We’re still here

It’s a glorious spring. We just finished one of the most physically lovely (if unnaturally chilly) Memorial Day weekends in memory, and we’re heading to the intellectually heady, cheese-filled joys of Shavuot.

But the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky cast a huge pall over everything, in ways that are both personal and communal.

To start with, on the personal side, the two were both young and attractive. They were in love, and about to get engaged. And then they were shot dead. It’s not as if we’d care less if they were old, ugly, and married forever, or never. The act wouldn’t be less evil. But somehow, unfairly, it’s worse because they were young, gorgeous, and radiantly in love.

So it was the wiping out of two lives and so very much promise.

Sarah’s background is familiar to most of us; substitute New Jersey or New York for the Jewish suburbs of Kansas (it’s not all Dorothy Gale out there) and she could be our daughter or sister or childhood best friend. Yaron’s a bit more complicated — Russian-born, half Jewish, said to be a practicing Christian, but Israeli, Zionist, and one of us. They were both passionate Zionists and also passionate seekers of peace between Jews and Muslims, Jews and Christians. That’s why they were at the museum. If they were rigid haters of everyone unlike themselves, they’d be alive now.

Their separate stories, and the story of their coming together, should have unfolded, and would have unfolded, in ways that we can’t predict. We’ll never know what would have been. What should have been.

And then there’s the communal. What does it say about our need for constant vigilance, for always having to peer down the block and turn around and glare behind us and stare into alleys? Until the world changes again — and who knows when that will happen — we have to be constantly on guard. And that’s hard to do.

We know very little about the despicable creep who murdered Sarah and Yaron, other than his weak-mindedness. Exactly what did he think he’d gain? How did he think he’d make the world better? He hasn’t helped Palestine (a place that it’s unlikely he could find on a map). He’s been praised online, I’ve read — he’s been glorified alongside Luigi Mangione, the murderer who killed Brian Thompson. And that seems just about right. Not the glory part, that is, but the murderous, self-righteous idiocy.

Shavuot is coming. We will celebrate it with all-night study, with cheesecake, with picnics in parks that will be fluorescently green because it’s rained so much and it hasn’t been hot yet. Yes, we’ll look over our shoulders, but we’ll also take joy in each other.

As Abe Foxman says in this week’s paper, this is bad, but we’ve been through far worse, and we’re still here.

Chag sameach.

—JP

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