Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

Nous sommes tous Américains!” Thus the headline on September 12, 2001, Le Monde’s declaration of French solidarity with America in its time of wrenching agony. Our civilians had been hijacked, forced to become part of inhuman missiles. The World Trade Center had been converted into two dusty tombs for thousands of innocents and 10 demented mass murderers; the Pentagon was hit a glancing blow and brave passengers died having revolted in the air attempting to re-take a fourth pirated plane.

The comparisons to events in Mumbai are overt. Here parallel towers, there parallel hotels; here the financial capital of the United States, there the financial capital of India; here warnings were ignored, there warnings from us were ignored; here they flew in from the sky, there they sailed in on boats; here they were well organized Arabs, there they were (it would seem) well organized Pakistanis; here our response was poorly organized—and so was theirs; here president Bush’s term was beginning, now it is ending, bookending tragedy; here there was shock and anger, there there was shock and anger.

But there is one substantial difference. Jews. In the New York tragedy the murders let it be thought that the whole thing was an Israeli plot. Jews didn’t report to work that day, because they had been tipped off. Only the deliberately stupid believed the calumny. This time Jews were a target, perhaps for all we know the target, the other assaults mere diversions. Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his 28-year-old pregnant wife, Rivka, were killed, though the couple's son, Moshe survived after his nanny, Sandra Samuel escaped with him 10 hours after the hostage incident started. There is intense pressure to declare Miss Samuel a “righteous among the gentiles”. No less significant, though often over looked are 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who was traveling in India, Bentzion Chroman, 28, and 38-year-old Leibish Teitelbaum who were all killed as well—not in the cross fire, not with a spray of machine gun fire, but tortured to death in ways I cannot describe because I cannot know them. First the Indian coroner and later Israeli Zaka (Orthodox Jews who help to collect body parts after terrorist attacks in Israel) felt compelled to leave the room where the bodies were found, appalled by what they saw. As I write, two other Jews are in critical condition.

At about 2:00 on that pleasant Thanksgiving Day, Chabad rabbi Joshua Laufer called. He was trying to organize a prayer service for the hostages. I asked “What time?” and he said “4:40.” Our company was due at 4:30. But I said that we’d pray at home. As family and our guests sat at our groaning table, I distributed yarmulkes and asked my son, a fifth year cantorial student, to lead us in a prayer for hostages. He chanted Psalm 130 in Hebrew and then translated it: a truncated version follows:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Oh Lord, hear my cry!
Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
It is He who will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

But while I heard those words of supplication, I was thinking others about the Deccan Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba or whoever it was that decided to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. It’s from another Psalm, number 94, not one of my favorites, normally, but parts of it seemed more than appropriate at the time: “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! How long shall the wicked exult, shall they utter insolent speech, shall all evildoers vaunt themselves? They crush your people, O Lord, they afflict Your very own; they kill the widow and the stranger; they murder the fatherless, thinking, ‘The Lord does not see it, the God of Jacob does not pay heed.’ Take heed, you most brutish people; fools—when will you get wisdom? Shall He who implants the ear not hear, He who forms the eye not see?”

The previous Shabbat the young Mumbai rabbi had been talking about the humane slaughter of animals Jewish law demands. The irony? Jews slaughter animals humanely, but the animals of the Deccan Mujahideen slaughter Jewish human beings by torturing them to death. “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, Judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts!”

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!