Once again, a mass shooting has hit the U.S.  This time, it was a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  One shooter, eleven dead, gunned down as they worshipped on their Sabbath.  It's awful, its horrifying.  As many who were there have said, "I can't be a Jew in the same way again."
     
     Nor can, I suggest, the rest of us be who we were last week.  It's not difficult to argue that it is the current fracturing and polarizing of the American society that has created the climate in which this type of tragedy happens.  Buying more guns or installing armed guards at every house of worship will not stop it, nor will using the death penalty or building more prisons.  The real problem is the darkness of the national heart.  It's under siege, under a siege of unrelenting vituperative political rhetoric, openly expressed and undisguised racism, an obsession with getting rich, and a pervasive cultural alienation and loneliness.

     Thousands of years ago, God, as the Hebrew writings record it, asks Job, the Job whose name has become synonymous with inexplicable suffering, "Who [meaning Job] is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"  Indeed:  how do you really know, Job, what is going on with life?
     And that, in a nutshell, is the problem:  so rarely do we admit to the fallibility of whom we, our finite selves, are.
     
     I hope that America learns from its Jewish brethren and listens to a God, not the transient god of a finite planet, but a God whom it cannot possibly create.