Have you ever heard of Six Degrees of Separation? Supposedly it would only take, at most, six steps to connect any two people in the world, from New York to London, London to Shanghai, Shanghai to Cancun. In our high-tech society, the world is very small, and strangers, perhaps, are not so strange.
The Jewish community has turned this theory into a game – Jewish Geography. That person you met at the Rat on Saturday night is probably your camp friend’s cousin. He did BBYO with your best friend from high school. He went to middle school with your first kiss. Thanks to Jewish Geography, all of a sudden you feel like you know the entire town of Great Neck. And it is so much fun.
Sometimes, however, the small Jewish world can be a scary one to be a part of. On November 19, a friend asked if I had heard about the American who was killed in Israel. He was a recent high school grad on a gap-year program studying at a Yeshiva. He was delivering food to Israeli soldiers in the West Bank when a terrorist fired shots and rammed his car into a crowded intersection, killing three people. My friend told me he was the roommate of one of her good friends from high school. Jewish Geography is a game, and a really easy one at that.
A few hours later I finally made my way onto Facebook. I saw his name everywhere. Ezra Schwartz. Ezra Schwartz. Ezra Schwartz. I quickly found out that this 18-year-old Massachusetts native was more than just a name in an article and a face on a viral photograph, but he and I had only two degrees of separation between us. In high school, Ezra participated on a teen tour lead by an organization of which I was an active member. Even though we had never met each other, and now we never will, he and I were part of the same community.
After I read about what had happen to Ezra, I looked up his Facebook profile. Facebook-stalking the dead is a surreal experience. We have ten mutual friends, nine of whom are college freshmen or younger. Two of them attend Binghamton University. Another is an alumnus.
Terrorism has become so common that many people, including myself, have become numb to it. Every day there is another stabbing in Israel, a bombing in Iraq, a massacre in Paris. In November alone there have been over 40 separate incidents that could be classified as terror attacks, but I have not seen commemorative Facebook posts about most of them. The world may be small, but it is big enough to shield us from tragedy, until that tragedy forces its way directly into our lives.
I began to care about international terror when I was only two degrees from it. It should not have taken me so long. The theory says that there are only six degrees at most separating any two given people. That means after any given attack you are only, at most, six degrees from someone in mourning. Only six degrees from a victim. Somewhere along those connections, it is affecting you. Tragedy in a distant land is never really so distant. We should stop treating it like it is.
Elyssa Diamond is a sophomore double-majoring in English and human development