Tragedies

The year started tragically. When the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, it looked as if fate finally had humanity on the ropes. The scale of devastation scoured our hearts. Children crushed by their own classrooms, bodies heaped onto the backs of trucks and ferried out to mass graves. When the president of Haiti said it would take three years just to clear the debris, I wondered how, in an age when attention is measured in nano-spans, the people of Haiti would ever get the help they need.

But people did help. The Israeli emergency response team was the first to offer a full-scale search-and-rescue and operating theater. But that heroic feat was soon followed by the outstanding contributions from countries around the world. Volunteers and donations have poured in, and people have given selflessly of their talents, time and money to beat back the disaster.

Almost two months later, the massive aid has put Haiti on the road to recovery. It is not a happy ending — there can be no happy ending after so much loss — but it is a hopeful one.

Then came February, when tragedy struck much closer.

In one terrible weekend, the Jewish community lost two bright, promising young men. On Friday, Feb. 12, Avi Schaefer, 21, son of Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer, spiritual leader of the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara, and his wife, Laurie Gross-Schaefer, was killed when hit by a car in Providence, R.I. Avi was a freshman at Brown University; an old freshman, he liked to joke, because he first served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces.

He was “a young man of inordinate strength and integrity,” Brown University President Ruth Simmons said in a statement. Schaefer recently organized a campus-wide relief effort for victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

The same Friday that Avi died, another boy, 17-year-old Adir Vered, a junior at New Community Jewish High School (NCJHS) in West Hills, was killed in a car accident in Northridge. Nearly 1,000 people attended Vered’s funeral at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 14.

Vered was much loved on campus, “an A-plus friend,” Bruce Powell, head of school at NCJHS, said.

These two untimely deaths, striking such promising, beloved young men so close to home, struck like disasters of an altogether different magnitude, testing faith, testing strength, testing community. The loss of these young men bought home the truth of what the writer Anton Chekhov once observed: Anyone can face a crisis; it’s day-to-day living that wears you out.

It is the sudden, ineffable sorrows of day-to-day life that pose our greatest challenges. Will we be strong enough to meet these challenges? Will we be there for others in their time of need? It is one thing to show up for strangers suffering from an earthquake 3,000 miles away. It is altogether more difficult, and more important, to be there for our friends and neighbors.

That is not just the challenge of community; it is the definition.