Do our souls still shudder?
I woke up today with my stomach in knots.
Some part of me kept asking why I was so unsettled. I’m not a particular fan of Charlie Kirk; I don’t follow him on any social media platforms. But I also hadn’t found myself quite so disturbed after the shooting of Minnesota lawmakers a few weeks earlier. It wasn’t the rhetoric surrounding his death, left and right, blaming one another’s policies. And it wasn’t even the smiling pictures of Kirk with his beautiful young family.
It’s tragic. But I’ve become somewhat accustomed to tragedy in the last two years. The disarming feeling was something else.
Like so many other people, I went online last night and immediately saw the close-up video of Kirk’s shooting. The blood spurted out from his neck before I even understood that it was blood.
It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. And it took me a day to understand what I am feeling.
I feel violated.
* * *
Despite being a “Zillennial,” on the cusp of Millennials and Gen-Z, I didn’t have much exposure to computers growing up.
My formative years were in Bais Yaakov, and my parents allowed us to use a computer, but it didn’t connect to the Internet. My brother and I typically fought over the keyboard after school — I wanted to write or paint, he wanted to play SuperTux (a knockoff version of Super Mario).
But I snuck onto my father’s computer, which did have the Internet, occasionally. I liked reading info pages on Wikipedia, and googling the answers to random questions. One day, I typed my age into the search bar and pressed enter, just to see what would happen.
Google redirected me to a pornographic website featuring photos of young women. Within moments, I had exited the page and began to cry. I hadn’t had any kind of sex education. I had never been exposed to obscene images. I had never ever seen a woman fully naked. From the moment I saw that webpage, I knew I had seen something I couldn’t come back from.
The end of this story is, in some ways, simple. I immediately went to find my mother, tear-streaked and ashamed, and told her what I had done and what I had seen. To her credit, she comforted me and explained what I had seen rather than punishing me for using my father’s computer. Later, she and my father researched parental filters to add to his browser. The matter was resolved quickly.
But I still thought about the site for years after. And I’m thinking of it again, today.
* * *
How many children saw that video of the life leaving Charlie Kirk’s body?
I shudder to think of the answer. I am certain it’s a higher number than most of us would believe.
And the question I am trying not to ask myself is: How many of them were disturbed?
The yeshivish community I grew up in liked to emphasize that a person could entirely never recover from exposure to certain things. That everything left a mark. As a teenager, I dismissed this as hysterical, designed to prevent us from stepping out of line.
As an adult, I know that it’s true. My sensitivity — to violence, sex, tragedy, and death — has dulled. One of the first TV shows I ever watched after high school was Game of Thrones, and I had to stop after a season because it was so gory. I remember confiding in a friend that I didn’t want to watch a show where everyone had “bad middos” (poor character). Today, I’m certain I could watch Game of Thrones without batting an eye.
And still, a part of me wishes that I hadn’t lost that sensitivity. But maybe it’s not all gone.
Dr. Leon Kass, a bioethicist and writer, once addressed this in an essay. That sensitivity, he wrote, is a good thing. “Repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity,” he expressed. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
Today, my soul is shuddering.
And I pray we will live in a world where our children’s souls, too, are able to shudder.
