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In the Wake of Virginia Tech A few minutes ago, we read from the Torah a mysterious passage. What if, the Torah tells us, the owner of a house comes and says, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” “k’nega nir’ah li ba-bayit.” What do we do? Well, according to the Torah, the priest first evacuates the house. He then goes into it and examines it to confirm that there is a problem, and then the house is quarantined. It is then cleaned out, decontaminated, and replastered. So far, so good. But if after all that, the plague breaks out again, then the house is condemned: it’s demolished and its rubble is taken away and disposed of. What’s this all about? What’s this all about? The rabbis in the Talmudic period never themselves experienced such a thing, so some of them said, “This describes what used to happen in Biblical days.” Others said, “Such a thing never—literally, that is—happened; the Torah must somehow be saying something about something else in this little story.” Most of us just read this and move right along. It just seems so bizarre. What could it possibly be talking about? I thought about this passage as I watched students on the campus of Virginia Tech packing up their belongings and heading for home. They had been through a lot, and it made a lot of sense. It isn’t that there was something physically wrong with those buildings on campus where those horrible killings took place, or where the victims or the perpetrator lived, but there was a sense in which those buildings were contaminated. “How can I ever go back in there?” One student said. We can understand that. Right now, those places that we saw on the television screens, those classrooms, those dorm rooms, they’re not places that we can imagine studying in. They’re contaminated. They’re impure. They need to be cleaned, and even then we might wonder whether we’d ever want to go back in there. I have no doubt that that will eventually happen. I have no doubt that, eventually, the students and the faculty of Virginia Tech will resolve to go back and to start all over again. Of course, between now and then there will be a lot of thinking, of investigating, of reflecting on what happened, and why it happened, and how to try to prevent it from ever happening again. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? There’s no need, at this time, to state what has been written in the papers, what has appeared on television. We’ve all been exposed to the horror, and to the repeated reporting of the horror. We’ve also been exposed to the tales of heroism; of self-sacrifice; the stories of men and women who found themselves “in the wrong place at the wrong time”—and others who, through their behavior, demonstrated that they were in the right place at the right time to save their fellow human beings. There are some observations I would like to make and there are some thoughts inspired by the parasha, that I would like to share with you. Proportionality I was as struck, as were we all, I’m sure, by those first reports of the massacre at Virginia Tech. I wasn’t quite sure why. On the one hand, it was a horrible event. On the other hand, it felt familiar. Sad as it is to admit, we’ve lived through such terrible loss of life, such explosions of rage, before. The most obvious such case goes under the name of Columbine. That took place exactly eight years ago, yesterday. (Of course, for young people, that’s ancient history. Remember, children becoming bar or bat mitzvah were barely five years old when that took place. Its lessons may never have been learned, or if learned, they may have been forgotten.) As the coverage of this most recent tragedy unfolded, it felt to me somehow somewhat overdone. The attention by the news media—and not just the media—seemed more than usually voyeuristic. To cancel an appearance by the attorney general of the United States before a Senate committee? Was that called for? Yet, by the time Tuesday rolled around, it was clear that national attention was single-mindedly riveted on the massacre and its aftermath. But there was something about that coverage that struck me as disproportionate. I wasn’t sure what. And then, just the next day, there was a very different news story. On that day, those of us who heard or read the story learned that more than two hundred Iraqis had died in hideous, gruesome, explosions. (At first, the number of dead was reported as 171; it was then revised upward.) It was a wave of attacks, four of them involving car bombs. “In the worst of the bombings, a car packed with explosives exploded at an intersection in the Sadriya neighborhood [in Baghdad.] [That one explosion] killed at least 140 people and wounded 150, [and] incinerated scores of vehicles, including several minibuses full of passengers.” (The New York Times, Thursday, April 19, 2007, p.A1) Where were the reporters? Where was the saturation coverage? Where were the human interest stories? What were the names, the ages, the occupations, the dreams of those who’d been killed? Why were they killed? What do we know about the minds, and the motivations of their killers? As measured by the stark differential in coverage, why aren’t we as interested as we were, and continue to be, in the perpetrator of the VT massacre? After all, in terms of its ultimate impact on America, the explosions in Iraq are probably far more significant. Thinking about Iraq made me think about the many, many United States soldiers who’ve died in that conflict. What do we know about them? We know a lot more than we did at first. Although again, it may be ancient history, some of us will recall that, at first, it was not permitted to show the coffins of those soldiers as they were brought back to America for burial. Sharing the “human interest stories” of those casualties was considered “un-American.” That’s changed, but grudgingly. I still feel I know a lot more about those students and faculty members who died in Virginia this past week than I do about the the 3,245 U.S. servicemen and women who’ve died in the war in Iraq [through April 1st—see http://cryptome.org/mil-dead-iqw.htm.] and the [according to Wikipedia, as of April 18, 2007] 24,645 wounded in action [of which 11,030 were unable to return to duty within 72 hours]. What’s that all about? Why the disproportionality? Of course we are interested, and we want to learn about those who were involved in that terrible tragedy in Virginia. Of course we do. But why do we make a distinction between the lives of American college students and the lives of American servicemen and women? Why do we make a distinction between the lives of Americans and the lives of Iraqi civilians? We can’t blame the news media. They’re simply giving us what we apparently want to see and hear—and withholding from us what we don’t. Gun Control This massacre has raised anew questions about gun control in this country. How is it that a young man who was clearly at risk to himself and to others—how is it that such a person can go into a gun store and buy a gun? How is that possible? The second amendment to the U.S. constitution reads: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I’m not sure what that has to do with the right of even someone who is not a danger to himself or to others to purchase the kind of weapons that the perpetrator of the VT massacre purchased legally and lawfully and freely just weeks before the attack. On the news, I learned that there are some who blame the massacre on gun control: if only—the argument goes—the VT students had been permitted to carry sidearms—which they’re not because of a university regulation—this massacre could have been prevented. Hearing that argument made me feel, somehow, as though I am living in a delusional world. Maybe I am. On the other hand, whenever I’m in Israel, I am in a place where guns are prevelant, where lots and lots of people pack pistols. But is that the kind of a place we want America to become? There, there are clearly-identified people who have access to weapons and who are threatening civil society. There is a clear and present danger. Here, isn’t there a more civil way to protect society than to arm every college student? Going Beyond Gun Control There is something very, very sad about this story. To think that the perpetrator of the killings in Virginia was clearly identified as seriously troubled, and yet was unable to be helped—and ultimately unable to be stopped. Every school, every community—all of us—will be examining this event very closely, and trying to learn lessons from it. Depression, loneliness, mental illness—these are topics we don’t usually talk about—but should. As I wrote in my bulletin article this month, we have to try to reach out and help every one of us. In the Torah portion, we learned about how the leper is sent outside the camp. And yet in the haftarah, we learned about how four lepers turn out to be heroes. There’s a lesson there. We can’t simply ignore or be oblivious to those at the margins. We have to try to include everyone in our community of caring. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t clear—not right now, at least—what, if anything, could have prevented that awful tragedy in Virginia, but we should be thinking about that. We All Have Some Cleaning Up To Do We all have some cleaning up to do. It isn’t just the officials of Virginia Tech, or other universities, who need to think about instituting new security procedures or new monitoring procedures. It isn’t just state and local authorities who have to think about how to share information more effectively so that guns don’t end up in the hands of people who are going to commit massacres. It isn’t just other people who need to think about this tragedy. It’s all of us. We all share some responsibility. We live in a nation, we live in a world, of tremendous interdependence. The world is once again, as Tom Friedman has taught us, flat. And there are moral implications of that fact. At the end of the story in our parashah about the contaminated building, we’re told that, when it’s clear that it’s finally free from contamination, the priest takes a live bird, a tsipor hayah, and releases it. And when the bird flies away into the open country, the building is once again pure and ready to be inhabited. Let’s not just be voyeurs. Let’s reflect on this tragedy, let’s learn lessons from it, and let’s act upon those lessons. And then let’s re-enter our collective home and start all over again. Shabbat Shalom. |
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