For the past few weeks we’ve been pondering antisemitism, grief, loss, acts of hatred as we process the difficult world events teeming with such actualities. There is no lack of such suffering even as we reel again this past week from the antisemitic violent attack in Boulder which even seriously injured an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. All those targeted were doing were walking in support of the hostages still held by Hamas from the October 7^th attack. They were not even participating in a political protest. They were just as Jewish people feeling the pain of other fellow Jews and their families.

The Boulder march participants were being co-sufferers. They were reminding us of the pain we all feel when any one of us is in pain and suffering, regardless of race or religion. It’s called being human.

We all love to share joy with others. What’s better than a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah for feeling the joy of others and entering into that feeling with them. It’s contagious! We are wired to be emotionally responsive beings, to engage with others. We are designed to be socially connected. What a joy!

Yet the flip of that is true as well. When others hurt, we do too, especially when we are connected to them intimately through relationship or friendship, and perhaps even more deeply if also by our faith and ethnicity. When the October 7^th hostages were taken and the Israeli embassy young couple were killed last week, we all felt pain, loss, grief. Perhaps being Jewish the loss had additional emotional attachment for we so identify with these people that it’s as if we are being killed too. Somehow we enter into a form of co-suffering with them, yes as members of mankind, but intimately also as fellow Jews.

Perhaps not objectively but subjectively it feels to me as if these are times of inordinate suffering, at the macro level as well as at the micro. The world news is painful down to community members and even young people and children in our immediate circles who are suffering from unusual health challenges, life challenges. They are victims of suffering. When these times seem to be more prevalent than usual we are drawn to seek solace through our faith, especially our faith in Yeshua. Not only are we drawn to it, we recognize that we cannot sustain ourselves in a healthy way without that faith, without that knowledge of faith in Yeshua who knew intimately of suffering.

For it was He who was the ultimate bearer of suffering for the sins of all mankind, divinely as well as personally in His lifetime in the flesh as well. How He suffered in particular as “King of the Jews” as we in an infinitely smaller way now in modern days co-suffer with Him as Messianic Jews. We know His suffering is righteous as we try to be in His model, a struggle we seek, painful, yet without regret. It is the power of His suffering that enables us to have the courage and endurance to live lives of co-suffering for we know that He is the Messiah. He performed the ultimate act of co-suffering by dying for us and even in these days He is with us in all of our suffering, co-suffering with us, giving us the ability to endure, to live with hope.

Last week we put alongside the empowering words of Adon Olam the exhortation of The Sound of Silence to not be silent. We can choose to not be silent by our overt actions against injustice through protest and by standing up for what is right. We can also not be silent by our living lives modeling Yeshua, to act as He would have acted, to serve as co-sufferers in our hearts alongside the victims of hatred and bigotry and to pray for the perpetrators, the ultimate both/and.

These are the times more important that ever to immerse in Scripture and prayer to teach us how to walk in His Way, a seemingly impossible challenge during these days of suffering. When we do so, however, when we commit to Him in this deepest of ways to follow, only then can we really have hope for a better tomorrow.

Shabbat shalom.

Diane