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