A Guide for the Bereaved -Sherri Mandell [pictured above]
To the families of those killed in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, make no mistake, this tragedy will affect you for the rest of your life.
People will ask you: Do you hate the killers? And when you answer no, they will think that something is wrong with you. But hate is not something you have the energy for; you are too sad to hate. Besides you are a person who loves. To turn to hate would make you like the killers.
Don't let others tell you that your loved ones died for nothing. They died because they were innocent victims of radical Islamic hatred. They died because radical Islam is vicious and evil and worships destruction and stands against everything you hold dear.
It is paramount that you seek justice - but do not seek revenge. Revenge embitters you while justice elevates you. Justice is motivated by love; revenge is motivated by hatred. Revenge is the modus operandi of the terrorists, and their hatred for others will in the end be defeated.
Keep speaking about the evil that was perpetrated against your loved one. Don't allow the media or others to call the murderers militants or freedom fighters. Insist that your loved one's murder be remembered.
The writer's 13-year-old son Koby was murdered by terrorists in 2001. She and her husband Seth created the Koby Mandell Foundation which offers healing programs for families struck by terror
(Jerusalem Post)
To the families of those killed in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, make no mistake, this tragedy will affect you for the rest of your life.
People will ask you: Do you hate the killers? And when you answer no, they will think that something is wrong with you. But hate is not something you have the energy for; you are too sad to hate. Besides you are a person who loves. To turn to hate would make you like the killers.
Don't let others tell you that your loved ones died for nothing. They died because they were innocent victims of radical Islamic hatred. They died because radical Islam is vicious and evil and worships destruction and stands against everything you hold dear.
It is paramount that you seek justice - but do not seek revenge. Revenge embitters you while justice elevates you. Justice is motivated by love; revenge is motivated by hatred. Revenge is the modus operandi of the terrorists, and their hatred for others will in the end be defeated.
Keep speaking about the evil that was perpetrated against your loved one. Don't allow the media or others to call the murderers militants or freedom fighters. Insist that your loved one's murder be remembered.
The writer's 13-year-old son Koby was murdered by terrorists in 2001. She and her husband Seth created the Koby Mandell Foundation which offers healing programs for families struck by terror
(Jerusalem Post)
Love the victims, loathe their killers –Shmuley Boteach [pictured above]
The deliberate targeting of a small Jewish center and its married young directors, whose only purpose it was to provide for the religious needs of a community and feed travelers, proves that those who perpetrated this crime are bereft not only of even a hint of humanity, but every shred of faith as well. The world's most aggressive atheists are more religious than these spiritual charlatans and pious frauds.
What blow against Western decadence were they striking by targeting a Chabad House whose entire purpose it is to spread spirituality to people whose lives lack it? Now is not only a time to remember the victims but to hate their killers. One cannot love the innocent without simultaneously loathing those who orphan their children.
I know how uncomfortable people feel about hatred. It smacks of revenge. It poisons the heart of those who hate. But this is true only if we hate the good, the innocent or the neutral. Hating monsters, however, motivates us to fight them. Only if an act like this repulses us to our core will we summon the will to fight these devils so that they can never murder again.
I am well aware that my hero Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." But surely the great man never meant for this to apply to people like Hitler, who was never going to be stopped by love but only by an eloquent loathing, as articulated by Winston Churchill, which summoned an Allied campaign to carpet-bomb his war-making apparatus into oblivion. Indeed, had King's nonviolent movement not been protected, at crucial times, by federal marshalls and the National Guard, the terrorist thugs of the Ku Klux Klan might have killed every last one of them.
[I]t is for us, the living to recommit to their work. I suggest that best possible response to this tragedy is to implement a program of a Jewish peace corps to Chabad Houses the world over. Young people, especially students 16 to 30, should offer to spend two weeks of each summer volunteering for a Chabad House somewhere in the world to help the emissaries with their very difficult and important work.
Finally, the world witnessed how the Holtzberg's non-Jewish nanny, Sandra Samuels, saved their two-year-old Moshe's life, running out with the child while risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire. In that instant, we saw how religious differences pale beside the higher of us all being equally God's children, Indian and Jew, Muslim and Christian, and how acts of courage and compassion are what unite us. As I write these lines, the State of Israel is being lobbied by the Holtzberg's remaining family to grant Ms. Samuels immediate citizenship. A hero of her caliber would be an honor to the Jewish state and the request should not be delayed by even a single day.
[Jerusalem Post]
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