Hi, I'm Zibby Owens, and this is Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm doing a special sort of broadcast, if you will, today. It's Sunday, and yesterday was the Pittsburgh shooting massacre, and I just couldn't let time go on without addressing it in some way. I wrote an article that I published on K-V-E- K-V-E-L-L-E-R, Kveller.com, called

Atabat Mitzvah the Night of the Pittsburgh Shooting, Celebration Mixed with Sorrow.

So I know I'm not one of the authors that I usually interview, but I do a lot of freelance

writing and I've tried some books. So I wanted to read my essay in the hopes that

it will help any of you out there listening tonight and that it might help just put this into

context or make you feel a little better that's all last night I went to a bat mitzvah just a few

hours after a dozen fellow Jews in Pittsburgh were brutallyburg were brutally murdered during a bris a bris

i remember the bris of my two sons like they were yesterday the pride i felt the fear of hurting my

newborn during this religious and medical ritual the warmth of my family gathered around us like a cocoon

the comforting sounds of hebrew prayers With every Jewish tradition, I always feel

the reverberations of history, the echoes of all the boys' cries that have come before my own

son's brises. The idea that one hateful man could enter another's, another family's sacred moment,

in a synagogue, no less, a place so sacred I won't even enter without wearing a skirt,

and slaughter the participants in cold blood is impossible for me to comprehend, and yet it happened.

As my husband and I sat in our study watching the news footage of the worst attack on Jews in American history yesterday, away from the prying eyes of my four innocent children, we talked about the horror of it all.

Maybe know about mitzvah tonight, my husband said.

Is it even safe to go? We have to go, I said. Not only did I want to be there to support my dear

friend's firstborn daughter and a family that has gone through its own set of challenges,

but I needed to be there. There were no other threats the devil was caught. How could we not?

In the cab ride to the bat mitzvah that evening with my two older kids, 11-year-old twins, I decided I had to tell them what happened. I wanted to shield them from the news as long as possible, but I thought it would probably come up in the Havdala service that evening. I wanted to shield them forever, from everything. While rain pelted on the roof of the cab, the dark sky enveloping us, my son responded

by taking a deep breath. He shook his head and asked, is anything like that going to happen here in

New York? I responded honestly, I hope not, love. During the ceremony, at a beautifully decorated

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