Perusing my older pieces of writing just now, I found an essay I wrote back in 2003, which was just on my mind just a couple of hours ago as I watched my jujitsu classmates throw each other (and did the same myself):
I love guns. Always have. We had a nice assortment of play weaponry when I was a kid—plastic laser tag pistols, cowboy and police cap gun revolvers, even a cap shotgun which we still have hanging on the wall. We had a disk launcher that looked like it came from Darkseid's asteroid and a Ghostbusters gadget that shot foam pellets at pesky poltergeists or unfortunate relatives. I even dressed up as Trinity from The Matrix last year for Purim so I could carry around a plastic semi.
And two days ago, for the first time in my life, I went to the range and shot a real one.
My parents, you see, while perfectly happy to indulge our thirst for violence with Nerf and Mattel, were never proponents of their real-life counterparts. We didn't have guns in the house that could do anything more than snap, beep, or blink. We didn't even have a BB gun. It wasn't safe.
And so, despite my lifelong love for firearms, I experienced a certain apprehension as I plugged my ears with rubber and slipped .38 slugs into my best friend's Smith & Wesson six-shooter. What if, I pondered, I fire this thing and scare myself half to death with the sound alone? What if I see what it's capable of and never want to touch a gun again? Up till then, my sole experience with guns had been from the safety of the cinema viewing audience. I could go on and on about how I needed a gun for protection as a vulnerable woman alone in the big bad world, but deep down I just wanted to strike a pose and look as cool as Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Ann Moss. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
So I raised the gun, aimed, and fired. I did it again. And again. And I discovered something. My shot was always more accurate when I held the gun more tightly. Whenever I wanted to hit dead center, I just grasped the handle harder, aimed, and shot. It even braced my arm against the kick. I shot half a dozen rounds into that silhouette, and not one strayed off the target.
A friend of mine once pointed out that we refer to G-d as hagadol v'hagibor—great and strong. But what is the proof of G-d's strength? G-d's power is infinite. It spans the entire universe and then some. It overflows into eternity. And it takes some major strength to keep that in, to hold it condensed into the finite parameters we know as nature. It's not about the big guns, setting off supernovas—it's the grip, the control, keeping the supernova packed down into a star.
We all have forces inside us that want to explode, to expand, to become raw muscle and wipe out everything that dares to be bigger than we are. That may even do the job sometimes. But that's not strength. Strength is our manipulation of those forces, our hold on them, our self-control. If it's not there, the gun spins out of our hands.
