Good Vibrations Lost in Tragedy

When Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller heard the news Tuesday morning, she was still basking in the good vibrations of the Beach Boys concert the night before.

The crowd at the fairgrounds arena had been so happy. Beach balls bounced and conga lines snaked. The dirt aisles between the rows of folding metal chairs were alive with creaking baby boomers, little old ladies from Pasadena, enthusiastic fourth-graders, all dancing.

Even the hourlong wait for the bus home with her two young daughters was fun, in its way.

“I remember thinking that it’s nice to live in a society where people can queue up in a long line and get along with each other,” said Hochberg-Miller, the spiritual leader of Ventura’s Temple Beth Torah. “There was a sense of, here we are, there are an awful lot of us, we’re all in this together, and we’re being good-spirited with each other in public.”

And, now this. Friends had been calling since the news of the latest shooting broke. At the temple, Hochberg-Miller was never far from the TV, on alert for the latest grim detail from the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills.

When the Beach Boys ruled the waves, this didn’t happen with such sickening regularity. The tower at the University of Texas in Austin became a grisly landmark 33 years ago not because it was the highest vantage point for a random mass shooting, but because it was the only one.

On Monday night, the Beach Boys had crooned: “Wouldn’t it be nice to live together . . . in the kind of world where we belong?”

Tuesday morning, the only answer possible was the saddest one of all: “Yes, wouldn’t it be nice?”

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Hochberg-Miller had reason for anxiety.

Her temple, like the Granada Hills Jewish Community Center, runs its own day camp. And the shooter described as a heavyset, balding white man in his 40s, much like a face in the crowd at Monday night’s Beach Boys concert, had no qualms about spraying bullets into kindergartens.

But, she calmly reminded callers, we know nothing about this man’s motives. Perhaps he’s a raging anti-Semite or maybe he was involved in a custody battle with a woman who works at the Jewish Community Center or perhaps his choice of target was chillingly random.

She directed her staff to keep an eye out for anyone who acted suspiciously or didn’t look as if he had a good reason to be on the premises.

Ah, but wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where precautions were needless, and suspicious strangers never come equipped with weapons of mass destruction?

Hochberg-Miller last gave a sermon on gun control in 1991. It was on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

She can’t recall just what prompted her exhortation, but she vividly remembers what followed it.

The morning after Hochberg-Miller made a plea for sane gun laws, the teenage girl who headed her temple’s youth group called her in tears. The girl’s 20-year-old cousin had just been shot to death in her bedroom by the boyfriend she was trying to dump.

“That really cemented my views on the issue,” the rabbi said. “We’ve let guns and the insidious violence of citizen against citizen tear apart the fabric of this country. We’ve got to get this through to the gun lobby.”

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.