Rabbi’s Message on the tragedy in DC: Thursday, May 22, 2025
In reading the news this morning, in addition to our regularly scheduled Omer Journal and important community information, I write to you with a heavy heart. Last night, our wider Jewish family lost two shining souls: Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, young researchers and educators at the Israeli Embassy, who were tragically murdered while attending a reception at the Jewish Museum. Yaron, an Israeli Christian, was planning to propose to Sarah, an American Jew, next week. Next week. The future was just around the corner—and then, heartbreakingly, it wasn’t.
Throughout the past two years in particular, it strikes me deeply how much we can grieve for people we’ve never met. Grief is love that doesn’t know where to go. And losses like this are a shocking reminder of that love. It reminds us of how much we love each and every one of our people and all those connected to our people. It’s not imaginary. It’s not melodrama. It’s love—yours, mine, ours for the whole of our people, for the whole of humanity—suddenly orphaned, without a destination.
This kind of love sneaks up on you. It lives within our hearts each and every day, more or less unnoticed. Until. You see a picture, read a headline, hear their story—and there it is: a wave of sorrow as real and raw as if you’d shared a Shabbat dinner with them last week. However, this feeling is not a weakness. That’s the calling of the divine spark that resides within each of us, singing to one another’s humanity. It’s deep interconnectedness, the way we have always felt bound to one another—whether in celebration or suffering. Our capacity to mourn—even for those we’ve never met—is a sacred strength. It means we still believe in a world where every life matters. It means that we still love every life.
Now, Jewish tradition does not tell us to wallow endlessly in our grief, nor does it tell us to shut it down and “move on.” What it tells us is this: Avelut—mourning—is not just a feeling; it is a process. And like all Jewish processes, it is structured, sacred, and surprisingly actionable. So what options do we have when we grieve people we never had the honor of knowing?
We start by naming the loss. Say their names: Yaron and Sarah. Or Hersh. Or Shiri and Eden and Ariel and Kfir. Or the names of so many that we have lost to hate in the past few years. A name in Judaism is more than a label—for the mystics, it is a whisper of the soul’s purpose, echoing “I have called you by name; you are Mine” (Isaiah 43:1). We remember names as a way to honor a life shaped by covenant and kindness, held sacred by the human story.
We light a candle—a physical flame that reminds us of the soul’s eternal spark, because “the soul of a person is the lamp of God” (Proverbs 20:27).
We create tzedakah in their honor—not just charity, but justice. Let our grief fuel acts of kindness, of support, of resistance against hate and senseless violence.
We gather—as we’re doing this Shabbat and in the coming weeks—in community. Because Judaism understands that even grief is not meant to be carried alone.
And finally, we pray, not because prayer fixes everything, but because it reminds us that we are not alone in our heartbreak; their humanity is woven into the warp and weft of all of the generations of our people.
May the memories of Yaron and Sarah be a blessing. And may our grief, bewildering and painful as it is, find its way—through action, through compassion, through love—into something healing, something lasting, something good.
With broken hearts, but unbroken spirits,
Rabbi Lauren
