Chazak V'ematz

This weekend I went with my school on our annual winter shabbaton. On Shabbat morning, when our Rabbi came to wake us up, he told us that an incident had happened involving vandalism and we had to discuss it immediately with everyone before davening. At that point I thought the usual, that some student had broken something in the hotel. But when I arrived at davening with my roommates we were not allowed into the usual davening room. The whole school met in the next room over and our Rabbi began to tell us what happened. He said that in middle of the night, someone came and vandalized our things. He wrote anti-semitic things on our Siddurim, and he broke some of our band's equipment. But worst of all, he wrote and spat on our Sefer Torah, our most prized possession, putting it in a condition that we can no longer use it. Soon, Homeland Security and the FBI arrived. We were not allowed into the room where this took place since it became a crime scene. This meant that davening would evoke an extreme challenge for us. We had to share the extra Siddurim that we had, four people per a book. We also had to cut our davening extremely short since it was Rosh Chodesh and we didn't have a Sefer Torah to read from.

Why should this happen to us? We've been gone from our home in Memphis for only one day. Why now? What did we do wrong? We're just a small school of only 48 innocent Jewish boys. Does being Jewish make us guilty? We didn't choose to be Jewish, we were born into it and raised by it. I don't understand. But I do know that this has been happening to us for thousands of years. It happened just a couple of weeks ago when rockets were fired into Israel. Anti-semitism is everywhere. They do this because of our religion. They do this because we are Jewish. But we can't allow things like this get to us. Sure, it's scary and makes me angry, but if we let it affect us in negative ways we are basically giving people like this the win.

As shabbos was "ebbing" away we sang "Acheinu." I started listening to the words. "Acheinu kol beit yisrael, han'nutunim b'tzara uvashivyah." It says, "Our brothers, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress and captivity." I realized that it's in times like these when we need each other the most in order to comfort one another. It made me think back to the times on NCSY when you never feel alone. There's always someone you can talk to for comfort.

Thankfully, no one was hurt by this incident, and they do have a suspect as to who it was that committed this hate crime. But we are not letting this stop us. We are moving on with our shabbaton. Don't let anything ever stop you because your Jewish.

Post by, Sendy Gross