VOICES: Reactions to President Obama's Syria address The vigil began with readings and music at St. James Cathedral late afternoon Saturday. Then hundreds of Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists lighted candles and marched up Madison Street in downtown Seattle to the plaza at Temple De Hirsch Sinai. The marchers prayed for a single goal: peace in Syria. But as darkness deepened and Rabbi Daniel Weiner read aloud from the book of Isaiah - "They shall beat their swords into plowshares" - he was acutely aware of how complicated a path to peace would be. He was aghast when he saw the photographs of the Syrian dead, shrouded in white and felled, the Obama administration says, by chemical weapons ordered by their president. At the same time he wondered, why are these 1,400 or so casualties different from "the thousands upon thousands of deaths to this point" in that Middle Eastern nation ravaged by civil war? "It's hard to pick and choose and to seem to react randomly to suffering," said Weiner, senior rabbi at De Hirsch Sinai, the largest Reform congregation in the Pacific Northwest. A chemical [weapons] death, sure, is the most horrifying of deaths. "But if someone dies of incendiary bombs or chemical weapons, they're still dead," he said Tuesday afternoon as he awaited President Obama's speech. If we're going to respond to the slaughter of the innocents, we need to do so with some consistency. Weiner described himself as "incredibly torn" but said before the speech that he was leaning against retaliatory action in Syria, "not because I don't think Assad deserves it." His main concern was that such an attack would be a "futile gesture." What he wanted from the president Tuesday night was "an ideological basis and a way to move forward" in Syria and anywhere else that atrocity occurs. And it will. He said he believed that the United States should "occupy the moral high ground." But he also believes that this nation should have "a policy template" for actions because "this is going to happen again and again." Just moments after Obama's brief but powerful accounting of the administration's rationale for action, Weiner said he was gripped by "a real sense of painful irony: that the ideology has been laid out well, but that the practicality is impossible at this point." Tuesday's speech, Weiner said, should have been given after the U.S. military bombed Syria a week or so ago. At this point, Weiner said, Assad probably has moved all potential U.S. targets, therefore dampening the effectiveness of a future strike. Still, Weiner said, Obama "made a good case" about why this time is different and why, if chemicals "become a normative weapon of war, all the bad actors in the world will have access" to them. And then there is Israel, Weiner said, which Obama invoked along with the use of chemical weapons in World War I. "If Assad is going to respond, the first response is against Israel," the rabbi said. The imagery of a country with no compunction to use poison gas and use it against the descendants of people who survived Auschwitz is an incredibly powerful and evocative and troubling prospect. The bottom line for Weiner? I'm still torn. Maria L. LaGanga