Photo Credit: Courtesy
It’s hard to find the right words tonight.
It’s hard to describe the right feelings.
It’s hard to convey the right emotions.
It’s hard to put into words the loss and the anger and heartbreak and the tragedy and the hopelessness that people are feeling tonight.
On one of the happiest days in the history of the Jewish people, when we celebrate our restored sovereignty in our own land, two Arab terrorists decided to take an axe and a knife, enter our home and murder as many people as they could, leaving three dead and many other injured.
Advertisement
In the town of Elad, less than 30 kilometers from Tel Aviv, Boaz Gol, Yonatan Habakkuk and Oren Ben Yiftach were murdered for being Jews.
And there is a darkness and a sickness and an evil in ‘palestinian’ society that will see this and has seen this as a ‘victory’ to be celebrated. They will celebrate the fact that there are 16 children without a father anymore, and they will rejoice that there are three widows suffering in ways that we cannot even begin to understand.
Because that’s what evil does. It takes all the good in the world and sucks it out, leaving you gasping for breath. It smashes it, shattering the goodness of all things, leaving you feeling sick and empty.
Jewish history is a history of both immeasurable pain and unbridled joy, of a sorrow so deep and a love so strong, of an endless chasm of such darkness and a boundless world of infinite light.
I always believe that good will ultimately prevail in life. I have to because, without that hope, we are left with nothing to live for.
But that doesn’t mean evil doesn’t succeed, and in Elad on Thursday, as it has on too many unbearable occasions, evil was the victor.
I cannot offer words of comfort tonight because there are no words that have ever been written that can soothe the suffering of their families. There is nothing that can be said that can ease the pain in their hearts.
All I can offer is an invisible embrace that will wrap around these families – and hold them tightly and hold them closely so that they can feel that wherever we are in the world, the Children of Israel are never alone.
Our Jewish hearts will always beat as one.
Advertisement
