A Wake Up Call from the Heartland

This has been a bruising week for America’s soul. We’ve been confronted, through screens that never turn off, with stabbing, assassination, and the echoes of September 11th. Once again, we’ve watched the very worst thing: human beings made in God’s image destroyed before our eyes. 

Judaism never denies the reality of violence. Our Torah opens with a murder: Cain rising against Abel. The rabbis called that act “a destruction of a whole world,” because each human life is a world. To kill one person is to erase a universe. To watch it happen on repeat in the digital age threatens to erode our souls.

Torah, though, doesn’t stop at despair or merely feeling. It insists we name violence for what it is: sin, desecration, cruelty, and then it demands that we choose life. “Uvacharta ba-chayyim, l’ma’an tichyeh…”—“Choose life, so that you may live” (Deut. 30:19). Judaism’s answer to political violence is not numbness, not voyeurism, and not vengeance. It is a communal awakening: to see the humanity of even our bitterest rival, and to build a society where life is sacred.

America needs that awakening. Our politics has grown drunk on rage. Too many Americans now see those who disagree with them not as fellow citizens but as enemies to be silenced. The Jewish people know where that road leads. We carry Auschwitz and Kishinev, Hebron and Pittsburgh, in our collective memory. We know that words of contempt give license to acts of bloodshed.

So what does it mean to wake up this week, as Jews and as Americans? It means refusing to let violence become normal. It means pushing back against the lure of constant outrage. It means guarding our speech so that it blesses instead of curses. It means teaching our children, by word and deed, that democracy without decency will not last.

In synagogue, we stand and say the Kaddish, a prayer often identified with loss. Its words never mention death. They speak only of God’s greatness, of peace, of a world made whole. It insists that even in the face of horror, our response will be to sanctify life.

That must be America’s response, too. The answer to stabbing videos, assassination videos, and the unhealed wounds of 9/11 is not to sink into despair or hatred. It is to build communities of covenant, whether they be our families, schools, congregations, or civic institutions, that resist the logic of violence with the stubborn hope of life.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that “the test of faith is whether I can make space for difference.” That is the civic test before us. America can awaken if it remembers that democracy is not about destroying our opponents but about living together despite them.

This week has shown us the abyss. Our tradition calls us back from it. Choose life, says Torah. Choose hope, says Kaddish. Choose covenant, says history.

That’s how America wakes up.