Stunned By Carnage, Again, We Cannot Be Idle

Not again. No.

Las Vegas faces the unimaginable. Again and in ever more terrifying ways, gun violence has shaken the United States to its core. We mourn. We come together. We offer words of condolence in an attempt to somehow address the compounding and boundless scope of grief and the scale of innocent human lives lost.

But each time, the country goes back to business as usual. As the body count grows, with new scenes of senseless slaughter, nothing changes.

Thoughts, prayer, and words are appropriate – but they’re not sufficient.

Words help us explain the unexplainable to children. Words help unite us as a Jewish community and as a civil society. But the truth is, our words and prayers simply cannot fix this immense problem.

Our words need to be followed by long overdue actions and hard work.

In response to the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said,

“We cannot say that there are ‘no words’ to express our grief and our outrage. We must find the words, and we must not stop saying them and acting on them until we stop this plague of gun violence that has gripped our nation for far too long.”

Please join the Reform Jewish Movement in taking action to prevent gun violence.

• Ask Congress to protect common sense gun safety laws. Use this action alert to send a message directly to your member of Congress.
• Explore the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism’s gun violence prevention resources.
• Join NFTY’s gun violence prevention efforts, led by Jewish teens committed to a better, safer world.
• Dig into ReformJudaism.org’s Jewish resources and ways to help others cope.
• Read Rabbi Jonah Pesner’s prayer in memoriam, recited aloud at the Washington National Cathedral’s interfaith prayer service to mourn the victims of Sunday night’s shooting.

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