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December 7, 2024
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Linking Northern and Central NJ, Bronx, Manhattan, Westchester and CT

The Lessons That (Certain) Jews Won’t Learn

If just one Jew of the Colleyville four had a gun and the appropriate training to use it, the 11-hour incident could have been ended in 15 minutes, maybe even much less. The appropriate application of a knife, taser, pepper spray, tactical pen, or even some basic krav maga, might also have provided a much-earlier opportunity to end the situation.

In “Lessons From Colleyville” (January 20, 2022) Harry Glazer states, “We are witnessing a resurgent antisemitism that will require… confrontation with the minority who seek our harm…” So how can it be that his “How Can We Protect Ourselves?” item within the article doesn’t suggest we learn how to confront?

I was teaching in Israel when the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva shooting occurred in 2008. At the next staff meeting, the principal suggested that teachers who have guns should wear them to, and obviously, at school. Where I live (Connecticut), not even an off-duty police officer may carry a gun into a school.

So I ask, what is the lesson we’ve learned? The only thing I can see is that our enemies learn from most of the responses I see again and again whenever we are confronted, that we are soft targets.

You do not confront evil with diplomacy. Take a look a week further back in your paper in which Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, speaks to “The Face of Evil” (January 13, 2022). The hatred we face is not rational. We cannot think our way out of it.

We must confront it. Maybe if we started with a “stop-the-shooter” drill, and made sure there were always those in our synagogues who could, we’d need fewer “stop-the-Bleed” drills, and might delay some of the work of our chevrot kadisha for, I hope, many decades.

David R. Herz
Bridgeport
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