Saying a thing that must be said

I do not write this as a candidate.  Rather, I do so in spite of being one.  I write to you because my father bled in combat to stop the slaughter of the Jewish people in WWII.  And because silence has caused too much harm too many times.  

I am speaking of the butchery by Hamas of more than 1,000 Israelis.  Of individual murders by individual murderers standing just feet away from their victims.  Of teenagers with rib cages ripped open and skulls pulverized by the impact of an assault rifle.  Of women raped, beaten, and kidnapped.  Of families dragged out of cars and homes to be slaughtered.  Of over 250 concert-goers chased through the desert as one would hunt an animal.  And then killed, one child of a mother and a father at a time. 

The Middle East is a complex faraway place, and Israeli retaliation will perhaps be, at times, hard to justify.  But what Hamas did is not complex.  It is simple.  They killed unarmed innocents because they are Jews. 

I have nothing new to add here.  But I do have some thoughts to share. One of them is very old.

John Donne famously said that “[n]o man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,  . . . [all of us] is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” Those words were true when written in 1624.  They are no less true today.

We are living in a very hard time.  The internet has replaced reason, facts are held in contempt, and our world bristles with weapons that can exterminate the human species in under 30 minutes. As we are bombarded by the emptiest of voices relentlessly undermining the very fabric of what our parents, their parents, and their grandparents sacrificed themselves to build.

Yet many and, I would wager, most of us are better than this. 

Remaining silent is easy.  In a world where many seem so easily offended, silence offends no one. But like so much that is easy, silence is plainly not working.  So we must change by speaking out about what matters to us, what we believe in, and what we aspire to.  That can and will cover many things, and not all of them are local.

In the wake of the largest pogrom of the 21^st century, one thing that matters to me is this. I stand with my Jewish neighbors in Riverhead and every other community in the wake of the murder and terror in Israel.   

Yes – there are a multitude of other important issues.  Some of which are local.

We can turn to those other issues tomorrow. 

Join me in speaking out on this simple issue. Today.

Andrew Leven lives in Riverhead. He is a candidate for Riverhead Town Board.

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