Do as the Jews have always done
The Jewish people are accustomed to standing apart from larger society. This has been their burden not just for decades, not just for centuries, but millennia. They are history’s most persecuted people.
On a rainy Saturday morning, the well-worn trail of Jewish anguish continued when a crazed man stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue and fired guns at mostly elderly people attending services. He murdered eight men and three women.
Political tensions are rising in our country and hate crimes against Jews have spiked in the last year. But what happened to congregants at The Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday is not peculiar to Jewish people or their culture.
It was the third major mass killing at an American house of worship in three years. Last year a gunman shot dead 26 people at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; and in 2015 another shooter killed nine at a largely African-America church in Charleston, S.C.
Tree of Life worshipers join the patrons of the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, the music fans of Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival, and high school students at Parkland, Fla. as some of the latest victims of gun rampages.
“I’m afraid to say that we may be at the beginning of what has happened to Europe, the consistent anti-Semitic attacks,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the New York Times. “If it is not nipped in the bud. I am afraid the worst is yet to come.”
Anti-Semitism exists in America, but it’s on the fevered fringe. No one holding anti-Semitic views can survive long in the corporate workplace or polite society. Polling has shown for years now that a wide majority of Americans like and value the Jewish people.
Americans no longer forbid Jews from the country club or deed-restrict them out of the neighborhood. But it’s easy to understand why American Jews are nervous.
Western Europe is a roiling stew of anti-Semitism, where a Jewish teenager can be brutally beaten for wearing a yarmulke on certain streets of London and Paris.
The International Community, so well ensconced in Western Europe, holds the tiny state of Israel to standards it would never impose on the brutal regimes in the surrounding neighborhood.
Non-Jewish Americans can largely trace their unease about mass killings to the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. But Jews were feeling that fear five years earlier when a suicide bomber blew up the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people.
They understood that if Middle East terrorists could reach across the globe and strike South America, they could also strike Jewish Community Centers and synagogues in North America.
So U.S. Jews began to harden their facilities and redoubled those efforts again after 9/11.
In Arizona you’ll find elaborate security around some of these centers, with concrete barriers to prevent car bombings, and heavy doors that open only with authorized security cards.
The Tree of Life community was established in Pittsburgh during the Civil War. Since that time, the global community of Jews suffered pogroms in Russia that killed tens of thousands and forced some two-million Russian Jews to leave their homes.
They witnessed the Dreyfus Affair in France in which a Jewish artillery captain was falsely accused and convicted of crimes he didn’t commit as Frenchmen yelled “Death to the Jew.”
They lived through the destruction of Europe’s Jewry during the Holocaust, six-million souls lost. They fought wars with the major Arab nations to establish and hold the state of Israel. They suffered the murder of 11 of their athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. And in the year 2000, they saw it grow common for buses filled with dozens of Israeli civilians to blow up during the Second Intifada.
We have something to learn from them.
The Jews are not merely set apart by their suffering, but by their endurance.
In 2009, Steven L. Pease, a successful, Harvard-trained venture capitalist wanted to understand why so many Jews punch above their weight, why the Jewish culture turns out so many high achievers — a fact that is quantifiable beyond dispute.
As he, a non-Jew, went about answering why, he decided one of the reasons was their determined focus on the future. “Jews believe in a future different from, and better than, the past, and that God has given them a role in shaping that future.”
How do you go on when real life is almost too terrible to confront? You do as the Jews have done throughout history. You step toward the future with the unflinching certainty it is yours to lift up.