So were the cameras, the flags, the folded prayers.
And somewhere between the eulogy and the evening news, an American watching from a kitchen counter six thousand miles away felt the familiar tug — that strange, guilty relief of distance.
This is not a story about geopolitics, though it will be filed under that.
It is a story about what happens when private grief becomes public property, and what that transaction costs the rest of us.
Leiter is a name most Americans won't recognize.
He is an Israeli public figure, a former aide, a settler leader, a man whose son fell in a war that has already outlived several news cycles.
But the mechanics of his mourning are instantly legible here.
The mother on the school board who lost a child to fentanyl.
The family whose GoFundMe went viral for eleven days and then went quiet.
We turn sorrow into content, then wonder why we feel hollow.
Here is the part that should unsettle us.
Leiter's grief was broadcast with a production value that would embarrass a Hollywood awards show — the lighting, the timing, the strategic placement of dignitaries.
And millions of Americans watched it the way we watch everything: half-attentive, scrolling past the hard parts, saving our outrage for the comment section.
It is a critique of us — the audience that has been trained to consume tragedy at scale and feel nothing by Tuesday.
In earlier decades, a death in the community meant casseroles and awkward silences and a neighbor who mowed your lawn without being asked.
Now it means a verified account, a thread, a candle emoji.
Leiter's story also exposes something uglier: the way American discourse treats foreign grief as either a moral cudgel or a tribal badge.
And the actual man — a father who put his child in the ground — disappears behind the symbol we needed him to be.
We have done this with soldiers, with shooting victims, with mothers who testify before Congress.
We borrow their pain for our purposes and return it damaged.
There is a version of this country where a story like Leiter's would prompt a quiet reckoning — about war, about the cost of distant alliances, about what we owe the families who carry the weight of decisions made in rooms we will never enter.
That version feels increasingly theoretical.
The outrage, the counter-outrage, the think piece, the backlash to the think piece.
By the weekend, Leiter's name will be a footnote.
Somewhere in that machine, a father still sits shiva.
That fact should matter more than it does.
We are not collapsing because of one broadcast funeral or one viral grief.
We are collapsing because we have forgotten how to sit with sorrow that isn't ours — how to let it be heavy without making it useful.
Final Thoughts
That is a quieter failure than the ones we argue about, and it is doing more damage than any of them.