Television and Tragedy Word from: Rahel

I'm feeling uncharacteristically unexcited about the season premiere of The OC tomorrow night, and not only because the show's quality took such a dive in its second season. I'm still in love with Seth Cohen, the hottest neurotic (culturally- if not quite halakhically-) Jewish boy ever to grace my TV screen. But I'm just not in the mood for teen drama right now, especially not one that is picking up in the immediate aftermath of a shooting. I remember in the days after 9/11 my best friend and I, locked down in our East Village apartment, numbed ourselves by watching old episodes of The Gilmore Girls on tape and, in my case, reading and re-reading P.G. Wodehouse books, comforting in their sameness. I haven't found a similarly appropriate anesthetic for the current tragedy. I was reading and loving Richard Russo's Empire Falls when the hurricane hit, and in its depiction of a dying Maine town it was strangely fitting (although I found the ending disappointing). I can't really bear to watch the news anymore, although I've been reading the newspapers obsessively, filling myself with horror and rage that more wasn't done. Anya Kamenetz, writing in the Village Voice, laments New Orleans with the words of Eicha. For me, as a semi-amateur hazzan with a High Holiday gig at my father's synagogue in New Jersey, the words running though my head are those of the U'Netaneh Tokef, especially since I've been learning at the Hadar High Holiday Beit Midrash in an attempt to prepare for the Yamim Noraim with more than my usual frantic listening to nusach-on-tape. In less than 4 weeks I will stand on the bimah and chant, mi yihyeh u'mi yamut, mi va'eish u'mi va'mayim, who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, and like Rosh Hashanah of 2001, these words take on a new and horrible meaning. The power of the natural world has never seemed more terrifying; human hubris and callous disregard for that power has never wrought such terrible consequences. Ein menahem lah. There is no one to comfort the city. And there is no one -- not even Seth Cohen -- to comfort us as we face the realization of our national blindness to danger and need.