Huff Post
I was living in New York in 1979 when Etan Patz disappeared, and it changed my life forever. I knew his uncle, who was a fellow rabbi, and I remember how the shock of his disappearance reverberated throughout the Jewish community, then all of New York as pictures of his beautiful, smiling face suddenly appeared on walls and telephone poles and milk cartons everywhere you looked. It was as if the raw terror his family experienced somehow touched us all — the frantic casting about for any shred of evidence he might still be alive, the aching, hollow pain of never knowing, of waiting day after day, week after week, month after month, until time stretched numbingly into forever.
It was as if we all were confronted with just how fragile and unpredictable, unjust and cruel life could be for any one of us, at any time. An innocent child, a parent who did what all of us have done, simply allowed her child to walk to the bus stop for the first time, and had her very life ripped from her heart and soul. Someone once said having a child is choosing to have your heart run around outside your body for the rest of your life. Who among us could go on living with that doubt, that searing loss, that unimaginable pain?
Categories: Life, Peace, Spirituality