High Holidays are for processing communal grief

(JTA) — If there’s one thing Rabbi Sholom Lipskar wants to remember from the aftermath of the Surfside condo collapse in June, it’s the small cards that he distributed to the first responders and search-and-rescue teams working at the site.

Inscribed with Psalm 23, a psalm often recited in times of trouble that begins with the words “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the cards were meant to protect and inspire those charged with extracting survivors and, later, recovering bodies.

Lipskar estimated that he gave out as many as 800 of the cards and recalled meeting a firefighter who kep...