Not really a sermon, but . . .
It was an especially difficult week to be a Jew. The week started as I opened my computer Sunday morning to read of the shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium. Then came the news of the European elections where far right parties all over Europe had picked up an astonishing amount of votes, including three seats in the Parliament for the Greek essentially neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party. And of course before last Shabbos even began, the news starting coming out of the states of yet another mass shooting. Perhaps I should say it was a particularly hard week to be a human. Usually what a rabbi is supposed to do is to find a great passage in the weekly Torah portion that will give us some sense of comfort in these times. Religious attendance and communal gatherings will go up for a few weeks especially in Santa Barbara and in Brussels as we try to make sense of all these things and hope that our rabbis and priests and imams and ministers and teachers and philosophers can f