I wonder how many Jews in America know that last week, a gunman opened fire at an ancient synagogue in Djerba (an island off the coast of Tunisia), killing five people, including two Jews.
Wissam Khazri, a member of the Tunisian National Guard, first killed another colleague at a National Guard base off the coast of Djerba, then seized his weapon and rode a National Guard motorcycle close to one of the world’s oldest houses of worship, the historic El Ghriba synagogue.
Khazri knew that hundreds of worshippers had made a pilgrimage to El Ghriba and were celebrating Lag b’Omer. In fact, this year the synagogue had attracted the most pilgrims — roughly 6,000 total (mostly from Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S.) — since 2019. Some visitors had stayed away for decades, especially after a terrorist attack during the annual pilgrimage to Djerba in 2002, when Al-Qaeda killed 20 people after a truck bomb detonated at the entrance of the synagogue.
Last Tuesday’s deadly attack claimed the lives of three police officers and two Jewish pilgrims. The Jewish victims were cousins Aviel Haddad, 30, a dual Tunisian-Israeli citizen, and French citizen Benjamin Haddad, 42.
When I read about the attack, I was extremely distraught. But as soon news spread that the men were cousins, my heart really sank.
I can’t recall a time in the last decade when so many Jewish family members have been killed simultaneously. In February, brothers Yaakov Yisrael Paley, 5, and Asher Menahem Paley, 7, died when a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a bus stop in Jerusalem. That same month, brothers Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, were killed by Palestinian terrorists as they drove through the West Bank town of Huwara. “Words can’t describe this disaster,” their mother, Esti, told reporters at a press conference. “Instead of accompanying children to the wedding canopy, we need to bury them.”
As Jews were still mourning these deaths, two more siblings, sisters Rina Dee and Maia Dee, 15 and 20, were shot dead by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank. Their mother, Lucy, who was also shot, died several days later. That same month, Ma’ayan Assor, 24, and her brother, Sahar, 17, both residents of the northern town of Tiberias, died when their car was swept away in a flash flood in southern Israel.
I admit that my descriptions above sound more like dry newspaper headlines. But each loss resulted in a universe of grief for now-broken families in Israel. And while the loss of one person’s life is enough to break our hearts, when two family members perish (and parents grieve for not one, but two children), the heartbreak is indescribably magnified.
Sadly, I’ve become inured to Israel coming under attack from Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket and missile fire every few years, and last week’s conflict was no exception. But I’ve been shaken to my core over the loss of so many young Jewish family members that have been taken from us in the past few months. Is there a deeper meaning to all of this tragedy?
Some Jews believe that God orchestrates all events, including catastrophes and devastation, as a way to send a message to the Jewish people. But what message could God possibly be sending us in allowing the deaths of so many siblings (and in Djerba, two cousins)?
I knew there could be no definitive answer, but I asked two rabbis and a Jewish scholar if there is supposed to be a deeper message surrounding these tragedies.
“I can’t say that there is a hidden aspect to all of this or not,” Rabbi Shlomo Seidenfeld told me, “but I deeply resonate with the idea that in the absence of knowledge or comprehending Hashem’s way, what we can do is to respond by allowing these losses and traumas to compel us to be more active in the pursuit of values like achdut (Jewish unity); to be less judgmental and more caring about people.”
Seidenfeld, who describes himself as a “freelance rabbi,” is a scholar-in-residence for Aish LA’s Jewish Men’s Initiative. “Whenever there’s a personal or national trauma, our instincts are to look inside,” he said. “It’s not only the individual, but Klal Yisrael (the Jewish people) as a whole. It’s tragic that Klal Yisrael comes together to unify and galvanize during times of tragedy, when what we really need to do is to be more brotherly and sisterly to each other now.”
When Jewish brothers and sisters perish together, perhaps we can be moved to treat others as beloved siblings.
That is truly a moving interpretation. When Jewish brothers and sisters perish together, perhaps we can be moved to treat others as beloved siblings.
“What you’re essentially talking about is theodicy — the idea that God or the universe or some divine power orchestrates all things good and bad,” Monica Osborne, author of “The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma” and editor at large at The Jewish Journal, told me. “Theodicy, of course, is more about our needs than about what really is. We need to know that there is meaning behind suffering, but that doesn’t mean that there is. Emmanuel Levinas’s essay ‘Useless Suffering’ is a great example of this, as well as Primo Levi’s ‘Useless Violence,’ to a lesser degree.”
According to Osborne, after the Holocaust, many Jewish philosophers and theologians deemed the notion of theodicy transgressive. After the murder of six million Jews, “it became impossible to say that there is meaning behind suffering (because that would be to say that God orchestrated the Holocaust and caused the suffering of millions of Jews),” said Osborne. “We can’t make or find meaning out of someone else’s suffering. To do so would be to say that someone else’s suffering is worth it if it offers meaning to me.”
So what can we do to ensure our hearts, eyes and minds remain open in the wake of tragedy?
“We can find or make meaning out of our own suffering,” said Osborne, “because it’s ours. And we can use tragic events around us as opportunities to express love and compassion, which is very different from saying ‘everything happens for a reason’ or that there is meaning to be found in someone else’s tragedy.”
I believe there is always meaning to be found in tragedy, but immediately identifying that meaning is a luxury that seems to be reserved for those who are farthest from the tragic news. I imagine that no one would ask the mothers of the victims mentioned above about what meaning they have derived from such horrifying loss.
Still, I asked Rabbi Yitz Jacobs, director of MyAish LA, if Jews are supposed to look for particular meaning (or a message) from loss. “What I’m sensing is that it perhaps didn’t touch our hearts enough when individuals were taken from us, even though it should have,” he said, “but somehow, seeing two people — siblings or cousins with such a close connection, who grew up together — it opens our hearts in a different way. It makes us feel.”
And then, Jacobs surprised me by turning the tables. “What is the impact of all this on you?” he asked me.
I responded that such tragic news opened “a flood of compassion” in me. That’s when Jacobs told me that his rabbi, Rav Noson Weisz (a senior lecturer at Yeshivat Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem), believes that the experience itself “does the job” of creating meaning for us. Jacobs explained that when a person asks, “What was I supposed to get out of this experience?”, Weisz often responds, “Well, what did you get out of this experience?” In Jacobs’s words, “You won’t have to wonder what you got out of it. Just look and see what you did get out of it.”
In hindsight, the tragic events described above left me more compassionate toward others, more grateful for my own blessings and more present and mindful, enabling me to truly live in the moment.
In hindsight, the tragic events described above left me more compassionate toward others, more grateful for my own blessings and more present and mindful, enabling me to truly live in the moment. “The message [from G-d] is compassion, care, love and giving,” Jacobs said. “What happened evokes identification and compassion.” Jacobs compared the losses to when three Israeli teens, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah were kidnapped at a bus stop in June 2014 and murdered. “Those three boys were everyone’s children, brothers and neighbors,” he said. “Jews all over the world opened their hearts when that happened.”
We’ll never know why these siblings’ and cousins’ lives were cut so short and in such terrible ways. If we look to the Torah for guidance, the closest reference is found in Parshat Shemini, in which two brothers, Nadab and Abihu, the first two sons of Moshe’s brother, Aaron, die as a result of offering “a strange fire before G d, which He had not commanded” (Leviticus 10:1–2). There is an incredible litany of commentary on this incident, including one question that Jews have asked for millennia: Were the brothers’ deaths a kapparah (atonement) for the Jewish people?
Humans are nothing if not seekers of meaning, and I am no exception. In contemplating the deaths of Aaron’s sons, Rabbi Seidenfeld was reminded of the words of Hillel: “Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving mankind and drawing them close to the Torah” (Pirkei Avot 1:12).
He added, “When there is a tidal wave of caring, consciousness and clarity, it infuses loss with more meaning, if it leads to a higher purpose. Those that were left behind are hurting in a deep, deep way and we have to be so careful how we approach those who are struggling with the loss. All we can do is be there with them, cry with them, and then privately, in our own lives, try to dedicate ourselves to being more active in our pursuit of Jewish unity.”
Tabby Refael is an award-winning weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal, and an LA-based speaker and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @TabbyRefael.