Friday, March 29, 2024 -
Print Edition

Anguish

A day of rejoicing turned into unbearable grief

The incident in Meron, Israel after midnight, April 30, rips at the gut on so many levels, each without comprehension.

The anguish over the innocent lives lost; the children lost; the families torn apart forever; the wrenching funerals that followed; the linkage within the Jewish people worldwide that has everyone knowing someone, or related to someone, or former neighbors of someone, who knew one of the victims or their family.

The anguish of the beautiful date of Lag b’Omer totally upended; the day of rejoicing amidst a period of mourning for disciples of Rabbi Akiva turned into a date of mourning itself.

The parallel anguish — the beautiful date of the first mass respite from the COVID lockdowns in Israel, on which long pent up relief and celebration turned to death and horror.

The anguish of knowing that it all could have been avoided; that warnings of overcrowding in Meron for years went unheeded; that negligence, whether of omission or commission, facilitated this endlessly pain-filled tragedy.

The anguish of the first responders, of the atrocity scenes, of the lethal chaos, of the desecration of a holy place via the desecration of human lives taken, of the image of G-d erased.

The anguish that it just couldn’t be pinned on an outside force, such as a forest fire or a terrorist attack or an earthquake — not, Heaven forfend, that the slightest comfort is to be found in any of these — but still, the anguish that either the collective or part of the collective was responsible for this: be it too many people, insufficient facilities, improper policing, inadequate escape plans, absence of safety protocols, dismissal of earlier warnings.

The anguish — bottom line — is that many knew this was a tragedy waiting to happen, even some of the people who came; the people who oversaw, the people who made the fire (and the place where it was made), the police or politicians (or both) who sanctioned the event.

Perhaps the final anguish is the urgent need to scrutinize what went wrong and who made it go wrong; at the very time when the overwhelming feeling is shock, sadness, mourning, weeping; the anguish of focusing on nuts and bolts, on the precise protocols that need to be put in place to ensure that this horrible, unbearable pain never happens again.

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News




Leave a Reply