Who are we? Who do we want to be?

Last month I killed a chipmunk. It was an accident of course. Nonetheless, on vacation with my family, the front wheel of my rented bicycle collided with the head of a little wild animal and left her to die.

We were riding through the wooded innards of Michigan’s Mackinac Island. With my eight-year-old on a “tagalong” attachment behind me, and my husband and younger daughter on a tandem, we were looking for a road we had heard was particularly pristine.

And in a moment like a thousand other moments, the chipmunk appeared in the road and noticed our bikes. She hesitated, again and again, displaying an indecision that I can identify with. Then she made the wrong choice and continued her path to me.

We returned to see the damage. Bright red blood seeped from the chipmunk’s head.

She had obviously been writhing on the road but by the time we returned, she was dead. The sight of her blood pooled in my psyche and still drips there. I can’t forget it.

It was an accident, I know. And it’s the way of the world; I’m a much larger animal than she. But my killing her also raises questions: Though I try to live gently, how can it be that in an instant I can still cause painful and sudden death to another creature?

What I do know is that even in accidents there is responsibility to be taken, whether it is my little one or a tragedy of historic proportions.

Responsibility is about being accountable to someone or something. Beyond blame, responsibility is about relationships, about being in charge of one’s behavior and being attentive to its effect on others. Ultimately, it implies our connectedness, our duty to one another.

Recent days have brought us scenes of horrific tragedy in New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico coast. Hurricane Katrina and the resulting floods have tested our sense of responsibility for each other. The results are mixed.

The images on television and radio narratives are wrenching; they’ve etched themselves onto our personal and collective souls. The pictures of poor, mostly African-American residents — suffering, ailing, waiting, dying, decomposing — cannot and should not be forgotten.

I’ll leave the finger pointing to others, but I will ask questions of responsibility: Why were so many people left behind? As a stream of cars rode out of New Orleans, why were masses of impoverished folk left to face the storm alone?

Why did our government institutions not care for those without cars, money and insurance? Why does a city have the wisdom to ask its residents to evacuate but does not take care of its helpless?

After the storm hit and the levees broke, why were people left to fend for themselves for so long before the nation responded properly? The questions themselves are heartbreaking.

This tragedy is not about bricks and mortar or inadequate planning, or even about levees or an exotic city’s destruction. This is a story about human loss and our responsibility to one another.

Our role, as living people, is to continue to feel and to remember the human stories. Beyond the punditry, intellectualizing and theorizing, we must stay awake to this pain.
When one poor, black woman dies in Louisiana, my heart must continue to weep and scream in protest for her. We – all of us — are a broken people and we must mourn for the victims and work to defend and heal the survivors.

We must also ask how people turned so quickly to violence and lawlessness. What can we do to prevent that kind of simmering desperation in the future, here and elsewhere?
As people of privilege, as those who believe in tikkun olam, our responsibility is to be connected to our brothers and sisters in the South — Jewish or not. Not only, “They could be us,” but “They are us.”

Though many of us would like to go to the South and physically do something, most of us are left in the frustrating position of helping from afar, of giving without looking into the eyes of the recipients.

But we are a community of givers and this crisis is no exception. In less than one week, community members donated more than $67,000 to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Hurricane Katrina fund, which will be sent to the United Jewish Communities’ fund for humanitarian relief. That fund has raised more than $4 million.

The Jewish Community Foundation, the federation’s endowment development program, has helped donors redirect more than $13,000 from foundation funds to other organizations, such as the American Red Cross. Countless other groups, Jewish and not, are collecting donations to ease suffering and rebuild.

My encounter with the luckless chipmunk, in no way parallel to the devastation in New Orleans, reminded me that even during an accident (an act of God perhaps?) we must acknowledge the wake we create in the world’s waters. Despite our best intentions, we are still responsible for the harm that we cause.

Now, at this time of incomprehensible loss and suffering, the same principle holds. Our tragedies force us to look inward and review our place in our world. They impel us to ask the most crucial, basic questions:

What is our connection with our fellow humans — black or white, Jewish or not, poor or affluent? Who are we? Who do we want to be?

As we enter the month of Elul, which heralds the High Holidays, we enter a time of questions, reflection, redirection and renewal. May we step forward with eyes open, hearts awake and enough wisdom to make a difference.