Vaera 5779: Hardening our Hearts and Gun Violence

Vaera 5779

In our parsha, we read about the first seven of the ten plagues, and Pharoah's famous reaction, his heart hardening over and over.
What does it mean to have a hard heart? To say “I don't care.” Balls of fire & ice destroying the trees? I don't care. Cattle dying? I don't care. Nobody has anything to drink, to eat? I don't care. I don't care what happens to other people—it doesn't affect me. Pharoah only cares at the tenth plague, when his own firstborn son dies.
All of us have the experience of our hearts hardening, of becoming desensitized to suffering. Shootings are not news, they need to be mass shootings. There are so many shocking things going on in the world—starvation in Yemen, oppression in Saudi Arabia, you name it-that we are just used to it.
When we no longer cry, really we are like Pharoah, our hearts have turned to stone. It happens to all of us, myself included. My chaplaincy supervisor, Joe Leggieri, once said that when you no longer cry, you're not fit to be a chaplain anymore. But the truth is, it's the only way we survive. I had a friend worked in hospice chaplaincy, and who used to joke he was friends with the angel of death; when he had terminal cancer, he made the same comment. When we see suffering on such a regular way, we get used to it, even befriend it.
I have to wonder whether we have become desensitized to gun violence. When shootings fade into the background, and we just shake our heads and accept them as a fact of life, our hearts have become hardened. There was a shooting in the Wellington Mall Christmas eve—how crazy is that? Today, the final draft of the Stoneman Douglas report was released. On the one hand, it is a great sign that people are not letting this issue die, fade into memory like Columbine and Sandy Hook. I am so impressed by the students of MSDHS, who took it to the streets of Tallahassee, Orlando (Disney's Main Street), DC, and even ran for office to keep this issue alive. They refused to let it become a memory, to fade into the history books.
One of the primary recommendations of the report was that teachers should be allowed to carry guns. I am not going to weigh in on the merits of whether teachers should pack; we have an armed security guard here, and thank God for that. The problem is, if a shooter comes around, they will go somewhere else instead. We have not solved the underlying issue, we have come to accept it
We cannot afford to accept as a society the idea that deranged individuals, students who torture animals and classmates, should have access to weapons. We cannot simply accept that deranged individuals will act in hostile ways and not be held accountable. If we do, if we simply accept that the bad guys will have guns, then our hearts have become hardened. Yes, we do need to protect ourselves, to have an armed guard, but we also need to keep questioning how we have become such a violent country.
This week's parsha challenges all of us to maintain a heart of flesh, a heart which feels the pain of others, not to become complacent. Rebbe Nahman says that if we find our heart becoming desensitized, we should bang our head against the wall of our heart, we should tell ourselves to wake up, to remember this is painful, this is not right.
Torah challenges all of us to keep our hearts sensitive to everyone around us, to feel even minor sufferings of the individuals around us, and through this to create a humane society & world.
Shabbat Shalom.