Why the Pittsburgh Shooting is Different

We woke up on Thursday morning to the sickening news that 12 people had been killed by a gunman inside a California country-western dance bar that was hosting an event for college students. The painful, undeniable fact is that becoming the victim of gun violence in the United States has become a part of our daily life. And we are all at risk.   We are at risk at our houses of worship.   We are at risk attending a concert. We are at risk at a bar. We are at risk at a night club. We are at risk in a movie theater. We are at risk on a college campus.  Kindergartners and High School students are at risk. We are at risk in a supermarket. This September alone, there were 42 murders and 214 shootings in Chicago. Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio called that “progress” because there were 60 murders and 257 shootings in Chicago a year before in September. Progress?  Not for those 42 families who lost loved ones in September.  Since 2012 there have been at least 14 senseless shootings in Churches in the United States that led to fatalities. Just a year ago, a 21year old man opened fire at a Baptist church in Texas, killing 26 people. In June, 2015 Dylan Roof killed nine African American worshippers, including their pastor, at the Emanuel African Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2012 six members of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek, were fatally shot by a self -described white supremacist. This is the America we live in.

From this perspective, the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue two weeks ago is just another attack on on a long list of attacks on Americans going about our daily lives. But the killing of American Jews fits into a larger narrative, one that transcends the gun violence occurring in American society today. One rabbi began his sermon on the subject by writing, “It’s hard to believe that along with Masada and York, England ……..Warsaw, Poland and Babi Yar in the Ukraine, and countless other [places] … we now have to add the city of Pittsburgh as being one of those places that become a part of our people’s history, with the eleven Jews that were massacred there for no other reason than being Jewish.” The massacre in Pittsburgh is a part of the long history of anti-Semitism that began well before Columbus came to these shores. When the shooter shouted “All Jews must die” when he stormed the Tree of Life synagogue, he was using the language of Muslim fundamentalists of today, the German Nazis and the Hungarian Arrow Cross before them, and the Cossack Marauders before them, and the Chmielnicki pogromists before them, and the Crusaders before them, and the Romans before them. He was tapping in to a vein of hatred against our people that goes back 2500 years to the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem. So whereas the violence in Pittsburgh is part and parcel of  the general pattern of violence that other groups have experienced in recent years in the United States, it also has the particular scourge of anti-Semitism that has been part of the very fabric of Western Civilization since its inception.

In this instance, it is clear that the Jewish community was targeted because of the value we place on extending a helping hand to the stranger, of standing up for the needy and oppressed.   This time the stranger, the other, the besieged are migrant families seeking refuge in our land.

We know all too well how vulnerable the stranger can be. Our Torah portion for this week relates that Isaac and his family were forced to leave their homes because of famine. They settled in the Land of the Philistines. The Torah tells us that as a refugee to this new land Isaac fears for his life. Yet he settles down, prospers and even becomes wealthy. The natives envy him and accuse him of prospering by exploiting them. They stop up his wells and his is forced to leave. In his new location he digs another well, but the natives claim that the water is theirs. They take the water, although they are willing to let Isaac have the hole. Isaac digs yet another well, but the natives dispute the ownership of that as well. He is forced again to uproot his family and move south, where finally he finds a place to settle.

The  envy, hatred, bigotry and xenophobia that our father Isaac experienced are all too common experiences of refugees, whether they are fleeing famine, violence, or political persecution in all its forms. On his internet postings, the Pittsburgh attacker cited the work of an agency whose acronym is HIAS. He claimed this agency was helping to transport migrant caravans through Mexico that threaten, he said, to “invade” our country. The Hebrew Immigrant Aide Society, or HIAS, is an organization formed by American Jews on the Lower East Side of NYC in 1881. It aimed to help fellow Jews fleeing to America from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. HIAS helped 2 million Jews who fled from Russia, Austrio-Hungary and Romania settle in the United States between 1881 and 1924. Later they helped Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe, Jews fleeing Hungary in 1956, Cuba in 1960, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Ethiopia in 1977, Iran in 1979 and the Jews of the Former Soviet Union since 1980. Since 2000 HIAS has expanded its work to include resettlement of non-Jewish refugees, both in the United States and across the world.

Today marks the 80^th anniversary of “Kristallnacht,” the “Night of Broken Glass,” referring to the night in Germany and Austria where thousands of windows were shattered in Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. This pogrom was one more step on the path toward the Shoah, the systematic destruction of European Jewry. From this we learn that hatred and intolerance must be confronted whenever and wherever they appear.

CBS member Kim Sharon wrote on Facebook about one of the most heart-breaking moments for her following the tragedy at the Tree of a Life synagogue last week. That was when her teen age daughter told her that she didn’t think anyone but Jews would care. But the outpouring of love, empathy, compassion and support that has come from our non-Jewish neighbors  this past Sunday night was overwhelming.  As you probably know by now, 850 people packed our synagogue on in what was undoubtedly the largest gathering ever to take place here. All of these friends, families, neighbors, and strangers understood that an attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh is an attack on the entire People of Israel -- and on democracy itself.

Shabbat Shalom

Stephen Heyman is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Yanna, moved to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh from Paris, France two years ago. Both he and his wife were technically Jewish but had no idea of what that meant. They had never attended services at a synagogue or had a bar or bat mitzvah. The most religious act they performed was to eat lox. They were surprised, then, when they found that the home that they had bought sight unseen was smack in the middle of a neighborhood full of Jewish families.

They were immediately embraced by their mostly Jewish neighbors. Soon invitations to Shabbat dinners came. Neighbors would show up at their door to sound the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashannah or wave the lulav and etrog on Sukkoth. Later that year Stephen and his wife watched in horror as the terrorist attacks unfolded in their hometown of Paris. They were thankful that they lived in Pittsburgh, where they felt safe from terrorism.

Since the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue in his neighborhood, Stephen writes, he has been thinking about what it means to be a Jew. His thoughts led him to consider the words inscribed on former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s grave marker. His stone is inscribed with the final words of American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan by his kidnappers in February 2002. Those words were, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

He writes: “What a strange thing to put on your grave, I once thought, so intense, so tribal. But now I understand better. I had always deluded myself into believing that being Jewish was an option, something I could switch on or off, depending on the situation. The closer the attacks come, the less I feel that way.”

This story reminded me of an encounter we had on our recent Jewish Heritage Trip to Europe. We visited the Israel Cultural Center in Budapest, Hungary. There we were warmly welcomed by a Hungarian man in his mid-thirties by the name of Tordai Marton. He told us about the Israel Cultural Center and what it was like to grow up as a Jew in Hungary.  On his thirteenth birthday, he said, his mother took him aside and told him she had something important to say. He looked at her expectantly. “You are Jewish”, she said. That was all. Then she walked away.

Tordai was puzzled by that. He knew of Jewish classmates in school, but he never knew that he had a special connection to them. No one had ever told him he was Jewish. He had not been raised Jewish. In the Soviet years, being Jewish in Hungary was something to be hidden, to be kept secret and never to be spoken about. What could it mean that he was Jewish?

That incident recalls the Talmudic story of the man who came to Hillel asking to learn about Judaism while standing on one foot. The man had been driven away by the stern teacher, Shammai, for making such a foolish request. The patient Hillel, however, told him, “Do not do unto others as you would not have others do unto you. The rest is commentary. Go and study.” Impressed by Hillel’s wisdom, the man did go to study and became a great scholar.

“You are Jewish,” said Tordais’ mother. That was enough. Tordai went on to study, to learn what those words meant. Those words set him off on a path, on a quest, to understand.  Although his mother never talked about being Jewish, she must have remembered that in our tradition thirteen marks a significant transition for a Jewish boy. In some ways I felt that statement alone constituted his bar-mitzvah.

I think we all struggle to understand what it means to be Jewish. We often wonder why events that occur hundreds or even thousands of miles away from us, to people we do not know but who are also Jewish, shake us to the core. Why does visiting a restored synagogue from the 16^th century in Krakow, where once prayed a famous sage that most of us have only a passing knowledge of, affect us in such profound ways? On our trip we visited a memorial to the Jews of Budapest on the bank of the Danube river that broke our hearts.  It consisted of shoes lined up along the bank representing the shoes of the innocent men, women and children who were brought to that spot and shot by the Hungarian Arrow Cross soldiers simply because they were Jewish. Their bodies fell into the Danube river and were swept downstream. We can draw a direct line that connects the murderer in Pittsburgh to this memorial on the Danube River. Just as the shooter shouted as he burst into the synagogue last Shabbat, so the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary believed--that “all Jews must die.”

It is fashionable to say today that we are all Jews by choice, that being Jewish is an option, as Stephen Heyman once thought. We think of being Jewish as a garment that can be donned or taken off as our feelings and circumstances change. But the intense feelings that arise in all of us – religious and secular, Orthodox, Conservative or Reform -- when fellow Jews are attacked and murdered in their place of worship leads me to think of Jewish identity in another way. It calls to mind the midrash that says that the souls of all Jews who would someday live were present at the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. In this reading of our tradition, being Jewish is not an option – it is a destiny.

Shabbat Shalom

Message to My Congregants about the Pittsburgh Massacre

I sent the following internet message to CBS congregants on October 31 

My Dear Congregants,

Middy and I were leaving Israel Saturday night when we read the shocking news about a gunman in Pittsburgh who had killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We had spent the week in Israel after traveling on a congregational trip to Europe to explore our Jewish heritage. Our visits to Warsaw, to Krakow, to Auschwitz, to Prague, to Terezin, to Vienna and to Budapest were fascinating yet very sobering. Day after day we learned of once thriving Jewish communities that had been destroyed by the madness of Hitler. From this I learned two lessons. The first is that every day we ought to appreciate the freedom and acceptance that we Jews have as citizens of United States. In all of Jewish history there has never been a country to which we have been more welcome or felt more at home. We should never take that for granted. The second lesson is that by the early 20^th century, the Jews of Europe were fully integrated into the societies in which they lived. They were major contributors to the arts, to science, to industry, to government, to medicine, to architecture. Yet in a matter of a few short years, everything vanished. From this we learn that we must be ever vigilant about our freedoms in the United States. They can disappear in a moment if do not defend them when they are threatened.

That being said, we must not over-react to the horrible event in Pittsburgh. One cartoonist compared it to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria were burned to the ground. But this is nothing like Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was a government sponsored pogrom, meant to dispossess the Jews and drive them out of Austria and Germany. The act of murder in Pittsburgh was an act of one anti-Semitic lunatic. In Germany and in Austria the Jewish citizens were alone. Their neighbors either gleefully participated or stood by as Jews were systematically stripped of their rights and their properties. In contrast, in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh massacre, neighbors of different backgrounds and faiths reached out to comfort the Jewish community. Thousands packed Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Pittsburgh a day later as religious leaders across faiths, elected officials and members of the community remembered the slain.

As my friend The Reverend Richard Malmberg of Little Home Church in Wayne, Illinois told his congregation last Sunday in response to the Pittsburgh massacre, “We cannot afford the luxury of despair. No matter how we feel, we must reject hate, keep faith with our highest ideals, and pray for God to show us a way.” 

Rabbi

Remarks at the Gathering to Remember the Victims of the Tree of Life Massacre

On Monday evening, October 29 our congregation gathered in our sanctuary to honor and remember the eleven Jewish men and women slain at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Below are my remarks at that ceremony.

My Dear Friends,

We come together this evening, devastated, shaken, angry, and in disbelief over  the destruction perpetrated this  past Shabbat  during morning  services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, eleven congregants, brought together on the Holy Shabbat for worship, were killed by a lone gunner, who, in his deranged mind, held Jews responsible for heaven knows what. We come together tonight because we need to be together, we need to mourn together, we need to pray together, we need to be angry together, to be afraid together, to be resolute and brave together, to comfort each other.  We Jews have always and will always meet tragedy and misfortune together.  We need to be here now because at times like this we need community to support one other, to be reminded to love and not to hate, to be reminded that goodness will overcome evil.  

The Jewish world is a small one. I am sure many of us may have personal connections to Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood where the shooting occurred.  Diane Rosenthal Hurt of Congregation Etz Chaim in Lombard lost two brothers, David and Cecil Rosenthal, who were in their fifties.  They were both intellectually disabled and lived in a group home, yet they never missed a Shabbat morning at the synagogue. "When it came time to take the Torahs out, Cecil always stepped forward to carry it, and David was right behind him. The rabbis knew: You've got to give them a Torah to carry," said Barton Schachter, a past president for Tree of Life.

I too have a personal connection to Squirrel Hill. I attended college at the University of Pittsburgh, and taught religious school – sixth graders  on Tuesday and ninth graders on Sunday morning – at a Reform synagogue in that neighborhood.   In addition, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, the Rabbi at one of the three congregations that met in the Tree of Life Synagogue, was a colleague of mine in Springfield, Massachusetts from 2004 to 2008.  On Shabbat, when the shooting broke out, Rabbi Perlman had just begun praying with a half dozen congregants in the basement. He closed the door to the chapel and pushed his congregants into a large supply closet. The gunman actually looked into the closet, but did not see them, and Rabbi Perlman and his congregants survived.

I don’t know from where Rabbi Perlman drew the strength to speak before thousands at a public vigil Sunday night in Pittsburgh. There, holding back tears, he said, “What happened yesterday will not break us. It will not ruin us. We will continue to thrive and sing and worship and learn together and continue our historic legacy in this city with the friendliest people that we know.”

Tonight is a night to remember and to mourn, to come together and to hug one another, either literally or figuratively. It is a time to pray. I read a passage in a book recently by Mohsin Hamed called Exit West. The book contained one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read about prayer. The chief protagonist, who is a refugee displaced by war, explains why he prays:

“When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched/ and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents/ all of us/ every man and woman and boy and girl/ and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us/ and this loss unites humanity/ unites every human being/ the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow/ the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another/ and out of this [he] felt it might be possible/ in the face of death/ to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world/ and so he prayed/as a lament/as a consolation/ and as a hope ……….”

We too gather here tonight in the face of death, recognizing our common humanity, affirming our belief that we can build a better world, consoling one another in a time of uncertainty, and resolving to work toward a world, where, as the Prophet Micha says, “Each person can sit under their vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.”