Oh, What People Are Capable Of!

I write my first blog entry for Calabasas Patch with a heart breaking with pain. Surely I am not the harbinger of bad news because by now everyone has read or seen the gut-wrenching story of nine-year-old Leiby Kletzky, a little Chassidic boy, whose dismembered remains were found on Wednesday in two locations in Brooklyn. He was kidnapped only blocks from his home, but it is not yet known where he was murdered.

People are at a complete loss for words. The sheer evil of the deed in all its painful detail is just simply incomprehensible to decent people with hearts of flesh.

And when evil rears its head in such galling fashion, so evil that it literally takes your breath away, your tears come hard and fast. And these are not just tears of sympathy or empathy for Leiby's parents and siblings for whom this event will never end, even when the headlines have faded and moved on to fresher news. No, these are tears of pure humanity. These tears come from the core of our humanness. Why? How? This is our soul crying out in disbelief: A human being did this?

But friends, now, while we gasp for breath and cry with raw pain, now is the moment to make ourselves a simple promise: If a man can be so utterly and unpredictably cruel, I will do everything I can to combat it with an equal measure of utter and unpredictable kindness. Two can play this game and the game is on.

I will not hesitate when asked to give of myself, not even when it inconveniences me or even costs me. I will shock the world with my compassion. I will take people's breath away when I carry goodness beyond what they've come to expect. I will touch others so profoundly with my generosity and selflessness that tears of love will flow.

Why not? Why shouldn't I be able to? Why shouldn't you be able to? If human depravity can plummet to indescribable depths, then why can't it rocket to indescribable heights?

If a person can be insanely evil, putting aside all consideration of consequence and all rationale and reason, why can't I be insanely kind, putting aside all my contrived excuses and imagined exhaustion and committing acts of irrational, unreasonable kindness? Why shouldn't I transform an ordinary Tuesday or Wednesday with some extraordinary act of unselfishness?

By G-d, I want to do this. I want to do it for Leiby. Who's with me?