Loss

By: Cheryl Kupfer

Published: April 18th, 2007

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Just days ago millions of people’s lives across the country were impacted by severe unrelenting weather in the form of snowstorms, torrential rains, hurricane force winds and tornadoes. Many, including myself, found themselves at strange airports, waiting endlessly for information about their delayed flights. If and when they would take off, could they get back to work or home to the families waiting for them?

Many of us literally ended up going nowhere. We lost time.

Thousands of people who had not traveled experienced other aggravations due to considerable property damage. Roofs were torn off homes, basements flooded, electricity cut off, cars wrecked, etc. All no doubt have been hit hard financially. Those people lost money.

Most of us were angry, frustrated, annoyed, miserable and scared. We felt victimized. We felt sorry for ourselves.

It’s a sad fact of life that other people’s tragedies are often the only way we gain true perspective. It’s the only way we get the very sobering wakeup call that we have let ourselves be stressed by relatively minor events and situations. That we have no business to “sweat the small stuff.”

I write this as I hear the news of the massacre of students on a Virginia campus.

The previous day’s coverage of the bad weather -that deservedly received much media attention due to its severity and life-threatening nature – pales in comparison to this day’s news.

How minor and irrelevant lost time and lost money is when viewed in the context of lost lives. Especially if those lives were stolen by blind, unyielding hatred, as has happened all too frequently in Israel.

With Yom HaZikaron – Israel’s Memorial Day approaching, I dedicate the following poem to those n’shei chayil, murdered by terrorists, who lost their lives al kiddush Hashem by living in Eretz Yisrael - and to the soul mates who courageously survive them.