Our learning tonight is dedicated to the memory of the 11 souls who were tragically killed while attending synagogue last Shabbat in Pittsburgh, PA. We remember: Rose Malinger, 97, Melvin Wax, 88, Sylvan Simon, 86, Bernice Simon, 84, Joyce Fienberg, 75, Daniel Stein, 71, Irving Younger, 69, Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, Richard Gottfried, 65, Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54.
(א) בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה' אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעולָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְותָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסוק בְּדִבְרֵי תורָה:
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha'olam, asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu la'asok b'divrei Torah.
Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has sanctified us with commandments and commanded us to be involved with words of Torah.
The word "cry" ["v'livkotah"] may have been written with a small bet to suggest that the full measure of of his weeping was kept private. His grief was infinite, but the full measure of his pain was concealed in his heart and in the privacy of his home.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Genesis 23:2
Rabbi Harold Schulweis:
We are not to close our eyes to death. Nor are we to pretend that our grief, our mourning, our ache are all unreal. We have learned the price of such denial and evasion. The momentary relief it may bring us is followed by an overwhelming despair on the morrow. Pain, suffering, death are real. It must be confronted with emotional honesty. Beyond that, the vacuum left in the wake of our loss must be filled with a creative memory, with a remembrance which leads to activity. Death must be overcome by deeper living, fear by more courageous faith, remorse by stronger resolve.
We Jews believe in an immortality of influence. We believe that no gesture of goodness is swallowed up into oblivion. There is a conservation of moral energy wherein the quality of goodness expressed in the lives of those we remember is transformed into our own attitudes and behavior towards life. The past is not over. It flows into the present towards the dreams of the future.