The Special Time of Jewish Weddings, Tragedy in Philly, and Turmoil in Israel
Dear Friends,
I just got back from a brief vacation in Portland, Oregon where Caroline and I attended my sister’s wedding, which I was honored to officiate.
Jewish (and presumably all) weddings are aimed at capturing an experience that can seemingly transcend time: the sheva berachot, the seven blessings that make up part of the Jewish wedding ceremony, evoke themes of creation and the Garden of Eden, and redemption, a future time period when the world will know harmony.
The seven blessings recognize that the world we know today, considered to be broken and in exile, is a different sort of moment than those two poles of time, and yet lifts up the wedding day of the couple as a moment that evokes the peace, harmony, and love of those two transcendent moments of time. We sometimes hear that Shabbat is a “foretaste of the World to Come (olam ha’bah).” In a sense, that’s what we’re invited to experience when we are present for a wedding celebration. Even while the world is broken and there is so much that needs to be done to repair, we can experience, even if just for a moment, what the healed world feels like, what those moments of creation and redemption feel like, in the moment of union between two life partners. It was truly a joy.
Mass Shooting in Kingsessing Neighborhood of Philadelphia
And yet that backdrop of brokenness is ever present.
Heartbreak. What else can your response be in regards to another mass shooting, this time the worst in Philadelphia in decades. There is little I can add to the policy conversation that hasn’t already been said. The Philadelphia Citizen offers a brief overview of seven approaches to respond to gun violence, with track records of success, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School for Public Health also offers a range of sensible responses.
The important thing for us is to continue to take stock of the lives lost—in this case, five people: Joseph Wamah Jr., 31, Da’Juan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Ralph Moralis, 59; and Dymir Stanton, 29. Two additional children (yes, children), ages 2 and 13, were shot in the legs but survived. The Inquirer has a piece highlighting who they were as human beings. We know now that Mr. Wamah was killed by the shooter the evening before the mass shooting, and that police were dispatched to the wrong end of 56th street to investigate this initial shooting. It turns out the dispatcher reached back out to the woman who placed the 911 call in response to the initial shooting to help gather further facts, but that the woman ended up hanging up after being placed on hold, concluding her call was not being taken seriously. Why the mistrust? Heartbreakingly, the caller herself had two sons who were recently killed, one in 2021 and one in 2022, and their cases have not yet been solved.
If that doesn’t demonstrate the reach and the tragedy of violence in Philadelphia, I don’t know what does.
Even if the political system renders our efforts at reform a slog—which it does when it comes to gun violence—we cannot turn a blind eye or allow ourselves to become numb to these deaths. Staying attuned, keeping ourselves in touch with our broader community—not just Society Hill and Queen Village and Bella Vista, but the extended Philadelphia community and our extended human community—stimulates us to strive for political strength within this system and to do something about it when we that capacity, as opposed to deaths like these being blips in the headlines that drift to the recesses of our memory. The challenge of gun violence remains urgent and, though the political deck is stacked against reform, it is not a foregone conclusion that the status quo will remain in place. I often cite the following teaching attributed to Bill Gates, which I learned from Rabbi Sharen Kleinbaum: we often overestimate what we can get done in one year and underestimate what we can get done in ten. The road may be long, but we’ve got to stay on it.
What’s Reasonableness Got To Do With It?
Israel is experiencing its own turmoil. As part of a controversial (to put it mildly) series of proposals aimed at overhauling the role of the judiciary in Israel, Israel’s current right-wing governing coalition moved today to restrict use in Israel of what is known as the reasonableness standard.
In short, the reasonableness standard allows courts to invalidate decisions by other governmental actors, even if those decisions don’t run afoul of any explicit laws, if they are deemed by the courts to be unreasonable. Though not exactly the same, the United States also has features of its legal system that have been reliant not on statutes but on what is known as common law. One legal scholar defines the Israeli unreasonableness doctrine as a check against governmental actions which “disproportionately focuses on political interests without sufficient consideration for public trust and its protection.” Another report describes it as used to strike down “decisions seen as having not taken into account all the relevant considerations of a particular issue, or not given the correct weight to those considerations.”
Examples of its use included a court determining that it was unreasonable for the government to only fortify some classrooms in a school that was vulnerable to rocket attacks from Gaza, thus requiring it fortify all the classrooms in the school. Another decision found that, given the context, denial of request to construct a mikveh (ritual bath) in a particular locale was unreasonable, and ordered its construction. A third held that it was unreasonable to appoint a particular politician to a cabinet position when that person had recently been convicted of tax offenses and their suspended prison sentence had not yet ended.
Questions about the interplay between the judiciary and other branches of government confront any democracy, including the world’s only Jewish democracy. Regardless of one’s stance on any particular legal question, what is important to know is that the judicial reform proposals as a whole, which include proposals to give the prevailing governing coalition more power to reject judicial checks on its power and to appoint the judges that make up the judiciary, are seen by wide swaths of the Israeli public, as evidenced by massive protest movements across different sectors of society, as tearing at the very fabric of that Jewish democracy.
As American Jews, it’s not always easy to know how to respond. A starting place is engagement. Checking in on The Times of Israel, Ha’aretz, and The Jerusalem Post, which together cover a wide range of the political spectrum, can help you draw informed conclusions to help you engage. Here at Society Hill Synagogue we’ve formed a committee to explore who we can bring to speak to our congregation to deepen our learning and our engagement, and also to explore how our annual High Holiday Israel appeal can be in conversation with the present moment. We welcome your input.
