Charlie Kirk’s Assassination and the Cost of Conditional Compassion

I do not ration my grief. I weep for them all.

For the forty-nine people shot dead at Pulse, the LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, I wept.

For George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Black Americans whose lives were cut short by racist violence, I wept.

For Karen Diamond, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, murdered at events organized by the Jewish community, I wept.

For the 1,200 Israelis massacred on October 7, 2023 and those in Gaza who have died because Hamas used them as human shields, I have wept.

And now for Charlie Kirk, assassinated last week at just 31 years old, I weep. A man whose politics I opposed in nearly every way, except for his heroic support of Israel, was taken by the same violence that has turned sanctuaries into killing grounds and public squares into crime scenes.

How easy it is to grieve when the victims are reflections of ourselves. As a member of the LGBTQ community, I wept for those at Pulse who could have been my friends. As someone who has marched for racial justice, I felt the sting of George Floyd’s final breath, Breonna Taylor’s stolen sleep and Ahmaud Arbery’s interrupted jog. As a Jew and a passionate Zionist, I continue to grieve murdered Israelis as if they were my own family.

As different as Charlie’s and my politics were, I could have been him. I have been spit on, kicked and threatened because I would not flinch from standing publicly for what I believe. I was a leader in the fight for marriage equality, with mostly Democrats standing beside me. Today I champion Israel’s right to eliminate Hamas, mostly alongside Republicans. Even before I registered as an Independent this summer, leaving the Democratic Party because of its anti-Israel bias, I never let partisanship dictate my conscience.

Indeed, I have been attacked by radicals on both sides. One time the threats grew so intense, I had to wear a Kevlar vest.

When Charlie Kirk was struck down in Utah, something deeper than politics demanded my grief. It wasn’t my instinct that Charlie could have been me. It was the truth that Charlie could be any of us, left, right or center, who speak up for what we believe in.

That is why the measure of our humanity cannot be whose deaths move us, but whether all deaths do.

To mourn without exception is not weakness. It is defiance. It is the refusal to let cruelty divide us into camps of compassion. It is the insistence that we will not let the haters draw the lines around our humanity.

If we only grieve those who share our views, our tears are not compassion. They are calculation. To weep only for our own is to accept the lie that humanity is stamped with labels: Worthy, unworthy, one of us, one of them. But to weep for all victims of violence is to proclaim a different kind of politics: The politics that remembers the ancient teaching that every person is created B’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

In the days since Charlie’s death, I have been disgusted by the activists who openly celebrated his murder.  Nearly as abhorrent have been the self-proclaimed progressives who treated condolence as a throat-clearing before the sermon they planned to give anyway. They issued perfunctory “this is tragic” clauses only to pivot instantly back to reinforcing their own politics. Their sympathy was not compassion but a setup line for self-justification.

What, they couldn’t have waited a week? Did they not realize how much more powerful their statements would have been – especially when all their allies already knew their politics – if they had expressed sorrow and nothing more?

Charlie Kirk is dead. Pulse’s 49 are dead. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery are dead. Karen Diamond, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim are dead. All were stolen by hate and violence.

If we save our grief only for those who look like us, love like us, or vote like us, then violence has already won.

If our tears are only political, they have no soul.

And grief without soul will never heal the world.