It felt like the whole world was watching when Moshe Holtzberg, a day shy of his second birthday, cried,”Ima! Ima!” (Mommy! Mommy!) in the arms of the family cook half the world away in a synagogue in Mumbai. His grandmother, Yehudit, could hardly hold back the tears and his grandfather, Shimon, allowed the tears to surface as the little boy cried out for the mother he would never see again.
And yet, there must be an end to tears. Someone told me that one shouldn’t be excessive in mourning, because it makes the souls of the deceased grieve when they are in a state that should be blissful. According to Jewish tradition, the most souls go through a year of purification, when family members say the Kaddish prayer every service. After that difficult year of purification of the soul, the soul is perfect and is reunited in joy with the Creator. The souls of Rivkah and Gavriel Holtzberg, and the guests at the Chabad House which was the scene of the undescibable savagery that only baby Moshe saw firsthand, are perfected now, not just through this year of purification, but because they died sanctifying the name of G-d, killed merely for acting like their ancestors, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, greeting guests and doing acts of kindness.
One may ask how could these people be punished so horrifically for their hospitality? While the terrorists forced their way in, evidence has arisen that they visited the Chabad House at least once in disguise and they targeted Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg to make others afraid of doing such good deeds, or accepting such kindness in the future.
But these plans always fail. Darkness cannot prevail over light, because it has to work too hard. One candle can banish a room of complete darkness, but goodness is more stable than a candle, because it can never be extinguished. A terrorist may kill a good person, but because we care so much, a hundred, a thousand will always stand up and compensate for the lost lives of good people, because that is as much a part of us as a reflex.
Sandra Samuel, when asked what she was thinking when she snatched Moshe and rescued him, said “Does anyone think of their own lives at a time like that? When they see a precious little baby (crying..) No.”
Darkness and evil are sicknesses, which by definition, are perversions of nature. The Lubavitcher Rebbe has said these will soon cease to exist in our generation, the generation of Moshiach (the Jewish Messiah) and given the greater and greater outrage expressed over every terrorist act, the world seems to be one candle away from lighting darkness out of existence.