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AHAREY MOT: THE UNSPEAKABLE FOLLY
By Rabbi Joel R. Schwartzman
When I first heard the news coming out of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg,
Virginia, Ziva and I were driving home from
grocery shopping. My heart
sank. The initial reports were, as they are most often in the chaos and
confusion of the first moments which follow such an event, inaccurate.
It was somewhat later on, that the actual, shockingly high number of
victims was released, and then the gruesomeness of what had happened and
what was yet to come leapt into my consciousness.
Almost instantaneously, I began to rue the hours and days that lay
before us all. Like other national occurrences of this sort, I knew that
Virginia Polytechnic Institute would become the grounds of a media
circus. And so it became.
In contrast to the national response to these murders, when, in the book
of Leviticus, in the passage, *Shemini*, Aaron’s own sons, Nadav and
Abihu, were struck down, /he/ remained silent. We could all learn
something important from his response. Dennis Prager almost immediately
struck a critical stance when, like the rest of us, he heard, coming
from Blacksburg… and then blaring from the national media, the
announcement that the healing would now need to begin. In near mocking
tones, he railed against this stupidity. I know that the word
“stupidity” may sound harsh, but what else can we Jews call it?
We know that the _processes_ of loss and mourning aren’t those which we
may summon at a moment’s notice. Our laws and customs concerning death
and mourning prepare us for times of near insanity and for feelings of
absolute loss of control. How wise a people we are! to have instituted
customs that enable the individual to drop out of “normal life” for a
full seven days and then gradually reenter one’s routine; to recognize
and embrace the mental confusion and waves of grief that make a mockery
of attempting to live the same life that preceded the death of a loved one.
As we were driving home, I immediately turned to Ziva and decried how
much I didn’t want to go through the coming media orgy. We’ve all
experienced enough of these types of grinding, gruesome horrors; and now
we were to witness the media sticking its insensitive, blunt, and
enlarged fingers into every human wound imaginable. It is as though they
say to the victims and those immediately affected by the tragedy, “we’ll
expose every gory, brutal detail so that, like an infection, once it’s
all out in the open, you can clear it away from your lives, and go on
just like nothing ever happened. We’re here to help.”
I am so tired of this repulsive banality. Aren’t you? I am so appalled
by the commercialization of every human emotion. Aren’t you? I am so fed
up with the two faced attitude of those who broadcast the suffering, who
try to show us _pictures_ of the pain, just so they can achieve higher
Nielson ratings.
To believe that people here in Colorado who witnessed the /Columbine/
murders have now all moved on; to think that the families of the
murdered have been able to “heal” and resume their lives as though all
is as it was before Harris and Kleibold turned their worlds and ours
upside down is one of the greatest hoaxes that anyone could try to feed
us. It doesn’t work that way, and we Jews know that!
During this Yom HaZikaron, this Israel Memorial Day, the Israeli media,
far saner and somewhat more respectful of loss and suffering than ours,
reported that families of lost soldiers continue to feel that loss every
single day of their lives. Yes, over time, the pain dulls, but as
parents of a soldier killed back in the 1973 - Yom Kippur War said, “For
ourselves, we don’t need a Memorial Day. Every day we live is Memorial
Day.”
Don’t talk to me of healing as though it is something as easy as
slamming a car or cabinet door shut. Don’t speak to me glibly of moving
on with life as though it was akin to taking off a pair of shoes and
exchanging them for another…as if to say: “Oh, today I can forget my
child, my spouse, my friend, my lover. I am free of all those memories,
those experiences we shared; I have put aside the horror of their death,
of the vastness of the sea of shock in which I am perpetually drowning.”
Don’t go there because it is all a sham. It’s delusion and denial. It’s
a horrible deception. And it is as psychologically unsound as believing
that one can’t become addicted to alcohol or heroine.
Personally, I have done as much as I could to avoid the media hysteria
that followed on the heels of Virginia Tech. Nonetheless, short of
turning everything off, I could not help but hear the reports about
Seung-Hui Cho. But could someone please tell me what earthly good it
does us to know the manner in which he murdered his victims? How does
knowing the number of wounds each person incurred move our societal
knowledge, our understanding, and our empathy forward? What good does it
do?! I don’t want to go to the point of saying, “who cares?” But what
earthly purpose does this information serve?
I’m not the only one who has come to question the motives of NBC, the
news organization which received the manifesto package from Cho. I did
not see their subsequent broadcasts, but I certainly agree with the
people who are supporting their being sued for causing unnecessary
mental anguish to the families and friends of the victims.
I realize that the line between trying to hold the media accountable for
their gross insensitivity is a fine one. It can be hard to distinguish
between displacing the rage we feel about the event itself and putting
it on the media, lodging legitimate complaints about a huge over-reach
on their part; and the need we have to explain such an event. But, in
this case, I believe that those who were forced to suffer so grievously
ought to sue the very pants off NBC. Maybe it will cause the entire
industry to sit down and formulate better rules for their coverage of
such horrific events. I am not so naïve as to deny the profit motive
involved here; but there are limits and there need to be boundaries to
media-horror-gazing and our national self absorption when it involves
causing dire pain, bordering on overt cruelty, to those immediately
affected. It /is /time for America to grow beyond acting like
me-centered teenagers and face these events---and here I again agree
with Prager who refuses to call what occurred at Virginia Tech a tragedy
but, rather, terms it what it actually was, an instance of mass murder.
It is time that America
begin coping with these terrible matters with
some maturity and better psychological insight. Otherwise, all we shall
be doing is wallowing in the cruelty and sowing the seeds in some
feckless minds of their right to do the very same thing at some future
date.
Perhaps the wisest thing to have happened since Cho’s rampage was when
the students and faculty of Virginia Tech sent the media packing,
telling them that they were no longer welcome on campus. The denizens of
Hokie Land
asserted the control over their lives and asked the
interlopers, the curiosity seekers, and story hounds to leave them alone
so they could, indeed, begin the processes of recapturing their
community and of regaining their lives. Notice that I did not say:
“complete their healing.”
Learning from this lesson, we should all stop harping on “instant
cures.” Healing is a long and, often, very involved process. It
sometimes takes years and years even to begin to come to terms with the
/deaths/ of loved ones, let alone the maw they leave behind. How much
the more so, for /murdered/ dear ones? Mourning isn’t merely a matter of
placing teddy bears and flowers at a given site or of lighting candles
and waving them in mass rallies. It isn’t simply chanting a school-cheer
over and over again. It is all this but much, much more. The bears,
flowers, candles and cheers may all be of some comfort to the families
of the victims, but, as Jews have learned, it is the thousands upon
thousands of hours spent in community, it is the repetitions of the
Kaddish over the months and years, it is the countless tears and the
near endless reviewing and reliving of memories and then more tears…and
let us not forget those mandatory wanderings through the stages of
grieving…which enable us to return to life.
Healed? Hardly! Better to say “we’re deeply, profoundly wounded but are
trying to limp forward,” and, with God’s help, growing ever slowly but
increasingly able to cope with our losses. And until then, can’t we all
just give those grieving in Blacksburg
and throughout the country some
much needed space?
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