Today is Tuesday, December 17, 2024. Questions are being asked today about that 15-year-old school shooter – it was incorrectly reported that she might have been 17 yesterday – in Madison, Wisconsin, that left two people dead, a staff member and a student, at the private Christian school where this latest outrage took place. An online article by Dakin Andone entitled “What we know about the Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter” outlines the latest information authorities have on the very young killer.

For obvious reasons, I’m not going to post the young woman’s name – why should I glorify a horror like this by posting the assailant’s name then! Anyway, six others were injured in the shooting, police said, including two students hospitalized in critical condition. Let’s hope those wounded are able to recover from their wounds – at least physically. Psychologically, it’s another matter altogether. This event will stay with these poor victims the rest of their lives. Who really knows the psychological toll this type of event will have on these individuals?

Investigators into the shooting are trying to determine the shooter’s motive here. Police Chief Shon Barnes has indicated that it “appears that the motive was a combination of factors.” He declined to provide more details.

It now appears that a “document” was shared widely on social media by the killer. Police are also examining the shooter’s activity online, Barnes told reporters.

Police have said the shooter used a handgun to carry out the deadly attack – a weapon whose history is being traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) and Explosives, Barnes said.

The family of the young shooter is cooperating with police, Barnes said yesterday. Police, together with the district attorney’s office, will “want to look at if the parents may have been negligent” in providing their daughter with an illegal firearm. Barnes indicated that, “at this time, that does not appear to be the case.”

Both federal and Wisconsin law generally make it illegal for someone younger than 18 to possess a firearm, so how did this young preteen get ahold of such a weapon then? State law similarly makes it illegal for any person to intentionally sell, loan, or give a dangerous weapon to someone younger than 18.

A more recent development in these terrible shootings is that prosecutors have now taken steps to hold parents accountable for providing their children the firearms they would go on to use in school massacres, testing the limits of who could be deemed responsible.

Two such cases followed school shootings at an Oxford, Michigan, high school in 2021 and a Winder, Georgia, high school in September.

Don’t you wish with this latest school shooting, something finally would be done to prevent the next incident? But this is the United States of America where guns rule supreme in our streets and schools. It’s just revolting, in my humble opinion.

Today because of the shockingly warm weather, I ventured into Manhattan to first exchange our Metropolitan Opera tickets to La Boheme for another date since I discovered that Elliot and I will be away on Saturday, January 11. In another blog, I’ll mention why. So I went to Lincoln Center initially to ask for two seats for the January 18 performance, and I was able to get two new tickets without paying a farthing.

Then I took the B downtown to West 4th Street where I bought a ticket at IFC for Sabbath Queen, a new documentary by Sandi DuBowski that is a marvelous exploration of what it means to be gay and still be connected to your religion in the 21st century. I highly recommend it to all of my gay Jewish brethren because it examines – over more than two decades – the life of one Amichai Lau-Lavie, a gay Israeli man who moved to New York in 1997 and participated in the gay/drag culture back then, by donning the persona of Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a widow who married and outlived six rabbis. Lau-Lavie speaks quite seriously about his heritage of being born into a family of rabbis going back 38 generations, all the way to the 11th century.

Lau-Lavie also cofounded the experimental Lab/Shul which breaks with traditional synagogues in that it welcomes all faiths and those who have intermarried. His brother Benny is a powerful rabbi in Israel’s Orthodox community who renounces his more flamboyant brother for his rejection of tradition. Amichai’s mother mourns his son’s gayness, based on her belief that it means an end to the family line. Her tolerance for her son’s gayness actually softens when Amichai donates sperm to a lesbian couple and coparents their son, in which his family now views him as an honorary heterosexual.

The film is more than just a portrait of this very complex man, it questions the meaning of Jewish traditions in contemporary society which becomes its beating heart. The documentary also takes us to the very depths of the Holocaust in which Amichai’s family line is shattered. Amichai’s and Benny’s grandfather was sent to Treblinka by the Nazis, where he was killed. While his father saved his own life by jumping off a train en route to Buchenwald.

The film is very rich in its exploration of Amichai’s life journey and his later choice to become a Conservative rabbi by attending the Jewish Theological Seminary here in New York. However, while he’s studying to become such a religious leader, he learns that he cannot officiate at interfaith marriages anymore and this becomes a sore point during one of his board meetings at Lab/Shul. Does this new title change the freewheeling and radical Amichai? See the film and find out. I just found the whole venture fascinating as a gay man and a nonobservant Jew who did partake in holiday services as a much younger man. I still go occasionally to services at the Congregation Beit Simchat Torah here in New York and I even accompany my friend “Harold” to services at Rosh Hashanah. You will see in the film how services are totally different at Lab/Shul in that the traditional prayers are abandoned for something very alien to what traditionalists have grown up with.

In a review of the film, I learned that the director first met the subject of this almost two-hour documentary when working on his first film, Trembling Before God, which profiled queer Hassidic and Orthodox Jews and their problems with adjusting to their faith after coming out.

I decided to have some dinner at the Washington Square Diner after the film. What happened at the end of my meal totally blew my mind. Maybe you can say I experienced a true New York moment when toward the end of my dinner, a young woman sitting at a booth next to me asked me about the book I was reading: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner that became a bestseller in 2021. The woman commented on how good the book was and I replied I just began reading it. When the check was handed to me, this Good Samaritan swept up the bill and paid for my dinner. I was totally flummoxed. First, I thought the waiter gave her my check by mistake, but she just repeated that she paid my bill. I asked her why and she said it was the holiday or something to that effect. I offered to at least leave a gratuity, and she said that was not necessary. I thanked her effusively and still cannot tell you why this perfect stranger decided to do this for me. Did she like the fact that I was reading a book that appeals to Gen Z, which is the target audience that Zauner’s book probably appeals to? I think she was only in her 20s when she wrote about how the death of her mother devastated her. I’ll never know why. All I can say is that charity is still alive after this act of supreme kindness. Maybe I should have strongly refused her offer, but then, would she still have insisted on paying the check? I will ruminate over this for a very long time.

And so it went!