Two days after the hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, the congregation conducted a healing service at a nearby church. The place was full. I watched it live. One of the compelling themes offered by Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, spiritual leader of the congregation, was this: “We are not helpless! No one would be saying the Mourner’s Kaddish, thank God, thank God.” There will always be tests, he said, but the answer is always the same: “Like every journey, we will take the next step. We stand together against hatred.”
Three days later, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about Colleyville, reporting that an elite FBI team had flown in from Quantico, stormed the synagogue, and released the hostages. At that point, it was already widely known that it was Rabbi Cytron-Walker’s heroic act that had broken the grueling, 11-hour standoff, and that he and his two congregants had not been rescued, but had escaped on their own. They were not helpless.
The following Shabbat, we read in Parashat Yitro that Jethro hears and then comes from afar to join Moses and the Israelites. He heard what God had done for the Jewish people and he came. Rashi asks, “What did he hear?” He heard that we were not helpless, that God helped us, but that we can also help ourselves by creating a system to prepare ourselves. [Wikipedia image, Jethro comes to Moses in the wilderness.]
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in Manhattan was a key figure in the gunman’s demands. He insisted that the Colleyville synagogue contact her in order to free a Pakistani terrorist. Rabbi Buchdahl gave a stirring sermon the following Shabbat, citing the theme of perseverance. “The Jewish people,” she said, “have been trained to be ‘captives of hope.’”
In an essay in The Times of Israel, Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum wrote that the Jewish people have been caught between two extreme narratives: total helplessness and invincibility. “Having been vulnerable and politically weak for 2,000 years, it is natural to fear any sign of weakness,” he wrote. “It’s natural to think that any sign of vulnerability means we’re back in Egypt, a state of deep helplessness…The world has bought into this mythology, too… Either we the Jewish people are Superman — invincible and invulnerable — or we are Holocaust victims…Perhaps we need to change the narrative…We can be strong without being invincible…We need to remind the world of that…No one should have to be a total victim to qualify for sympathy.”
CBI could have been CTI or the name of any other synagogue. Just as the people of Israel learned to defend themselves back in their land, the people of every synagogue need to learn to defend themselves in their own synagogues, their Jewish land. While we can hear what happened in Colleyville, we need to listen as well and to act. Sometimes we need only to throw a chair to save ourselves. Captives of hope are never helpless.
May we have a safe and blessed month,
—Rabbi Gadi Capela