The devil, in the form of an evil troll,[2] has made a magic mirror that distorts the appearance of everything that it reflects. The magic mirror fails to reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things, and magnifies their bad and ugly aspects. The devil, who is headmaster at a troll school, takes the mirror and his pupils throughout the world, delighting in using it to distort everyone and everything. They attempt to carry the mirror into heaven in order to make fools of the angels and God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror shakes with laughter, and it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth, shattering into billions of pieces, some no larger than a grain of sand. The splinters are blown by the wind all over the Earth and get into people's hearts and eyes, freezing their hearts like blocks of ice and making their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, seeing only the bad and ugly in people and things.
— Wikipedia
I went to the vigil held here in Tucson last night in solidarity with the survivors of the murders at the Tree of Life synagogue and the city of Pittsburgh. It was held in the sculpture garden at the JCC, a lovely courtyard, and there were chairs set out facing the platform for the speakers, which was a relief since my ability to stand is limited. Rabbis and cantors from local congregations were there, and the service was punctuated by the singing of Hebrew prayers including Sim Shalom (Grant Peace) and Misheberach (prayer for healing); and by speakers including clergy from several Christian churches, the Catholic Bishop of Tucson, a Sikh woman, and an Imam, who chanted the first chapter of the Quran before speaking. The speakers expressed condolences, and added this murder to the Sikh massacre, Mother Emmanuel Church, the two African-Americans shot in Kentucky, and other hate crimes.
The central part of the service was the reading by the Jewish clergy of prayers written by attendees on cards available on the seats. My seat didn’t have one when I got there, and I couldn’t really think of anything that expressed what I was feeling anyway. These were mostly prayers for peace, for an end to hate, for a better future, an end to suffering, and such. As the readings went on, I started to feel impatient. Praying for peace, for an end to hatred, for healing, for the realization that words matter - this is important, but I was missing a call to action (until Mayor Rothschild at the very end): I kept adding "and vote" to what was being read. The mayor is not my favorite person, but he was right on target here. I was also missing the anger that goes with the grieving. I was feeling a lot of that.
Earlier I had been phone banking, and one man I called angrily said he wasn’t going to vote for any Democrats again until they stopped spewing hate, like the Democrats in Congress. I was speechless. How could he be seeing our situation so differently? Why is opposition seen as hate? As I thought of this during the vigil, I kept thinking of the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” which begins with the story of the Devil’s mirror, told in the quote I began with. As I listened to the words the people around me wrote, I kept thinking about the people who hate, who see refugee families at the border as invaders, who see enemies in everyone who disagrees with them (or with the president), who see everyone who is different from them as a threat. And I realized that my prayer was for the haters, that they might be freed from the distortion in their vision and the ice in their hearts. In the story, Kai’s friend Gerda travels far to find him, and when she finds him and runs to hug him, he starts to cry and his tears wash the splinter out of his eyes and heart.
Would that the cure were that simple in this time and place.