9 terrorists are dead and one is captured. God knows what the Indian police are doing to that man. He will endure the entire worlds frustration and anger in their hands. It will not be pretty. The shooting ended yesterday and today Bombay is trying to its best to pretend that none of this ever happened. Plywood covers the broken windows of the Taj Hotel and ZAKA is trying as hard as they can to get the Jewish bodies back to Isreal. As NSG commandos clear what is left of the Taj and the Oberoi/Trident hotels the death toll will surely rise. Perhaps there will be someone found alive, some little bit of goodness in all of this shit, but I doubt it.

Now that things are slowing down we will have to think about what happened here. Why it happened. What drove these people to do this terrible, terrible thing. 

Suketu Mehta wrote and op-ed in the New York Times yesterday that reminds me a lot of what was said after 9-11, after the London Train Bombings, after the PanAm disaster, after the Gujarat massacres, after any one group of people decides that another group of people should die for believing something differently.

Last night I went with an Israeli photographer to photograph the parents of the Rabbi Gavriel’s wife Rivka Holtzberg. I had met Gavriel and Rivka about 8 months ago when we visited them at Chabad house here in Mumbai. A 30 minute visit, some tea and a weak promise to return for a visit another time. The first time I returned to Chabad house I was 100 yards away with NSG snipers, waiting, while the Rabbi and his wife were brutally murdered. 

I am sorry I didn’t keep my word Rabbi. 

When the door opened and the Israeli inside asked who we were my friend spoke Hebrew to him. No cameras. They do not want to be photographed. We went in anyway, cameras left at the front door. I went to pay my respects to her parents. Her ultra-orthodox parents. My reformed Jew condolences. 

When they said the evening prayers I was a part of the minyan. I can’t read Hebrew anymore, so I stood there. I stood there for everyone that was killed this week for no good reason. 

I am sorry Bombay, this shouldn’t have happened to you.

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