Saving Lives at Virginia Tech
| Author: Rabbi Chaim Levine | |
 This is a picture of Liviu Librescu, a Jewish man who survived the holocaust to build a family during turbulent times in Israel, and then spent the last twenty years as a professor at Virginia Tech University.
He died Monday at the age of 76. Fox News reported that he blocked the door with furniture and his body and asked his students to flee. He was gunned down, but in the process saved the lives of several of his students. They sent emails to his family describing his heroism. He was over 50 years older than the men and women he was trying to protect. He could have asked a young strong person to try to block the gunman while he hid under a desk, but he did the opposite, and the world again witnessed the nature of heroism and goodness.
It is a terrifying yet incredible juxtaposition: an angry and homicidal 23-year-old student trying with all of his might to take innocent life, and a kind and dedicated 76-year-old Holocaust survivor trying with all of his might to save innocent life.
How do we make sense of this? How do we make sense of September 11th when 19 fundamentalist Muslim terrorists killed thousands and in the aftermath hundreds of firefighters and city workers risking their own lives to save even one survivor that lay under the rubble? We read the news of yet another angry young person walking into a public place and killing at random and we feel a wave of despair about the state of humanity. We read the news of a person like Liviu Librescu giving up his life to save his students and we feel a wave of inspiration about the state of humanity.
We have to look behind the two actions, one terrible and one incredible to the state of mind that these actions were born out of.
Does every human being have something so pure inside of them that we can only refer to it as Divine? Judaism stipulates that this is the case. Does every human being also have a shell of selflessness and self-centeredness around their soul that manifests as an ego? This is also a Jewish idea. We experience both as real. When we are in the reality of our egos we experience some shade of a dark world that cannot be trusted. We are visited by thoughts of jealousy, cynicism, anxiety, frustration, hate, and even violence but they do not look like thoughts, they look like a compelling reality that we urgently need to react to.
When we are in the reality of our souls, we experience varying hues of a brighter world that evokes a feeling of gratitude, wisdom, and discovery. We are visited by thoughts of selflessness, compassion, contentment, creativity, humor and love and we have a sense that the world might be even more wonderful and beautiful than we even know.
We must understand it is not that each human being is a combination of a soul and an ego. Each human being is a soul, and that soul is covered by an ego, sometimes thickly covered.
Did the killer have a soul? Was the killer formed in the image of G-d? Yes. Was the killer consumed by his ego? There is no other way that he possibly could have done what he did. Did Professor Librescu have an ego? We all do. Was he living in his last moments way beyond his ego? There is no other way to act with such heroism and selflessness.
The ego comes with a compelling feeling of urgency and constriction, it distorts what we see into seeming bigger and louder than it actually is. It has a twisted logic that supports and rationalizes the insanity it would have us live in. The soul comes with a feeling of perspective and wisdom. It gives us a 100,000-foot view of our lives and guides us as to what to do and where to seek good counsel. One is loud, petty, and compelling; the other is quiet yet profound. Both are available to us at this moment. We have the choice as to which channel we are going to tune into, and which channel we are going to tune out, no matter how loud it may be playing at the moment.
Episodes like the Virginia Tech massacre are a wake-up call that we can no longer afford to indulge the insanity of our egos no matter how justified we may feel in the moment. We would never go as low as this homicidal student, but we easily could go low enough to say hurtful things to the people we love the most. As disturbing as this may sound, the killer was simply living in an extreme version of the daily insanity we find ourselves in; the insanity of blame, frustration, feeling like a victim, anger, resentment, and ill will.
We have a choice about whether we are going to allow ourselves to live in this internal world or whether we are going to look for something within ourselves that is of a different order altogether. Our Jewish Heritage and its Mitzvot point us towards living a life that produces the Professor Librescu’s of the world. People that in the face of insanity and terror, choose righteousness and giving. In choosing this, Professor Librescu achieved the highest accomplishment here on earth, and in his great act illuminated a path for us to travel down during the rest of our hours, days, and years. |
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