Marshall McLuhan wrote that media become extensions of man, and right now my computer is an extension of my tear ducts. My friend Ben was murdered the other day. He was on a business trip and was held up in the parking lot of his hotel in Detroit. I heard about it from Dan while shopping for vegetables with my son Itamar. I almost cried as I chose beets for my wife.
Gil Scott Heron once lamented that “We almost lost Detroit.” But I just lost a friend, in Detroit, and I'm really, really sad. I just found him on Facebook the other day and wondered why he hadn't responded to my friend request. It wasn't like him. Ben was the technology guy among all my Habonim friends. He even lived in Silicon Valley.
The Talmud says that, “If you seek to have a world, strict justice cannot be exercised; and if you seek strict justice, there will be no world” I don't want strict justice, but some justice will do, and I can't find any justice in what happened to my friend Ben. In my broadest, most bleeding heart liberal perspective, this isn't justice for the oppression of the poor and downtrodden. Some slightly richer poor person will go to bed with blood on his hands, and two young children will go to sleep without a father, and Lonnie, his wife will go to bed, incomplete, without her partner, her soulmate, her love.
Justice is one of the most repeated words in the Torah, and I wonder what the author was thinking as he watched my friend die. Did he feel regret for creating free will? Does he feel remorse for not exercising his?
Twenty six years ago, in Red Hook, New York, my friend Ben played us a song. He borrowed the music from Bob Dylan and infused the lyrics with his own. Idiot Ben, why did you stop blowing? Why did someone take the wind from you? Why?
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