My husband, Todd, and I rode our bikes up Fernwood Road with Victoria City Councillor, Lisa Helps, on Sunday afternoon January 8. A family carried flowers as they walked beside us while vehicle traffic grew unusually heavy for this area and time. We all moved slowly up the hill to the Jewish Cemetery where graves, one as old as Canada, had been desecrated with racist symbols over Xmas.
More than one thousand concerned Victorians of many faiths and backgrounds stood empowered amidst Garry Oaks and gravestones. Rabbi Harry Brechner, who initiated this Vigil of Respect, began his brief address by acknowledging that “We are Victoria!”
Rabbi Harry explained that while our Jewish community had taken the hit this time around, we are all victims when a hate crime occurs. Together we transformed a moment of thoughtless disregard into one of support and deep respect for diversity.
More than a thousand sang, many for the first time, the traditional Hebrew song, Hineh Matov (How good it is to sit together as brothers and sisters) perched arm in arm on rocks and mossy ground.
One participant, Karen Lenz, marvelled at “…the willingness of complete strangers to put their arms around each other, swaying rhythmically as we sang.”
Perhaps the biggest act of repair, known as tikkun in Hebrew, was the most practical. Sid Fry, a stone mason who created the site’s Holocaust Memorial, held up photos of the oldest gravestones he and his assistants had cleaned. It took Fry’s team two days to do the work.
Tikkun Olam, repair of our world, will take much longer, of course, and yet this lofty goal is not entirely out of our reach. Rabbi Brechner suggested that to achieve Tikkun we must work together. We have to think before we speak or act. Is what I am about to do or say kind and meaningful? Will what I do or say bring joy?
If you’ve ever organized a spiritual event, you may have found it difficult to motivate the public to attend. So it could be considered ironic that a negative act using a swastika, a symbol that is the antithesis of what the best of our life affirming culture promotes, mobilized such tremendous support.
Every city councillor in town attended this vigil along with Jewish leaders and participants from every congregation in our city. Several other clergy brought their faith communities with them as well. The cemetery has never been this full of life and love. Non Jewish people shared their condolences as well as their joy. There was tremendous solidarity.
May respect for each other continue to grow without the need for hateful catalysts of any kind, b’ezrat Hashem (with Divine assistance) as well as all of ours.
Shoshana Litman is an ordained Maggidah, a Jewish storyteller, teacher and writer. For more information, please visit www.maggidah.com
