The weekend’s massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue reminds me that the seed of evil can be found on social media. Like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, social media offers promise and purgatory, but it is never innocent. It is the opposite of innocence.

On Sunday we posted scenes from our wedding and hundreds of friends were suddenly joined in our celebration of love. When I was first married forty-four years ago, it was an intimate celebration linked only by surface mail to the outside world. The news of our joy could not reach my remote high school friends or many others who might have wanted to wish me well. The joy of linking Saturday’s celebration to those same high school friends and to my many students  and teaching colleagues makes me glad to dwell in Facebook and the age that spawned it.

Yet on that very day I heard of the carnage in Pittsburgh committed by a man remarkable only by his hatespeech on the modern convenience of social media. How easily the knowledge of good and evil turns to evil! We are handling an amazing and fatal technology, easily converted to brutality.

The traces of evil in this instance are not directly pointing to gun control or mental health, though eventually we will see connections. But they point clearly to free speech and technology, both blessings of that Tree that flung us far from Eden. Eating of that Tree gave us the capacity for ultimate good and ultimate evil. On my wedding day, October 27, I experienced both, holding joy and pain in the same hand.

Before we dissect the incident any further, can we remember what power we hold in our hands when we post on social media? Can we edit our anger and indignation and reject poisoning the public discourse with our resentments? Can we step back from retaliation in the season of savage political rhetoric? We might make social media a little less hospitable to hatespeech if we hold back from anger and instead celebrate what we love.

Victoria and many of her friends write weekly TILT’s on Facebook: “Things I love Thursday.” For years gratitude has gone out in this fashion to a few hundred friends. Clearly it has not overwhelmed the tide of hate speech which sweeps into view following tragedies like the massacre of the Tree of Life.  Just as clearly it reminds me that we each have some power in our words, and we have a choice to take from the Tree of Knowledge what could build up or what could destroy.