Love wins

In the living room, Eli picks up a long plastic tube and dangles it in front of his mouth. "I'm an elephant!" he declares, swinging it back and forth like a trunk. "Let's pretend I'm a baby elephant and I'm lost, and you're the mommy elephant and you have to find me."

I think of what I know about elephants, that mothers and calves stay together in lifelong family groups, that they have been known to tend to and grieve their fallen relatives, that a mother elephant probably would search in anguish for her lost baby.

It is the day of the worst mass shooting in American history, and even as I pick up my own plastic elephant trunk I'm thinking about another mother, the one I saw on the news outside the nightclub in Orlando, searching for her baby.

"I've been so proud of him," she said, the pride in her eyes even as her heart was breaking.

We have been here before. In San Bernardino, Aurora, Newtown. The first time I ever truly felt like a mother, the first time the full weight of motherhood seemed to settle itself around me, it was 2012 and I had just heard about the gunman at Sandy Hook. I looked back and forth from the television to my baby in his jumperoo, imagining him among the children in their classrooms, huddled under desks or in closets and bathroom stalls.

Since then: a clinic, a church, a college campus. I expect to feel devastated. I expect to feel angry. But this time I feel something else: fear. A movie theater, a library, a salon. This can happen anywhere, I think. This can happen to my child.

The next day, I'm scrolling through my newsfeed, reading Donald Trump's contemptuous words in despair. "Radical Islamic terrorists are pouring into our country," he says. "Threatening not only our society but our entire way of life."

In other words: We should be afraid. We should live in fear. Donald Trump's campaign depends on it, feeds off it, like the dementors in the Harry Potter books who breed in its wake.

"Dark times lie ahead of us," said Dumbledore, "and there will be a time when we have to choose between what is easy and what is right."

In Time magazine after September 11, Nancy Gibbs wrote something I've never forgotten: "Do we now panic, or will we be brave?"

It's easy to panic. Close the borders. Keep them out (whoever "they" are). Build a wall. But I can't build a wall around our neighborhood, our playground, our school. I keep thinking about the concept of tikkun olam, the idea that we bear responsibility as God's partners to repair the broken world. When the world is shattered, where do we begin? Not with ugly rhetoric and threats. "We're on this earth for such a short time," said that mother in Orlando. "Let's try to get rid of the hatred and violence."

Like any mother of a 3-year-old, I talk with Eli a lot about choices. Make good choices, I tell him. What I mean is to choose to keep his hands to himself, to keep his voice calm, to use his listening ears.

But today I also want to tell him: Choose hope over fear. Choose kindness over bigotry and xenophobia and hatred. Choose to be brave.