Horrific

Twenty-seven people were shot and killed today in a small town in Connecticut.  Counting the shooter, twenty-eight people died.

Twenty of the victims were children, age five to ten.  They died in a place where they should have felt totally safe -- their elementary school.

I can't imagine that any parent sends their children off to school in the morning and even remotely considers the possibility that they won't return home that afternoon because a sick individual shot them dead.

Less than two weeks before Christmas, twenty children won't wake up early on December 25th to eagerly discover what Santa brought them.  Perhaps some of the children who were killed were looking forward to lighting the menorah this evening at the Shabbat meal or playing with a dreidel and receiving Hanukkah gelt.

No doubt their parents had hopes and dreams for their future -- high school and college, a successful career, marriage and children, hundreds of achievements both big and small.  Now those same parents are making decisions about funerals and contacting extended family members with news so horrible that I don't know how the words can even form in their mind, let alone pass through their lips.

Today, evil in human form killed twenty children and seven adults in Newtown, CT.  And at the same time, a little part of every decent human being who heard the horrific news died as well.