Message from Rabbi Weizman

On the eighth day of Pesach we read a passage from the prophet Isaiah which we will read again on Tuesday for Yom Ha'atzmaut. “ The wolf shall dwell with the lamb/The leopard lie down with the kid/ The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together/ And a little boy shall herd them” (Isaiah 11:6). These words rang so dissonant on Yom Hasho'ah. While we were trying to fathom the atrocity of the Holocaust, a young man at Virginia Tech took his weapons and murdered thirty two innocent college students and one of their teachers, Professor Liviu Librescu, a holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself to save his students. On the other side of the world, scores of innocents are killed in five car bombings in Bagdad in the worst day of violence since the American led invasion of Iraq, seven road workers beheaded my Moslem terrorist in the Philippines, and the list goes on and on. God must be looking down on us with great dejection as He did before the Flood: What kind of creatures did I make to inhabit the earth? We must set the balance against the anger and the evil in the world today, purge our own society of the glorification of violence, and thus display a model of peaceful behavior to the world. May our effort lead to the world to the prophecy of Isaiah: “In all of My sacred Mount/ Nothing evil or vile shall be done; /For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord/ As water covers the sea” (11:9).

ובימינו במהרה המשיח שיבא