel can end this violence. Please read my book Oni, and the Kingdom of Onion, available on Amazon, or you can order the book through me; which teaches children to not hate and to respect other people’s differences.

In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “they should beat their swords into plowshares and their Spears into pruning hooks. One very important final note In the same neighborhood  where this slaughter occurred, was the same neighborhood where  Rogers had lived and built his moral church as minister to children all over America and their  families,  the basic principle that America was built upon, “freedom of worship”. Yesterday this principle  was shattered by massive gunfire and loss of human life . When I was a child my in the wake of the Holocaust, the greatest fear I had, was that men with guns  could and would come into my school or my synagogue and shoot me for being Jewish.  I was a child then. Now decades later, this childhood fear and nightmare became  reality for others.  It’s frightful!

For a more civil and peaceful America.

All the best,

Rabbi Marc Rubenstein