“MAY HIS MEMORY BE FOR A BLESSING”

The war in Iraq collided into my family on September 1st, when my grandmother called to tell me that a 19-year-old distant cousin of mine who was serving as a Marine in the Anbar province was killed a day earlier.  She told me that Colin Joseph Wolfe, the son of my mother’s second cousin, in Manassas, Virginia, was killed when a bomb exploded under his vehicle on August 31.  

In the wake of the news of my distant cousin’s death, my mind was flooded with sad thoughts, memories and prayers.  Though I never met Colin, I remember his mother Amy quite well from Passover seders we celebrated in Buffalo, New York when I was a child. She was a ballet dancer, graceful and young, and at my Aunt Cece’s seder table, Amy was sometimes seated at the “kids’ end,” though she was much older than my brother and me. 

I remembered Colin’s great-grandmother, who ushered my grandmother into her home when she became an orphan, and Cousin Janie, who was Colin’s grandma with whom my grandmother grew up, as if they were sisters.  I thought of my late grandfather, Joe, whom Colin was named after.

I thought of my mom’s beautiful cousin Amy grieving at home with her husband and her daughter.   My cousin Colin had enlisted in the marines to serve his country and earn tuition for college.  He was proud of his service, and pictures of him show a strong young man, dressed in uniform.  Like his mother, he had trained as a ballet dancer, and in the days after his death, our family downloaded video clips of him as a child prancing across the stage. 

Colin’s parents and his sister buried him on September 11 in Arlington National Cemetery.  A Jewish star will eventually mark his grave there.  His name was read aloud at Temple Sinai in the thirty days following his death, and he was among those for whom our congregation recited Kaddish. 

It has been the good fortune (perhaps due to accidents of birth) of many of us to live with the Iraq war solely as questions of politics, policy or patriotism.  Thankfully, many of us have not had family members serving in Iraq, and we do not recognize many of the names in the daily listing of fallen soldiers.  In this sense, then, we have been able to afford a relative distance from the daily progress of the war.  This had certainly been true for my family and me.  To be sure, that has changed for in recent weeks. 

But with a tragic death in my own extended family, I have become sensitive in a new way to the very real human cost of the Iraq war.  There has been one tragic loss in my family, but, as of this writing, there are – an unfathomable number – more than 2,700 other American families who have grieved for fallen sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, siblings.  And that does not even come close to the untold thousands of Iraqis, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, whose families have loved them, but who are now among the dead. 

I am among those who objected to this war from its beginning.  But now I have begun to glimpse its toll in a personal way.  I pray that the war may end soon, that the terrible devastation will cease, that a conclusion will soon come to the horrible violence and killings.  I pray that God send comfort to my mother’s cousin Amy and to her family, and to all the grieving families of those killed in Iraq.  And I pray that we might come to perceive the immeasurable price of war, to recognize that we are not immune from its massive consequences, and to accept that we bear a responsibility to repair it.  Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav taught:  “If you believe that we have the power to destroy, believe, too, that we have the ability to repair.”

I am so sorry that Colin's life was taken by this war.  I pray that his memory may be for a blessing.  I pray there may be some measure of repair.

Rabbi Andy Vogel