Mass Shootings and Strange Rituals: Why Every Life Still Matters©

Parashat Shoftim 2025/5785

Does anyone here like zombie shows? I’ll admit, when they first became popular, I thought it was just a fad. A few years, I figured, and they’d shuffle off into cultural oblivion. But I was wrong. Zombie shows and movies are still everywhere. I wonder what this says about us as a culture. These shows all have something in common: they aren’t about Zombies, they’re about how humanity changes because of the Zombies. It’s not just Zombie lives that are meaningless, but all lives except your own. 

My favorite series, The Walking Dead, begins with Sheriff Rick Grimes waking from a coma to discover that the world he knew is gone, overrun by the undead. In one of the first scenes, he’s cornered by zombies and, reluctantly, kills one to survive. Afterward, he fishes through the zombie’s pockets, finds a driver’s license, and says aloud: “Adam Smith—we will always remember him.”

Rick recognizes that this was once a living person. Someone with a name. Someone’s son, brother, or friend. But by the end of that first episode, 45 minutes later, Rick has killed twenty zombies without hesitation. No reflection. No naming. Life becomes cheap; the humans lose their humanity while still remaining human.  

This week, we witnessed yet another mass shooting, but this time, in a Catholic church. Children were killed in the pews, during a Mass marking the first day of school. Try to imagine: if something like this had happened before Columbine, before Sandy Hook, before Parkland, before the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, it would have shaken the nation to its core. But today? For many, it’s just another headline. Another story we scroll past on our phones. 

In 2010, this would have been unthinkable. Today, it is tragically routine. And it begs the question: if this keeps happening again and again, with the same responses and the same failures, how do we keep going? How do we hold onto compassion in a world filled with cruelty and loss?

We live in an extraordinary moment in history. The smartphone connects us to the entire world instantly like never before in the history of humanity. Today, we can see tragedy unfold in real time, raw and unfiltered.

The high school students at Parkland were live streaming their own murders. Brutality floods our screens. The sheer volume of images and stories overwhelms us.

And when you are bombarded with constant images of suffering, your mind protects you. Psychologists call this compassion fatigue. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that caring too much, too often, becomes unbearable. Your heart hardens, not because you are cruel, but because you are human. You’re trying to protect yourself. 

Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, describes a related phenomenon called psychic numbing. He’s found that our emotional circuitry is wired to care deeply about one person, one story, one face. But as soon as the numbers increase—ten, fifty, a thousand—the compassion doesn’t multiply. It actually decreases. The statistics don’t move us. Our brains can’t add compassion the way they add numbers.

Think of the difference between hearing that “twelve people were killed in a bar shooting” versus seeing the picture of one victim, learning her name, and hearing about her dreams.

One story reaches us. A number washes over us.

And yet, Torah calls us to resist that numbing of the heart. 

This month of Elul gives us a spiritual roadmap to reclaiming our humanity through our hearts. One of the acronyms for Elul comes from Deuteronomy 30:6: “God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your children.” Ramban explains that this verse points to the messianic age when humanity will be restored to the innocence of the Garden of Eden. In that world, the evil inclination will no longer tempt us. Our hearts will be softened, naturally inclined to compassion and love.

And that’s a beautiful vision, but the Messiah is not here. We still live in this world, so what do we do today? 

Our parashah this week, Shoftim, offers a surprising teaching on how to live between the headlines of loss. 

This week, we read one of the strangest rituals in the Torah: the Eglah Arufah, the unyoked heifer. If someone is found murdered in a field, and no killer can be identified, the elders of the nearest town must perform a ritual. They take a heifer that has never been yoked, bring it to a valley, break its neck, and declare: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done.”

The location of this passage in the Torah is important. It is found between two chapters that begin with the words: “Ki Teitzei L’Milchamah—when you go out to war.” War is about numbers: casualties, statistics, losses. Individual lives get lost in the tally. But right here, in between the wars, the Torah interrupts with a story about one anonymous unsolved murder victim. 

It’s as if Torah is saying: even in times of war, do not forget the value of one life.

And then, just a few verses later, we get another reminder: “When you besiege a city for many days, do not destroy its trees… for is the tree of the field a man, to come before you in the siege?” Seforno, the medieval Italian commentator, states that this is a rhetorical device. A tree is not your enemy. A tree cannot resist you or surrender. A tree sustains life. Even in war, you must not destroy needlessly. If the Torah commands us to spare the trees, how much more so must we value human life.

Still, you may not be sold on this ritual. Why should the leaders of a town who had nothing to do with the crime, after a long and thorough investigation, take responsibility? Why not just take up a collection and give the family some compensation?

The Torah insists: no. Money cannot replace a life. Instead, the community itself must stop, notice, and publicly proclaim: this death matters. This life cannot be ignored.

In the ancient Near East, the nearest town would have to pay a fine in order to release the bloodguilt from the land; Biblical law, on the other hand, makes no provisions for compensating the survivors because it assumes that it is impossible to compensate for loss of life. Dr. Jeffrey Tigay says, “(The Torah’s) concern is with the jeopardy in which the nation is placed by the unrequited blood that was shed in its midst.”

The individual unsolved murder matters, not just to the family, but to the entire society. Allowing for blood to be so cheapened is not the society that the children of Israel were going to be building in the Promised Land. 

Ibn Ezra, commenting on the Eglah Arufah, says the purpose is to create a culture where innocent blood is not ignored, a culture that honors life. “If you do what is right,” he writes, “innocent blood will not be spilled in your land. The reward of a mitzvah is another mitzvah; the reward of a sin is another sin.”

In other words, how we treat even one anonymous victim shapes our whole society. If we allow blood to be cheapened, it poisons the land. If we honor life, we build a culture of life.

Mishnah Sanhedrin builds on this. In capital cases, witnesses were warned that testifying falsely is like destroying an entire world, for every person is a universe of potential. That teaching echoes all the way back to Cain and Abel: “The blood of your brother cries out to Me from the ground.” Not blood in the singular, but bloods—his life, his descendants, his future. Murder is an ungodly act because it cuts off not just one life, but generations of potential.

That’s why this week we must say their names: Harper Lillian Moyski, age ten. Fletcher Merkel, age eight.

Harper was just starting fifth grade. She loved sleepovers, makeup experiments gone wrong, and staying up too late watching movies with friends. Her father’s friend, Michael Burt, said his daughter has been telling him story after story—about Harper’s goofiness, her laughter, her friendship. He said he wants to help his daughter keep Harper’s memory alive.

Fletcher was a third grader, only eight years old. His father, Jesse Merkel, said: “We will never again hold him, talk to him, play with him, or watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was becoming.” He asked that people not focus on Fletcher’s death, but on his life. “Please remember Fletcher for the person he was, not the act that ended his life. We love you, Fletcher. You’ll always be with us.”

These are the names. These are the lives. Torah tells us: do not let them be reduced to numbers.

We know the challenge. Compassion fatigue is real. Psychic numbing is real. Our screens expose us to so much death that our hearts cannot keep up. We risk becoming like characters in a Zombie apocalypse, starting with compassion, ending with indifference.

But Torah insists otherwise. It says: resist the numbness. Circumcise your heart. Remove the hardness. Remember the names. Hold the stories.

Elul is the month of softening. Most of the year, we focus on the forest. But in Elul, we notice each tree. Each soul. Each person created b’tzelem Elohim—in the image of God. 

The Torah says that one unsolved murder stains the entire nation. Life is too sacred to be measured in statistics. We live in a time when death is counted, calculated, scrolled past, and forgotten. But Judaism commands: don’t forget. Speak the names. Remember the stories. Let your heart break. 

Because only with broken hearts can we rebuild a world worthy of our children.

This does not mean we are silent witnesses. We need stricter gun laws, we need a better mental health system, and we must also beef up our own security. But, we must remember why we are taking these actions.

So in this month of Elul, may we resist the numbing pull of indifference. May we hear the cries of parents who will never again hold their children. May we soften our hearts before God and before each other.