I made a mistake yesterday. While waiting to catch my flight home from a board meeting, I joined a debate about gun control on a friend’s Facebook thread. I don’t typically participate in such debates via social media. Our emboldened rhetoric behind the anonymity of the computer screen is, I believe, problematic. But I was a bored traveler, feeling, I admit, a tad self-righteous.
I did not know the people I was debating. They were friends of my friend on Facebook. I tried to choose my words wisely, tried to speak with respect. But the debate was more about winning than it was about listening—each of us determined to have the last word. I finally withdrew from the thread, not because I didn’t have more to say, but because the debate itself felt soul-sucking. The weight of our gun-addicted culture became more than I could bear.
On the drive home from the airport, I tuned in to Krista Tippett’s “On Being” podcast. Tippett was interviewing Rabbi Arnold Eisen on the life and legacy of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a spiritual leader whom I greatly admire. Towards the end of the interview Tippett read Heschel’s words aloud:
In his essay, “Choose Life,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Just as we are commanded to love man, we are also called upon to be sensitive to the grandeur of God’s creation. We are infatuated with our great technological achievements; we have forgotten the mystery of being, of being alive. We have lost our sense of wonder, our sense of radical amazement at sheer being. We have forgotten the meaning of being human and the deep responsibility involved in just being alive. Shakespeare’s Hamlet said: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ But that is no problem. We all want to be. The real problem, biblically speaking, is how to be and how not to be.”
Heschel’s words about life—the wonder, radical amazement, and mystery of sheer being—felt like balm for my wounds. After listening to people defend our right to bear arms and our need for guns, I needed to hear from someone who valued life in this extraordinary way. Heschel’s words also left me pondering, though. How should I be? How should I not be? Even as I asked myself these questions, I knew the answers. I should be peace, I should be love, I should be for life, not against it, and be for all that honors the grandeur of God’s creation. Fighting for peace in a Facebook debate where one side seeks to verbally conquer the other is counter-productive and hypocritical. We are not going to heal our addiction to violence with more verbal violence. So I will put this mistake behind me. I will live more responsibly today.
Teri McDowell Ott 