שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל‬ (shema, yisrael)

I don't usually write about current events -- here, or anywhere else, really -- because, for better or for worse, they don't usually reflect my own lived experience, and anyway, someone else probably has done a better job writing about them than I have. There is an argument that, in this time as I make preparations to make havdalah [the closing prayers, service, and meditation for Shabbat] -- something I do approximately once every never at home -- that I should not be writing about this subject at all yet, but the peace of the Rest Day has already been shattered by eleven deaths in Pittsburgh earlier today, and surely my koteb ["writing"; a prohibited activity on Shabbat] shall not breach it any more than it already has been. And I'll give myself a pass on the other front, too: as I expected today's news to pass through me, I found this afternoon that I could not tear myself away from news and Twitter and messengers, hoping in some way to make sense from something that doesn't. And so I write.

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