Happy new year.

Today is the beginning of the year 5767. If this year is anything like last year, I’m afraid I’ll keep writing 5766 on my checks. (ba-da-boom)

As we do every year, we go to religious services. For many Jews, the high holy days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) are the only days they attend, save for a family bar mitzvah or a wedding here and there. So there’s a lot of pressure on the Rabbi to say something motivating enough for all the two-times-a-year folks to consider making a little more effort in the coming year. (We go fairly regularly, in case you were wondering….)

This year, I felt our Rabbi fell a little short. His sermon neither motivated me nor got me thinking. Maybe it had a different effect on others, but to me, it was about a concept that I have no ambivalence about…

But something else at services today got me really thinking. There was a spider. Seriously, a spider. It was crawling up the tallis (prayer shawl) of a man two rows in front of me. He was a cute little fella – almost clear and not very big. I was enjoying watching his voyage up the fringes. And I was thinking about Sammy Spider, the star of a series of children’s books about Jewish holidays.

So I watched Sammy (I decided to call him Sammy). The sermon, as I mentioned, was not rocking my world. I watched as Sam bravely edged over until he could touch the tallis of the man next to him. And he started to move quickly across the beautifully embroidered Hebrew letters.

But then, it happened. It was almost in slow motion. A friend of ours who was in the row between Sammy and us (I’ll keep his identity anonymous…!) reached out with his program and let Sammy crawl onto it.

At first, I thought he wanted to save Sammy from getting lost among the tallit. But I started to realize that he had evil intentions. He was not saving Sammy, he was plotting to kill him!

I wanted to shout out! Stop! Killing is wrong. And in the house of worship on the holiest of days! NOOOOOOOOOO…………..

And then, that wicked man put the program on the floor and stomped on Sammy. He perished right there on the carpet.

Sigh.

And this made me think. How many times could something terrible be stopped if people would stand up and shout out? What is it about getting involved that terrifies people so? We need to look out for each other. There are horrors in our world. If we do nothing to stop it, does our complacency make us partially responsible?

I’m sorry Sammy is dead. Though, he was nothing to me. We had nothing in common, lived different lives, had different priorities. He probably had a different religion from me (I never had the chance to ask) and I’m sure he was culturally at the other end of the spectrum from me.

But someone loved him. And someone will miss him. And that matters.