Las Vegas

The death toll in Las Vegas is 59 as I write these words, but it will almost definitely be higher by the time you read this as some of the most seriously wounded people succumb to their injuries in the course of the next days. My first plan was not to write to you about it at all because it felt to me as though there really is nothing to say in the wake of a disaster like this…or, at least, nothing to say that could possibly contextualize a massacre on this scale and grant it some sort of ex post facto meaning. And, indeed, at least as of now, the claim by ISIS officials that the shooter was a Muslim convert acting on as an agent of the Islamic State being widely dismissed as not credible, it feels far more likely that this was not an act of terrorism at all—not of the international variety but also not of the home-grain strain—but just an act of meaningless violence directly entirely arbitrarily against innocents who merely had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that’s comforting a little, but it somehow doesn’t feel quite right to explain—or, rather, to explain away—the incident as the just work of a deranged individual and then to leave it at that. Yes, it certainly does have that feel to it too. But just to wave a bloodbath like this away with reference to the fact that crazy people do crazy things and to consider that to be the final word on the matter…that sounds somehow too facile, too glib, too easy.

For many Americans, this horrific incident is all about gun control. And people are already lining up to express themselves in that regard, some to argue that this proves categorically how badly we need stronger and better gun control legislation in our nation and others to argue just the opposite: that incidents like Las Vegas only prove how important it is for the citizenry to be armed, and precisely so they can defend themselves against the Stephen Paddocks of this world when they lose their grip on reality, take up arms, and start shooting. But to file the whole incident away in the “gun-control, for and against” folder also seems, to say the very least, simplistic.

Of particular interest as we head into Sukkot, at least for me personally, is the way almost all commentators I heard on the radio or read in the nation’s press expressed their outrage with respect to the degree to which the shooter, aside from murdering all the people he actually killed, also succeeded in making all of us feel less safe. That is a big thing for Americans, of course: no one wants to feel unsafe or insecure. And the ability to sleep peacefully at night because we don’t expect some insane person, let alone an actual terrorist, to start shooting at ourselves or our children in some nightclub or at some concert or at work or at school…that is a key part of our American ethos. It’s what we want the government to do for us. It’s certainly what we want the police to do for us. It’s even, in a global sense, what we want our Armed Forces to do for us—not solely actually to make us safe, but to make it possible for us to feel safe as well. No one should feel the need to wear a Kevlar vest to a concert on the Vegas strip because someone might start shooting! Or anywhere.

As Jewish Americans, we hardly need to have it explained to us how intimately related the feeling of being safe is to the sense of wellbeing that we all crave. Our distant and recent history, after all, is littered with the remains of Jewish communities populated by people who felt secure in their places only to discover the hard way how little safe they actually were. So the ill ease that comes from feeling uncertain if we actually are safe or if we have only willed ourselves to feel that way is hardly a concept with which any of us is going to be unfamiliar: our whole Jewish ethos is so rooted in the yearning to be safe—and that our children and grandchildren be safe—that the notion permeates even our prayer life. Indeed, it is hardly accidental that almost all our most important prayers end with some version of a prayer for peace, by which we mean not only the cessation of strife between nations of the world in general and between the people Israel and the Gentile nations in particular, but also peace between neighbors and co-citizens in all the lands of our dispersion, and for American Jews particularly in these United States, as we make our way forward together into an uncertain future.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that the contribution Jewish Americans can make to the national discussion in the wake of Las Vegas derives directly from Sukkot because, whereas most Americans tend to think of security and safety as basic human rights that terrorists and deranged shooters aggress against, our tradition considers peace to be something reasonable to pray to God for—a blessing from God that society must either earn or else hope the Creator will choose unilaterally to bestow upon creation. In this regard, the sukkah itself is the symbol carefully to consider. A ramshackle hut with a roof made of rushes and leaves, a door that cannot be locked or even meaningfully shut (and most sukkot don’t even have doors), and walls made of burlap or canvas, the sukkah is the antithesis of the fortress. We provide our homes with complicated security systems. We all have doors with good locks on them. Our windows all lock too because, in the end, the goal is to be able to go to bed each evening feeling secure that whatever malevolent winds may blow during the night will leave us untouched, feeling as certain as possible that we will waken from our sleep in the morning free specifically not having to face violent turmoil or prejudice-inspired mayhem in the streets of our towns and cities.

The notion that for one sole week a year we abandon our sturdy homes and live—or at least dine—in huts that a particularly strong gust of wind could (and occasionally does) knock down is not meant solely to recall ancient times, however.

It is true that the Torah ordains that we build our sukkot as a way of remembering that our ancestors dwelt in similar lean-tos as they made their way through the Sinai for four decades of directionless wandering before finally being deemed ready to embark on the conquest of Canaan, the land promised by God to their ancestors as those ancestors’ descendants eternal patrimony. But the point is not merely to remember something that once happened, but to learn from it. The Israelites felt unsafe because they were living in an uncharted wilderness with neither roads nor roadmaps to guide them. But they were not without security…because the “clouds of glory” covered them by day from the harshness of the desert sun’s rays, because Miriam’s magic well simply disappeared and reappeared at every Israelite camp to provide them with clean drinking water, because the manna fell from heaven for all the years that the Israelites wandered across the desert, and because God watched over them and made peaceful their way forward towards the Promised Land. Because it was so apparent, the Israelites understood—except when they were being ornery, which was relatively often—that their sense of security, of wellbeing, and of safety derived not from the rickety shelters they slept in at night, but from faith in God…and from the reality of God’s watchful presence in the midst of the camp.

Sukkot is intended to bring home that precise message. We have an obvious obligation to do what we can to make our streets safe, and our concert venues and our schools and our nightclubs and our workplaces too. To do otherwise would be national folly: all citizens surely have the right to go out for a peaceful evening of music without having to hope that they return home at the end of the evening without having been murdered! But behind whatever steps we take to secure that kind of security, Sukkot recommends that we recall that, in the end, true security can only come to any of us as a function of faith, that people suffer from all forms of madness including some that make people violent and vicious, and that the only real way to feel secure in the world is to think of us all as God’s creatures eager to do God’s will…and to hope that a world devoted to spiritual progress will be one in which the deranged among us will get the help they need, in which neighbors will resolve disputes without needing firearms to speak for them, and in which the simplest of all prayers—the prayer for peace among neighbors—is not merely embraceable as a hope or as a dream, but as part of day-to-day reality for all Americans.