Rabbi's Week in Review Blog

I was involved in a roundtable last week as part of KCPT Channel 19’s “Flatland in Focus” program. The program was one of the events commemorating the 10th anniversary of the murders at the Jewish Community Center and Village Shalom. On the panel was Mindy Corporon, the founder of the SevenDays nonprofit organization promoting kindness and understanding, and the mother and daughter, respectively, of Reat Underwood and Dr. William Corporon, who were killed at the JCC. Also on the panel was social worker Patty Davis, program manager for Trauma Informed Care at Children’s Mercy. (The program will air on KCPT this Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m.)

Mindy Corporon has her own incredible story about turning painful loss into lessons of kindness for an entire city and beyond. Patty Davis is doing important work for the mental health of our kids, at a time of increasing concern for and awareness of the troubling increase in mental illness of our kids in these very challenging times.

For me, this felt like good preparation for our observance of Pesach/Passover. I have always seen the great lesson of Pesach to be in how we turn our own story of persecution and affliction into one of empathy for the other “strangers” in our community and in our world. The need is to look beyond our own pain to commit to alleviating the pain of others.  

Nowhere is this lesson of greater resonance right now than in the present war in Gaza. We need to acknowledge our own pain, the pain of our fellow Jews from the brutality committed on October 7. Yet, if we cannot go any further than to dwell on our own pain or, worse, to use it as an excuse to justify the starvation and killing of innocents (too many being children) amongst Palestinians in Gaza, then we have lost our sense of our Jewish values and our own humanity.

In this most challenging time, let the lessons of our own suffering be turned into good for others, the marginalized, and come to a day when we see them as strangers no more.