Our Hearts Are Heavy As Our Tears Flow 

Dear Friends,

While I am away with my family on vacation, soon to celebrate Passover, as soon as I learned of the tragic and senseless shootings which took place in Kansas I felt compelled to reach out to our congregational family.

Last Friday night, more than sixty adults, teens and children of our GRS family gathered together at our home as we joyously experienced a family service ushering in the festival of Passover.  With song, discussion, stories and lots of laughter, we retold the history of our slavery in ancient days to our 20th century rebirth in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.  As we spoke of how Pesach is known as the Season of Our Liberation, we focused upon the verse that bids us to reach out with love and kindness to our fellow human beings, ever knowing what it was like to be  "strangers" - an oppressed people - in the land of Egypt.  While we touched upon the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish People since the exodus, our emphasis, as always, was upon our responsibility to care for the poor, the sad and the discriminated against, both within our midst and the larger world, as we celebrated how fortunate our lives are within our nation.

Yesterday's shooting in Overland Park, Kansas was a tragic reality check of the anti-Semitism which still prevails in our world.  A white supremacist, referring to himself as the "Grand Dragon" of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1980's and subsequent founder of the White Patriot Party, opened fire during a dance class and play audition at the Jewish Community Center, killing two.  He continued his spree at the Village Shalom Assisted Living Facility, taking another innocent victim.

Tonight as we hold our Haggadot, reading the words that our history

is indeed more than a record of dead events of the past, we will truly be re-experiencing the hatred and violence which has too often been known to our people. As so poignantly expressed with the pouring out of each drop of wine in the New Union Haggadah published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis (the Union of Reform Rabbis), may the "hope and prayer that people will cast out the plagues that threaten everyone and everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts: