Processing Darkness: A Message in Response to the Sydney Attack

Hello beloved readers,

This poured straight of my heart today and it feels important to share it right away before time lets me revisit what I feel brave enough to say. Please share with anyone you think would benefit from it and let them know they should feel free to subscribe to my Substack if they’d like to get more of my emails in the future.

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I woke up this morning to the devastating headline of a shooting at a Channukah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach.

My heart instantly sank. Heartbreakingly, it was a familiar feeling. The horrified but semi-numb awareness that those beachgoers in Sydney, guilty of nothing more than celebrating their faith with joy, could have been my family in Toronto. They could have been my friends in cities all across the United States. They could have been me in New York.

There but for the grace of God go I.

Just three days ago, my fiancée and I went to see one of our favorite Jewish musicians perform at a synagogue about ten blocks from our apartment. Hundreds of people gathered for the concert. I’ve been to that synagogue so many times now that it almost didn’t register how many security personnel we had to pass through just to enjoy a simple night of music. We take it for granted now that our gatherings need security. To be Jewish in 2025 is to know that the safety we enjoyed that night at the concert could have been otherwise.

There but for the grace of God go I.

This morning, when I heard the news from Australia I started to cry. Real tears. Not the ones embellished later in a piece of writing or a speech to accentuate the emotional point. The ones that come straight from vulnerability and fear. The kind of tears that a small child cries when they truly don’t know if they’ll be okay.

I cry because at least 15 people are dead (nobody knows what the final number will be). Only once the blood has fully dried, the emergency surgeries are finally done, and the Instagram posts have all been made, will it become clear whether I, or any of my friends, did in fact know any of those killed. The Jewish family is small in moments like this.

I cry because at least 28 people are injured (though I’m sure the number will rise). Many of them will carry the physical scars of this day on their bodies forever.

I cry because every Jew in the entire world now has another emotional scar etched on their hearts for the rest of their lives.

I cry because of all this is devastatingly predictable. I’m brought back to a quote from Ephraim Mirvis the Chief Rabbi of England. After a terror attack at synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur just over two months ago, he said “This is the day we hoped we would never see, but which deep down, we knew would come”.

And I cry because it is profoundly sad to keep confronting the fact that there are people in this world who hate you and would harm you if they had the chance, who don’t even know you.

I am an optimist by nature. Wise or foolish, I try my best not to indulge alarmist thinking in these kinds of moments. That temperament probably won’t change after today, whether or not it should. But I cry because there are humans who will be buried tomorrow, who no longer even have the chance to indulge in the kind of complicated philosophical conversations about how to protect minorities when their safety is at stake.

On days like this, I’m brought back to a painful memory of experiencing antisemitism directly. I had just left a synagogue. My kippah (yarmulke) was still on when I walked into a Subway restaurant to buy a drink or a bag of chips. I was standing in line when the man behind me started speaking to me in virulently antisemitic ways. I was scared. I stayed silent and left as quickly as I could. I still remember walking away as fast possible, the way you’d only walk if you were trying to shake someone off you were afraid might follow you. When I stopped walking, I remember being overcome by a terrible feeling. There’s no exact word for the feeling but it was a mix of vulnerability and sadness and fear and even a bit of misplaced guilt for having not stood up for myself with my words and said something back to this man. There was helplessness in that feeling and anger in that feeling and that terrible realization that, sometimes, no amount of compassion or kindness –nothing at all about how you show up in the world– will matter to someone else who has swallowed an ideology that tells them that your people are evil.

So why do I write to you today? What’s the point?

The pain of this particular day is so fresh that I can’t be fully certain of my own motivations. But let me share a few hunches as to what brought me straight to my computer on encountering the news, in order to write something to you all.

1. I write to share my grief, because when we share our grief, we become a little more able to hold it. Grief and fear are never best held alone. This email is my way of saying that we need not be isolated in our pain. And that one of the only positive effects of agonizing emotional pain is that it can pull us back towards love and community, towards the things that matter most.

2. I write because I cannot stay silent. In the grand scheme of platforms, my particular Substack is still a humble one. I have hundreds of readers, not thousands or millions. But still, hundreds are not zero. One is not zero. I write, therefore, because I think all of us need to use whatever platforms we have, big or small, to speak up for those who face threat and discrimination. I write because the longer I do the work I do, the more I learn that hearts and minds are opened and transformed just as much from an email or a text message, as they are from the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the pulpit of a synagogue or church. I write because I am lucky enough to have a voice and I will not waste it.

One of the most profound poems of all time, written by a Lutheran Pastor named Martin Niemoller in 1946 after World War Two, is the clearest articulation of why we must speak up. The poem, usually titled “First they Came”, goes as follows:

“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me”

I write because sometimes the world swings in terrifying directions, where entire swaths of people have no one left to write for them. I write to say that Jewish people are hurting and afraid.

3. I write because I hope my writing can expand even one person’s circle of care. I have no illusions of thinking the next crazy person who shoots up a synagogue or a Channukah party will read this poem. But maybe his cousin’s cousin will. And maybe his cousin’s cousin, who for all kinds of reasons has placed Jews outside of the circle of people worthy of his care, will change his way of thinking. Maybe one day his cousin’s cousin will influence his cousin and so on and so forth.

I don’t know the specific motivations of today’s shooters, though frankly I don’t care. I do know that in 2025 there are many people who have been convinced that their views on the war in Israel and Gaza justify a hatred to Jews worldwide. I write so that maybe this email can make even one person understand that the innocence and the humanity of a Jewish ten-year old killed on a beach in Australia has nothing to do with one’s views on a conflict thousands of miles away.

But I write also to encourage all of us to enlarge our circles of care whenever we can. I write today as a Jew speaking to the Jewish experience, but I know how many other marginalized groups there are in need of the same compassion and dignity.

I write to encourage all of us to challenge ourselves again and again to notice the places where bigotry and xenophobia exist in us. When I think of this topic, I think of a profound quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was a Russian dissident and writer imprisoned under Stalin in the gulag. In his book, The Gulag Archipelago, he wrote:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

None of us, certainly not me, are fully free from ways of being and thinking we’d do better without. I write to help us perhaps illuminate the places in ourselves where racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. But I do it with a gentleness, acknowledging that a way of thinking we’ve learned over decades is not a light switch we turn on or off. Discriminatory ideas do not dissolve at once, but are chipped away courageously, day after day after day.

4. I write to celebrate loudly and publicly the beauty of my Jewish faith. If the beauty of Judaism is unfamiliar to you, come to my home on a Friday night and have Shabbat dinner with me. Sit with me in a synagogue and see the different ways that we try to find the sacred. Ask me for a recommendation for the best latkes (potato pancakes) we eat on Channukah or the best Matzah Ball soup in Manhattan. Let me share with you a Jewish song that will melt your heart, a Jewish meditation teacher who will ease your mind. It’s impossible to love what we do not know, but let me help you know this faith that is a treasure chest. My heart is open.

I write, too, as I celebrate Judaism’s profound richness, to encourage myself to always live my faith in the light, not to shrink it into the shadows. Two nights ago, my fiancée and I had two wonderful non-Jewish friends over for Friday night dinner. Before they came, we debated whether we should do both prayers we often do: the Kiddush (a special Sabbath prayer over wine/ grape juice) and the Motzi (the blessing over the Challah bread). We decided to just do the Motzi. At some level, I think we were self-conscious that if we did both things we normally did, our Jewishness might be too much for our guests. Next time, I hope I say the Kiddush prayer too. Next time, I hope I do not hide any parts of who I am, out of fear it might make someone else uncomfortable. To shrink ourselves is to give victory to those who want us gone.

5. And finally, I write to pray that light triumphs over darkness.

I do not know if it will. None of us do. But the profound teaching of Channukah, the Jewish holiday that has just begun is that light ultimately does prevail. We light candles and affirm a simple truth: that all it takes is one candle to light many more. And we place those candles in the window, knowing that light inspires more light.

Tonight, I am going to a concert that was scheduled weeks ago to celebrate the beginning of Channukah. I’ll hardly realize as I walk through a metal detector to enter, that should not need to be there.

I’ll take the elevator to the concert and listen to the music, all on the theme of light. I imagine the people there will cry. But we will sing too. And as we do, we’ll pray for a day when the song of this world is one of beauty, rather than heartbreak.

May the memories of those killed in Sydney be for a blessing,

Wishing for better days ahead,
Ari
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