Rebecca Dallet, the latest addition to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, spoke at Shalom Synagogue. She, her husband and three daughters, are members there. I attended because I'd never heard her speak before. After all, I voted for her. I wanted to know what I was getting.
It's quite a bit. She graduated summa cum laude from both Ohio State and law school at Case Western Reserve. She still (How does she find the time?) does religious teaching to the synagogue's youth. We did well when we put her on the state's highest court.
Dallet spoke on the enormous racial inequities in the Wisconsin criminal justice system. She should know. She dealt with 12,000 cases, civil and criminal, in the eight years she was on the Milwaukee County Court (and is the only member of the Supreme Court with Milwaukee roots, so that's another excellent reason she's there). She quoted statistics that are staggering, one of which is that black people stand ten times the chance that they will be incarcerated over whites. Think about that. The speech was entitled "Serving Justice Justly," which doesn't look to me like it's anywhere near happening right now.
That, and so many other pressing concerns, is being lost in the present cacophony that is our political and social discourse. One of those concerns was driven home again Saturday, when another radically-afflicted wildman shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people. Some of them had these ages: 97, 88, 86 and 84.
These, he said on his social media entries, were the ones underwriting the "invasion" (Note that word: both he and 45 used it) of some 5,000 political refugees from Latin America, seeking a little justly-served justice themselves, who would be crossing the border some 1500 miles away, on foot. Some national threat.
Meanwhile, Friday evening, Dallet's speech was preceded by a genuine Sabbath celebration in the synagogue. It represented a new frontier for me, a humbling but exciting one.
A former teaching colleague at Cedarburg, Jim Ross, is a member at Shalom. By sheer chance, without noticing, he and his wife had plunked themselves down in my very row. I got up and said hello, and they invited me to join them. I picked up the book of celebration--I'm not sure what it's called--and joined in when the prayers were said in English.
As I did so, I discovered three pretty interesting things:
- The book's pages are displayed from right to left;
- Many of the songs are sung in Hebrew, and many members know them by heart (Do you know one Christian hymn by heart? Even a single verse?); and
- The one, constant theme throughout the prayers is that of peace--being the one, most essential thing that God can deliver.
The celebration that begins Friday evening extends into Saturday morning. That would begin at 10 a.m., it was announced.
I wonder if that same time was the time that the Tree of Life Synagogue began its continuation of Sabbath services, too. We do know that the gunman walked in and opened fire at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday.
In all likelihood, then, they were saying those same kinds of prayers, too--prayers for peace within one's soul, prayers for peace in the world, prayers for peace for those a little short on it right now--when the gunman entered and delivered a very different message.
That brought an especially deep chill when I learned of the murders Saturday, the reports of which I watched for hours. The radio went off this morning at 8 a.m., and I heard the authorities hold their first actual news conference on the shooting. My first reaction was to turn it off. Yet another senseless, deranged person had gone off and taken out his fantastically paranoid attitudes on others. Same old, same old.
This time, though, I'm not just shaking my head and going on with my life. I got up and watched the news conference and absorbed the terrible facts of it all.
This isn't going to stop anything this very moment. But what I resolve to do is to face all of it, all the time it happens. I will not look away, though it would be easy, even understandable, to do.
I will not ignore for a moment the enormity of this barbarism. To do so is to first of all, diminish the lives and deaths of the victims, to condemn them to a kind of assembly line of the helpless, along with the children of Sandy Hook and the animals shot by people needing trophies to display.
It is to dodge the debate that's been raging on automatic weapons, which are completely unnecessary in our society. The gunman had an AR-15 as well as three pistols with him. He was ready for battle, and shot four police officers before being taken down.
Would he have shot fewer people with just those three pistols? That's not the point. Here's my question: Why would anybody want to make it that much easier to kill others?
Do you have a constitutional issue, too, those who kneel at the altar of the supposedly sacred Second Amendment? I have news: Each one of our freedoms and constitutional guarantees have limitations on them--you can't just say or print anything you want, you can't justify any action based on religion, you can't hold any kind of trial anywhere you wish, you can't interfere with a woman's body just because you don't like the decision she has made about it, you can't punish anyone in any fashion that feels okay to you--to note just a few examples of liberty under law that most of us still observe.
All of these freedoms have limitations depending upon circumstances and depending upon how we as a people wish to draw lines regarding their practice. Where abuses are committed, there needs to be new discussions.
I hereby bring back an old one: There is no functional reason why anyone who is not a member of our armed forces or police to have an automatic weapon in America. None. Define the term "automatic weapons" as you wish: You know what we're talking about here. We're talking about those which wiped out kids in Columbine and Sandy Hook; the ones which picked off literally hundreds in Las Vegas. Those.
Take them away, and you do not end ridiculous, outrageous, destructive barbarism. But you slow it down while we do the real repairs of alienation, loneliness and intellectual isolation that plague our daily interactions; while we work on the real meaning of justice that Rebecca Dallet addressed last Friday night--the lack of which erodes trust and faith in each other that we so dearly need right now.
I'm sure I will have to write this many more times until we kick-start the debate again. But I will. I will say so here, there, elsewhere, anywhere and everywhere, until someone listens.
And I will not look away.
Be well. See you down the road.
Mister Mark
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