In the Wake of Mumbai

The funerals are over and the bodies are buried, but I’m still thinking about the Mumbai Massacre.

So many innocents mercilessly slaughtered, so many families irreparably devastated. I know that there were close to 200 people murdered. But the numbers themselves don’t really allow me to grasp the catastrophe; they over-simplify the horror, coalescing to blur the tragedy’s enormity.

Each of these victims had individual loves and aspirations, each was a loss that shattered others’ hearts into a million pieces.

Can you process that?

Now do it another 200 times.

I actually can’t do it; the exercise boggles my mind and overloads my emotional circuits. But, one way or another, we need to digest the pain if we are to taste empathy.

Personally, my portal into this emotional inferno begins with Rabbi and Mrs. Holtzberg, the Chabad team who settled in Mumbai to create a Jewish oasis for locals and tourists. They are (conceptually speaking) my family, my brother and sister, who were brutally slaughtered.

It hurts more than I could have imagined.

And I need to broaden that heartache to empathize with the victims I never knew.

But then I need to put my angst to work. Pain packs a punch, and it has an intensity that’s waiting to be channeled.

Here’s a brief thought:

In Mumbai, we saw the tragic intersection of 12 young people. Two were devoted to bettering people’s lives. Ten were bent on destroying them.

Why the difference?

They simply had starkly different worldviews.

One saw potential friends; the other potential enemies.

Two poles of the humanly possible, within me and you.

The accounts of selfless kindness exhibited by Gabi and Rivkah Holtzberg are inspiring. They may sound otherworldly, but they’re not.

These weren’t human beings from another race. They were like me and you.

But they devoted their lives to tapping the beauty that can be found in the human spirit.

They were a testament to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who encouraged us each to find the Holiness we each carry within our souls.

If we’ve learned anything from Gabi and Rivkah, let it be this.

We are all selfless, superior human beings just waiting to happen.

We only need to actualize ourselves, one day at a time.

In the spirit of Mumbai.