Squirrel Hill

My daughter Mia taught Hebrew school at Beth Shalom, a synagogue in Squirrel Hill, when she was a student at the University of Pittsburgh.  Her fellow Hebrew school teacher Tziona, had a college-student son, Dan, who had grown up in Squirrel Hill.  Not altogether coincidentally, several years later Tziona became Mia's mother-in-law when Mia and Dan married.  

That synagogue was not the Tree of Life Congregation, but at this moment it feels very clear to me that we are all members of that congregation.  Squirrel Hill is a neighborhood much like Mt. Airy in Philadelphia, home of my own congregation, Germantown Jewish Centre, so the identification is deepened for me. 

At GJC there are Philadelphia police officers posted outside the building on the high holidays -- as I just heard is the case at Tree of Life -- but not for a regular Shabbat service.  In any case, multiple police were wounded in responding to the attack, so the idea (uttered aloud by rump on the tarmac on his way to his umpteenth MAGA mob gathering in BFE, this time Murphysboro, IL) that a good guy with a gun in the synagogue could have prevented the casualties is not only horribly inappropriate but not credible.

This could have been GJC, it could have been any synagogue.  The murderer had a particular grievance against HIAS, a non-profit that helps settle and integrate refugees from all countries.  GJC had an afternoon program on supporting refugees last Shabbat; it featured a representative of HIAS-PA.  HIAS-PA is separate from the national HIAS but has the same mission.  

This was an attack on all Jews.  The deranged murderer shouted "all Jews must die" as he began spraying innocent human beings with semi-automatic rifle fire. 

We empathize with victims and families of mass murders in schools, churches, movie theaters, shopping malls, night clubs... as deeply and as fully as we can.  The reality is that we all live at the center of radiating rings of concentric circles, and the closer to one's center, one's gut, one's heart, that the victims are, the more personally and immediately we experience the impact, the terror, the destabilizing jumble of being horrified, grieving and furious.  This for me feels very personal. 

Right now the report is that at least eight to ten Jews were shot by a hateful psycho anti-Semite named Rob Bowers. His sickness was so profound that he posted invective against the resident of the White House to the effect that said resident is "a globalist".  Rump is insufficiently hateful for this piece of stunted, twisted, misshapen protoplasm.  

I had been planning to write this morning about Rachel Maddow's brilliant opening segment last night.  If you didn't see it, I implore you to find the time:  http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show.  The segment title on the MSNBC website is "Trump era unique for violent extremists inspired by US president".  

Rachel's insight was to contextualize the pipe-bombing within the trend of violent crimes by white-supremacist neo-Nazi gangs on both coasts.  The common theme is hate and rage acted out as sadistic violent assault against perceived enemies of Christian white men.  

This absolutely does mirror the racist/nationalist rage that fueled Nazism.  Wounded, seething egos blamed and then frontally attacked the "others" for their reduced circumstances when after all they should rightfully have been the  masters by virtue of their superior Aryan race.  

The stunted, twisted, misshapen personality in the White House has made it his central mission to stoke hatred in the United States.  Howard Dean said this morning on AM Joy that "evil lurks in the hearts of men", and we are fighting to stem the tide of evil leeching from the hearts of rump's cult following.

Yes, so far our law enforcement agencies have been doing their job.  The Rachel segment details arrests of vile Nazi creeps on both coasts.  That's reassuring me that we are not living in 1930's Germany.  But Rachel ominously and rightly points out that the resident of the White House has been doing his evilest to undermine criminal justice agencies and to try to turn them into his personal tools of going after his enemies and protecting himself.  Right now his failure to achieve that may be all that distinguishes the present time in America from the 1930's in Germany.  Not so reassuring.

Our best chance of insuring his ultimate failure is to elect people who have the Constitutional power to block him and hold him -- and his enablers in the administration and Congress -- accountable.  Whether this violent hateful sickness be our future or a horrific brief chapter of American history is up to us and our fellow citizens.  

Post script based on later reporting:

Eleven Jews are dead, as announced officially in Pittsburgh.  The names of the eleven, none of whom are children, will be released on Sunday morning.

Although it's no consolation, I'm grateful that Bowers, who shot and wounded four Police officers, survived.  He will find the rest of his brutish existence, to be spent behind bars at the mercy of corrections officers, a living hell.  People in law enforcement and corrections take most unkindly to cop-shooters. I personally oppose the death penalty, and in this case I truly believe lethal injection would be far too easy a way out for this abomination of humanity. 

Today's Squirrel Hill Tree of Life hate crime was the deadliest attack on Jews in the history of the United States. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/27/pittsburgh-police-responding-active-shooting-squirrel-hill-area/?utm_term=.df8f68e96f4e  Jason Greenblatt, director of the ADL, noted in an MSNBC interview tonight that the ADL's Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents 2017 report documented a 57% increase from 2016 to 2017.  Today it's been repeatedly noted on MSNBC that, over the last several years in the United States, half of the hate crimes targeting religious groups have targeted Jews.  Jews comprise two percent of Americans.  

What a fucking country, eh?

Reflections on Squirrel Hill by two former members of that community, Howard Fineman and Bari Weiss, are at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/pittsburgh-squirrel-hill-shooting-synagogue.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/synagogue-shooting-pittsburgh.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage