It’s not an easy thing to properly honor grief and terror that are not one’s own.

Pity or superficial sympathy does not help anyone, and neither does cynicism or callousness. Yet the great teachers of my religion challenge us “to weep with those who weep.”  

I do believe that, with God’s help, one’s heart can be big enough to weep with all those who weep today.

Who all weeps today? What great well of grief do my tears join? What names echo as the tears drop?

I also do believe that, with God’s help, one’s heart can be strong enough to pray and to labor for an end to these horrific cycles of retribution and dispossession, of violent desperation. One’s heart can maintain the hope for the establishment – somehow, someday – of peace and safety and right relations between all those who call the “holy land” “holy” and “home.”

In the same way, one can be up to the difficult work of maintaining a democracy, here in the United States, so fraught and tenuous, where we honor differences in religious paths and ethnic and racial identities and cultural affiliations, without succumbing to violence or prejudice or hate.

“Let not your hearts become hardened.”

(Today is the year anniversary of the atrocious Hamas-led attacks in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. This horrific war that has claimed 10s of thousands of Palestinian lives and hundreds more Israeli lives. Now the fighting has spread into Lebanon, and the cycles of retribution are threatening a larger regional war.)