'Ad Matai,' Lord, until when?

(JNS) — King David’s plaintive and eternally mysterious question ad matai? (until when?), which we recite daily with heads bent or in deep self-contemplation, has a particularly searing relevance when I look at the recent terror attacks unleashed upon our innocents.

The murder of two young children invokes the exact inverse of the Talmudic wisdom that he who saves a life has saved the world. With these murders, the world has been destroyed; the world of decency, of compassion, of any kind of empathy—gone.

Furthermore, the murder of the Yaniv brothers and Elan Ganeles was the stamping out of th...