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