The Plague Upon Our House - Va'era 5773

Over the years that I have been privileged to lead this spiritual gathering, many of you have gotten to know me a bit, at the very least in terms of my service-leading style. As this community has continued to flourish, creating and strengthening relationships formed both within and beyond, you’ve grown accustomed to my approach to giving sermons. I come from the school of thought that says to start with something that gets your attention, something that invites you in from the get-go and says, “Come along for the ride.”
 
But that’s not going to happen tonight. Tonight there’s no anecdotes or stories, no jokes or movie quotes or song lyrics or commercial taglines. Tonight, on this Shabbat, the story of the Jewish people picks up in Egypt, as the epic battle between Moses and Pharaoh commences. We know, from our Passover seders, how it all goes down: Moses demands that Pharaoh free the Israelites, Pharaoh refuses, and what happens? Plagues. With each word of refusal from Pharaoh’s mouth, the plagues that God wreaks upon the Egyptian people increase in impact and severity. Which might make the first plague seem relatively insignificant, a sort-of leadoff plague, if you will. But it’s not. And what is that first plague upon Egypt, that first of God’s ultimate scare tactics aimed at Pharaoh and his people? Blood. Blood that courses through the Nile and overflows it, terrifying the Egyptians and leaving them without water to drink.
 
My friends, there is no cutesy story or humorous anecdote tonight because we, the citizens of this supposedly great nation, are inundated with that very same plague, the plague of blood. But, sadly, it’s not the first. This plague of blood is, instead, secondary, the result of the primary plague upon our country: the plague of guns.
 
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the rabbi had to eventually give a sermon in response to what happened just a few weeks ago in Newtown. And while that makes perfect sense, it’s actually not true. No, one of the saddest and worst parts of all of this for me is that I had circled this date on the calendar several months ago as a night that I would preach about gun violence. Long before Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School, I had marked tonight as a night I would broach this volatile topic. And why? Because two years ago this week, Jared Loughner marched through the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket in Arizona and fired a semi-automatic weapon on a constituent gathering of Representative Gabby Giffords, killing six, including nine-year-old Christina Green-Taylor, and wounding 19, with the Congresswoman somehow surviving, despite taking a bullet to the head at point-blank range.
 
Since then, since that fateful day, what has happened? What have we lived through, what have we been forced to bear witness to as a nation? In July, James Holmes clad himself in full bulletproof armor, a ballistic helmet, and a gas mask, and proceeded, under cover of tear gas grenades, to unload a 12-gauge shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle, and a Glock 22 handgun, killing 12 and wounding 58 more. Just two weeks later, white supremacist Wade Michael Page stormed a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and wounding four more with a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. And then, of course, Friday, December 14th, where 20 children and six adults had their lives callously ripped from them by bullets from two handguns and a .223 caliber rifle.
 
62 mass shootings in the past 30 years. 25 of them since 2006. In 49 of the 62, the weapons used were obtained 100% legally. Just some of the more than 30,000 people a year who die from gun violence. 30,000. And every time it happens, every time we are sent reeling into sadness and anger and frustration by these massacres—for, indeed there is no better word for what they are—what are we told?

We’re told, “Now is not the time to talk about gun control; it’s time for us to support the families of the victims.” We’re told, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” We’re told, “We need to be better at enforcing the laws that already exist rather than adding new ones.” We’re told, “It’s sad, it’s a tragedy, but guns are our Constitutionally guaranteed right.”
 
To those people I say: If now is not the time to talk about our obsession with guns, when is? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s not now. Maybe it was in April of 2007 after the Virginia Tech massacre. Maybe it should have been in April of 1999 after the murders at Columbine by high school students. Maybe, just maybe, the time for the conversation, was in March the year before, fifteen years ago, when a 13-year-old and 11-year-old stole ten different kinds of guns and used them in a murderous ambush of their teachers and classmates.

If now is only the time to comfort the families and the communities, then, my friends, that is what we will be forced to do forever. If now is not the time to have these conversations, to use just an iota of common sense, if for nothing else, to make our schools, our community centers, our places for worship, safer for our children, then shame on us. Shame on us that we retreat behind the 2nd Amendment, when it clearly states the right to bear arms is for the sake of a “well-regulated militia.” Shame on us that the highest-ranking lawmakers and judges of our country somehow feel that the right to amass and fire dozens of rounds of ammunition with a single squeeze of the trigger falls under, and is thus protected by, that 2nd Amendment. Shame on us that so many in our country are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep open the loophole that allows people to purchase weapons at gun shows without so much as a simple criminal background check. Shame on us that so ingrained in our society is this love affair with guns that both presidential candidates avoided even tangentially addressing any of these questions for fear of losing votes. Shame on us that we needed to see the pictures, to hear the hopes and dreams and loves of 20 six- and seven-year-old children, now lying in little coffins underground, to wake us up from our self-induced slumber. Shame on us that the agony and tears of their parents’ worst nightmares now a devastating reality, one they will never have the chance to wake up from—shame on us that that’s what it took for our country to get serious about this issue, no, this plague upon us.

Our tradition is abundantly clear: Isaiah’s charge to remove the scourge of weapons among us rings ever true today, to “beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning-hooks.” Deuteronomy tells us, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The Psalm tells us, “Turn from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it.” And the Talmud tells us that saving just one life is like saving the whole world. If that’s true, and I believe it is, how much the more so to save 30,000.

So what can we do? Call your representatives in Congress. Call your Senators. Call the President. Write letters, write op-eds in the newspapers. Better yet, go see them at their offices. Your Congressmen and women all have local offices; go find them. Whatever is there for you to do, whatever Facebook or Twitter petition comes into your feed, do it, sign it, pass it on. It may not feel like much, but every little bit counts. Only when we turn the tide, when the voices of common sense and peace are louder and more unified than those of the selfish and the violent-minded, then and only then will we be able to scourge ourselves of this horrible plague. Only then will we make our country, our world, a little bit closer to achieving shalom, to achieving peace.

Because, as the great Hillel once said, “If not now, when?                             

AMEN.