We Know Why

Friday August 1, 2025/ 7 Av 5785/Parashat Devarim

Hevre/Friends,

It’s every person’s worst nightmare. Someone you love gets up in the morning to greet a new day of life and isn’t alive by the end of it. That nightmare hit very close to home this week.

Monday night around 6:30pm our family chat got a text from my eldest, Natan, saying that he was in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan having dinner with a client and that they were under lockdown because of a shooter in the Blackstone building a block away. The staff was organized and efficient. Doors were locked and barricaded. Dinner was served - and even bar service was accelerated - to keep everyone as calm as possible as they waited for news, texted their family and friends, and managed their fears of their location becoming compromised. 

I breathed again when Natan and I spoke as he Ubered home after negotiating the labyrinth of police cars and crime scene barriers he met upon being let out of the restaurant. But I lost my breath again late Monday night when I received an email from the head of the Heschel School in NYC where I sit on the Board of Trustees. Wesley Lepatner, a fellow Board member and senior executive at Blackstone, was one of the civilians murdered. Waking from a fitful sleep Tuesday morning, I saw that our family chat had blown up once more with the news that the other Jewish woman murdered, 27 year old Julia Hyman, z”l, was part of my step-daughter Tamar’s social network and so many others that also intersected our lives. 

Every human life lost to these senseless shootings is a tragedy. These losses made us feel especially vulnerable.  As if there isn’t enough suffering in the world right now, and in particular in the Jewish world right now, this shocking attack plunged mine and Andi’s community into unspeakable grief.

As the week wore on, I tried to come to terms with the randomness of these losses by turning to the themes of Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Jerusalem Temples which begins tomorrow night after Shabbat. But that didn’t help. Typically in rabbinic theology there is no such thing as randomness; all that happens is part of a Divine plan, even if we can’t understand it. And more, the classical Jewish response to suffering always summons us to ask: what might I have done to make myself vulnerable to this pain? 

I reject the notion that everything that happens in life - especially a tragic event - is mandated by God; and I’m in the good company of rabbinic leaders of yesterday and today who feel similarly. More, I find the approach to random suffering that suggests, as did Job’s friends in the Bible, that a victim of such circumstances must have deserved it in some way, morally repugnant.

But on a day on which four separate mass shootings took place in the United States, the question of who might share the blame for such unfathomable losses actually does hold me in its grip. Because I know the answer. We all know the answer. At least a significant part of the answer. And we do nothing about it. The answer is our unforgivable lack of gun safety laws. 

Someone once said to me, if the 2012 mass murder of 20 young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut by a deranged shooter did not move the United States to reconsider the practically unfettered access to guns it makes available, even to people known to be mentally ill and suicidal, what hope is there to imagine anything will ever change? The same could be said of the Parkland shooting and so many others.

Upon reflection, the murders of my Board colleague, Wesley, z”l, and young Julia, z”,l don’t seem random at all. Just connect the dots between the approximately 5000 (yes, you read that right) mass shootings in the USA in the last ten years alone, now almost two a day on average. The relationship between gun laws and mass shootings may be hotly debated. Calls for tighter restrictions that follow these tragedies can end up increasing gun sales in anticipation of new restrictions. But ask yourself this: for how much longer will you tolerate living in a world where your children and grandchildren might go to work or school one day and not come home because someone who should never have had access to a gun was sold one at will? 

When I light my candles tonight and say my prayers of gratitude for the week that’s passed and the peace of Shabbat that has arrived, my heart will feel whole for my family is safe. But my heart will also feel broken for the families of the four in New York and the others in Atlanta, Reno and Detroit who will not be sitting at their family tables - not tonight, and not ever again. And still I will exclaim: “Why? How could this be?”. It remains inconceivable, even as I know - we all know - the answer. Just like these millennia later we’ll still open our chanting of Lamentations tomorrow night which describes the devastation of Jerusalem with the word, “Eicha? How can it be?” 

How can we let this happen?

How, indeed.

With continued prayers for our ability to bring home all the hostages, protect the soldiers, heal the injured, comfort the bereaved, and build a lasting peace in Israel and around the world, and with blessings for a Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo Courtesy of Ronen Avisror