How to make sense of the massacre in Pittsburgh?

In 10 days, the world will mark the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” which marked the escalation of Nazi violence against Jews in Germany and Austria, which led to the Holocaust.

For me, those long decades provide little separation; 1938 sits on my shoulder, breathing in my ear.

It leaned heavily against me as I watched 150 people with lit candles listening to prayers and words of comfort in Waterloo Sunday night at a vigil to remember the 11 victims massacred in the synagogue in Pittsburgh the day before.

There were so many police officers at the vigil. Were they needed to keep us safe, I wondered? Were we in danger, this tiny Jewish community and its allies, standing defencelessly out in the open air?

My mind jumped back and forth between then and now. My elderly uncle remembers Kristallnacht. He and my mother and their late sister were child refugees from Nazi Germany. Before they were taken to safety in Britain, they stayed briefly at a Catholic orphanage. My uncle remembers the fires of burning Jewish businesses and synagogues that lit up the sky. One of the nuns carried my mother, then just three years old, in her arms.

Now, I was trying to make sense of the Pittsburgh massacre, committed by a man who said he just wanted to kill Jews, by connecting one historical event with another.

A lot of people are doing the same. On social media, people circulated the statement that one of the victims in Pittsburgh had been a Holocaust survivor. It wasn’t true. But people kept repeating it, because we’re all looking for historical patterns.

“As I watch what’s going on. I find some things very troubling,” said Ken Seiling, chair of Waterloo Region and a historian.

“One only has to look at the history of the 20th century to see what happens in countries where these kinds of things take root and take over.”

Are we on the verge of another Holocaust? No. President Donald Trump is divisive, mean, coarse and an enabler of the most violent and bigoted strains of North American society. He bears responsibility for much of the ugliness we are witnessing. But he is not Hitler.

Still, Saturday’s mass shooting was the deadliest anti-Semitic incident in U.S. history. Is that a coincidence? Of course not.

It is chilling to see the parade of hatred and the collapse of civility. Not only in the murders of African-American worshippers in Charleston by a white supremacist in 2015, or the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016. But also in the complete breakdown of reasonable disagreement. Too many of us seem unable to allow people with whom we disagree even to express their point of

view.

When the extremists are screaming at each other, the reasonable people in the middle walk away.

Rabbi Moshe Goldman of Waterloo’s Rohr Chabad Centre for Jewish Life says it’s important to respond to evil with goodness, even if you feel so frustrated and helpless, you just want to shut down.

“It’s an old Jewish idea that whenever tragedy hits, it’s a wake-up call that you have to improve,” he said.

“Challenging that evil to go back where it came from.”

At the vigil, he had cards that people could fill out, describing the good deeds they were going to do. Goldman said 120 cards were filled out.

They will be mailed to the synagogue in Pittsburgh as a gesture of support from Waterloo Region.

Stopping the next attacker is a long road.

Gun control, by itself, won’t do it. We have gun control in Canada, and look what happened this year in Toronto, and Fredericton, and even Kitchener.

“The only thing that stops the next shooter is the shooter himself,” Goldman said.

“We have to get into their hearts and minds.”

But it will only work if we all pull together.