Pittsburgh shooting affects Jews everywhere
Faith and heritage draw us together as we weather this latest atrocity
Spend a few years in the United States of Anxiety and after awhile the violence, both subtle and stark, becomes part of everyday life.
There is violence in language — harsh, loud and bristling with easy expletives. There is violence in football, a carnage of bloody noses, broken bones and deadly concussions. There is violence on the roads, where impatience brings cursing, taunting, honking, racing and tailgating.
America was born in blood and has been bleeding ever since. It demands helpless detachment. The shooting at the concert in Las Vegas, the high school in Colorado, the church in Charleston: all evoke a numbing indifference from “the ilk in the armchair.” Yes, this is a madhouse. Accept it.
For all that, the murders at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh were different for me. It didn’t matter that it is not my city and not my synagogue: Mine is a Jew’s visceral response to an attack on other Jews. It’s personal.
Were faith a military alliance, our commitment to each other would be easily explained: An attack on you is an attack on me. It is instinctive. This is the tribalism of 14.5 million Jews in a world of 7.6 billion. It’s the collective insecurity of our clan.
And so when I heard the news Saturday, it was as if I were expecting it. I did not know the synagogue, but I did, because it is mine. I did not know the congregation, but I did, because it is mine. I did not know the rabbi or the kindly octogenarian in the shiny suit or the bimah boy, but I did, because they are ubiquitous. That makes them mine, too.
The bottle of scotch for a nip with the old men after services. The bagels and lox, the fabled provisionary of our people. The rack of worn prayer shawls and the wrinkled white yarmulkes inscribed with “Gerry Katz; Bar Mitzvah, June 18, 1988.”
I knew none of these at the Tree of Life, but they are the props and people of houses of worship of my life of nomadic faith: Adas Israel in Washington, Pestalozzi Strasse Synagogue in Berlin, First Narayever Congregation in Toronto, Beth Shalom in Ottawa and Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal, where my family has worshipped for five generations.
In Pittsburgh, the sect, the size, the sanctuary did not matter to me. The memorial candles and the social hall (renovation sponsored by the Friedman or Schwartz Family) did not matter. I know none of them and I know all of them. I know the Tree of Life because I am a Jew: Instinctively, inexorably, I recognize its roots, its branches and its leaves.
I emailed my old friend, David Shribman, who lives three blocks from the Tree of Life. “Horrific,” he replied. He is a Jew, his wife a Catholic, his daughter studying to be a rabbi. Married to a Catholic who converted, I understand his story, though we have never discussed it.
David is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has covered the tragedy with dignity, sensitivity, authority and restraint. Hours after the shooting, in the achingly beautiful prose which is his signature, David wrote: “We knew it could happen here — any here, anywhere ...”
We know. Jews don’t need “globalization” or “connectivity” to explain how we are bound together. We are not a flash mob or a confection; we’ve been around awhile. Because we’ve always known anguish and hatred — in the bloodletting of the Inquisition, in the Czar’s pogroms, in the Nazi camps, and more recently in the streets of Toulouse, Buenos Aires, Bombay and Amsterdam — what happened in Pittsburgh, while horrifying, depleting and wrenching, is not surprising.
We know this not because we are prophets, but because we are chroniclers. We know Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford, the primal scream and the coded message. We know it, hear it and cannot escape it.
We know that we are cursed or blessed as Jews until the end of days. And that bad things have happened and will happen to us — any here, anywhere.
America was born in blood and has been bleeding ever since. It demands helpless detachment.