When a Jew is murdered in the UAE, the ground shakes all over the world

I’m still struggling to find the words:

Rav Zvi Kogan, a Chabad rabbi was murdered in the UAE.

A man who spent his life showing up for Jews everywhere.

Wherever we go, wherever we wander, wherever history or life has scattered us,
there are people like Rav Kogan through Chabad—
building homes in foreign lands,
lighting candles in the darkness,
setting a place at the table for people they may never have met but love anyway
because that’s what it means to be a Jew.

And now?

One of those lights has been extinguished.
Not by chance.
Not by accident.
By murder.
A tear so deep in the fabric of our moral universe that it can’t be mended.

We all feel it because this is what it means to be Jewish:

There are no borders.
What happens to one of us, anywhere, happens to all of us, everywhere.
When a Jew is murdered in the UAE, the ground shakes in Jerusalem.
The air thickens in Brooklyn.
The grief echoes in Paris, in Buenos Aires, in Sydney, in Warsaw.

We feel it because Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh—
all Israel is responsible for one another.
Not just Israel the state.

Israel the people. You. Me.

The ones who stood together at Sinai, trembling.
The ones who have been hunted, and who have endured,
generation after generation after generation.

And this murder?
It is an attack on the unbroken thread that binds us together.
It is a knife aimed at the beating heart of what it means to be Jewish.

I am furious.
I am shattered.
I am full of rage for a world where a man who built sanctuaries for his people
met hatred instead of gratitude.

But I am also full of defiance.

Because this is the truth of our people:
We are still here.
And we will not be cowed by violence,
by hatred,
by those who try to tell us we don’t belong.
Because we do belong.
Everywhere.
And when you hurt one of us,
you will answer to ALL of us.

May the memory of this Rav Kogan be a blessing and a revolution.

May it remind us of our responsibility to one another.

And may his death light a fire in us to hold each other closer,to fight harder,and to never, ever forget that wherever we are in the world, and whatever paths we walk, we are one spectacular, resilient  family.