It’s Erev Rosh Hashonah. This is the season when Jews are obligated to examine their behavior and their relationships to both their fellow human beings and to the Divine. Among other things, we look for ways to accomplish tikun olam, the healing of the world that we are commanded to undertake. We are, indeed, “our brother’s keepers”.
I already had that sort of self-examination in mind when I started reading my usual list of blogs this afternoon. In them, I found discussions of a thing that evidently happened last Friday. Someone sprayed a chemical irritant into the room being used to care for the youngest congregants in a house of worship. A number people were treated for chemical irritation to skin, eyes and throats; some of the children needed oxygen because they’d gotten a lung full of the stuff and were so small that it sent them into shock. Several mothers and children were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. Thankfully, no one was so seriously hurt they had to stay, but the congregants were badly frightened, and with good cause.
It clearly fits any reasonable definition of an act of terror. It is pure luck that no permanent physical harm was done. It was totally reprehensible. Nothing exucses a random attack on a house of worship. Nothing excuses an attack on innocents, and no victims are more innocent than babies. But this didn’t happen in Pakistan or Iraq. It happened at a mosque in Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of United States.
Now, I have heard how “they” all hate “us”, where “they” are Muslims. I have heard that it is “they” who perpetrate the violence. I have had friends hurt in cross-border raids in Israel. But my own observation is that fanatics of any and every stripe perpetrate violence, that it accomplishes nothing save to breed fear and vengeance and further violence, and that when “they” are babies and their mothers, nothing can justify it. I don’t care who is doing what to whom in Afghanistan, or Kurdistan, or Iran or Iraq. Babies in child care to allow their mothers to worship in peace here, in this country that is supposed to carry the banner for religious freedom – especially here – should be safe.
I’ve studied religiously-prompted violence, both in the course of learning my own religious history and in college. It leaves marks not only on those present, but marks on cultures that can last for generations or even millenia. We still celebrate the failure of a plan for destruction that occurred 2600 years ago. (Purim, which has been summarized as “they tried to kill us, it failed, let’s eat.) Kristalnacht did not only mark Jewish culture and memory; it has marked German culture. This isn’t on anything close to the same scale. It isn’t institutionalized, is not government sponsored or sanctioned. But it’s still an act of hate, carried out against those who could not possibly have done harm. It’s still an act of terrorism, the sort of thing we see reported as occurring in places like Islamabad or Belgrade.
Not here. Not in America. We’re better than that. Except it did, and we’re not. I am ashamed for my country, for a government that has intentionally fed people’s fear and xenophobia so that someone thought it made sense to attack children. And I’m thinking that what we need now is to learn to think of those little ones not as “their children”, somehow distinct from “our children” – but of all of them as everyone’s children.
I’ve never understood how someone can hurt a child. To me, they’re all MY children even if I’m only lucky enough to see their picture. Children melt my heart and they are the greatest miracle in the world.