How can your heart not tear asunder seeing the horrific scenes of Jews in Talit and Tefillin covered in blood? We haven’t seen such chilling images since the Holocaust. Jews praying in shul slaughtered like sheep — while candies are being handed out in celebration in Gaza… What should be our response? What do we do with our outrage and anger? How do we move one without going into denial?
The battle for Jerusalem has been raging for centuries if not millennia. Esau wielding his sword and Ishmael his knife has been a tragic part of our history. But this does not console us. How much more innocent blood has to be shed by the “wild man” (pereh odom) and the “warrior” (ish melchomo)?! Will the battle for Jerusalem ever end?!
Maimonides writes that when a calamity strikes a community we must cry out, examine our lives and correct our ways. Please join Rabbi Jacobson as he addresses this gruesome attack, and how we can and should respond to it — channelling all our fury in the way Jews have always responded to events like this, making us an invincible people, which no one and nothing can destroy.