Reflections on the Virginia Tech killings

Even now, nearly two weeks later, my students look to me for answers. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose. Virginia Tech occupies every thought of students and faculty on campus. We are relieved when through the door it's only a late arriving student. My students look to me for explanation. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose.

It was the day after Yom Hashoah. Liviu Librescu, born in 1930 in Romania had been a survivor of the Holocaust. Romania's Iron Guard didn't wait for German orders. Jews were rounded up and murdered by homegrown fascists by the hundreds of thousands. But he survived. In the post-War era he lived under the tyranny of the Ceausescu regime which would neither allow him to practice his profession nor leave the country. It was only the personal intervention of Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 that secured his release from the suspended animation of life under Ceausescu's tyranny. In Israel he taught at Tel Aviv University and at the Technion in Haifa. In 1984 he came to Virginia Tech on sabbatical leave and stayed, becoming its most published scholar, ever. According to his son Joe, at Tech “he saw himself as the ambassador of Israel ... to an American university that had few Israelis but many representatives from the Arab world.”

I don't know how Professor Librescu observed Yom Hashoa, or if he did at all. I do know that on the Monday, Marlena,his wife, drove him to campus from their home at the edge of a forest through which he liked to take long contemplative walks. Shortly after 9:00 a.m. he was teaching Solid Mechanics to a class of 23 students. Gun shots were heard from the room next door. Professor Librescu slammed shut the door to his classroom and pressed his body against it. One of his students, Alec Calhoun, later told the AP that “he and classmates heard 'a thunderous sound from the classroom next door, what sounded like an enormous hammer.'” The students' initial response was to flip over their desks to use as hiding places. Librescu, though, shouted to them to get out the windows, to jump from the second story. The students kicked through the screens and jumped, one then another then another. The last image Calhoun has of his professor was just before jumping himself. He turned and saw Librescu at the door, blocking it to give the students another few seconds to escape. The killer, Cho Seung-Hui, tried to break in, but couldn't. Soon enough he shot through the door and hit professor Librescu five times. One student, Minal Panchal, was killed. All the others escaped. A survivor, Caroline Merrey, 22, reported that as the students were jumping out the window, “Professor Librescu never made an attempt to leave.” She reports that “He's a part of my life now and forever. I'm changed. I'm not the person I was before Monday.” None of us are. My students look to me for answers. I offer rationality, reason. It is insufficient. Madness is on the loose.

There is no way to bring back the 32 students and faculty killed. There is a way to help prevent a recurrence of the tragedy. Back in 1974, the Buckley Amendment, more formally called the Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act came into being. In short this says that if a student is 18 years of age or older, faculty cannot communicate with their parents. This to protect the students' privacy, a possibly laudatory goal. Down at Virgina Tech Cho Seung-Hui's English teacher noted dangerous tendencies and advised him to go to counseling but could not follow up. The campus police were called in on a couple of occasions in response to some creepy behaviors, but... You get my point. The consequence of protecting Seung-Hui's privacy was the death of 32 innocent students and teachers. The law had been obeyed scrupulously, the deaths are irrevocable. This we can do something about. We can write to our congressmen and senators and urge them to revoke the Buckley amendment, to allow teachers and counselors and administrators to talk to worried, distraught parents. I understand that mental health professionals have a code of ethics by which they must abide—but need teachers be bound by their code? When concerned parents call I want to answer their questions without fear of being sued by a student. Anyone care to join me?

Did we learn the lessons of the Seders?

The Seders of 5767 are now only a memory. Still, it's appropriate to ask, did their stories of freedom change us, clear our eyes, awaken our consciences? Are we more free now than before the Seders? By one definition, the answer is clearly “no,” for no man is free while even a single man is a slave. And, worse, what if we are enablers of the slavers? If we are, can we ever be free or are we merely latter day Egyptians, benefiting from the new pharaohs? Here's a simple quiz.

Did you emphasize that the story of our ancestors was the story of the exploitation of oppressed labor? And then did you go out and buy a product made in a sweatshop rather than in a Union shop?

Did you read of Pharaoh and not remember that people are being smuggled into this country to work in sub-human conditions; indeed, are being smuggled into the country in sub-human ways, crammed into airless trucks from Mexico, driven through deserts, abandoned if their drivers fear capture, or if from Asia, forced to live in ships in conditions comparable to those of the Middle Passage of the 19th century which smuggled Africans to our shores?

Most Jews no longer work with their hands in crafts. If we work with our hands it's as surgeons or dentists or musicians. We work with our minds as lawyers, teachers, store owners, stock brokers. We have achieved the American dream. We have become market driven bottom liners shopping for price, ignoring the human cost that goes into the production of our inexpensive goods. And why not? Being bourgeois is comfortable, it's convenient, it's what people around the world want—as proof of which there are all those desiring to come here. But there was a time when it was us who came to this country as the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. And then we began the American labor movement. Those who did were Yiddish speaking secular Jews; maybe they never entered a synagogue, but they were the product of the Seder, of the retelling as though they had been slaves in Egypt. They were not going to wait to be liberated by a God they did not believe in; when they searched for the Messiah, they looked into the mirror and saw their own grime-lined faces. They remembered that they had a mission as Jews, to redeem not only themselves but mankind in general, so they formed their unions and they marched for workers' rights and then when African Americans demanded equality, of the white community it was Jews who were the first to ride freedom buses and march in Selma. We've given all that up now, but at the Seder, if we did it right, we remembered when we were slaves in Egypt; if we did it right we wept at the success we've achieved at the cost of abandoning our roots as workers for the liberation of the downtrodden.

Rabbi David Teutsch of the Reconstructionist Seminary has it about right. “If we only pour ten drops of wine from our cups and do nothing more, we do not understand the significance of our act. Our joy cannot be complete when there is harshness, cruelty, or suffering in the world. We cannot wait for others to tackle the injustices of our time. What will we do this year?” Oh, Rabbi Teutsch is also a PhD—from the Wharton School of Business. He writes as a Jew, but with that business background he might also be channeling the ideas of the principal theorist of capitalistic economics, Adam Smith. Smith asked the question we too often ignore—what is it that gives something value? And his answer was straightforward and simple—it is labor. Without labor taking a raw material and transforming it into something usable, it is just a tree, not a desk; some ore, not a knife; some gold, not an earing. Smith, who brooked no interference in the economy, not from government, not from price fixing allowed only this—the formation of workmen's associations so that laborers could collectively negotiate their wages. Smith wasn't a Jew, he was, I imagine, a Presbyterian, but like Teutsch, he knew the lesson of the Seder. Messiah? Look in the mirror and see your own reflection. You are the messiah if only you would recognize the strength within yourself, within our tradition that began as slaves in Egypt.