Monday 27 May was a day soaked in blood. Videos of the horrors perpetrated in Rafah by the Israeli army should shock us from ordinary life. Since October, how many days like Monday have we been called upon to respond to with the proper pain? Human beings do not come into the world prepared to process such sustained catastrophe or to mourn the mass of lives lost. It should not come naturally to us. It is not natural.
But Jews do not come into the world alone. We come into the world with a tradition, born of necessity, which has taught us how to conceive of atrocity. We have 2000 years’ worth of schooling in how to mourn mass death, how to plead with a silent God, and how to live with ourselves when the blood has dried. So, when I saw the videos from Rafah, my mind was not blank. It echoed with the liturgy I was bequeathed for reckoning with the fruits of human cruelty.
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