Unveiling on Yom Kippur

Aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting; 27Oct2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/us/tree-of-life-groundbreaking.html

I entered the synagogue last night for the kol nidre service past two armed and armored police. The rabbi told us of the need to find our Jewish community because we are strangers in a strange land, a small minority. He told us that we were all at Sinai when God spoke to us through Moses, that we must work tirelessly to be righteous, to deserve the blessings we have received. Through it all I kept thinking how flawed and small I am, how often I cause harm no matter how vigilant I am, no matter how hard I try for perfection.

I kept noticing how cold and uneasy I felt, not like someone among friends praying together in cushioned chairs, but like one of the condemned. I wondered what difference I could make if someone burst in with a machine gun blazing. I worried that I and all those around me stood condemned for my failures, that none of us were to be sealed in the book of life this year. When the rabbi told us of the 36 righteous people on which the fate of the world depends, I wondered if I am one of the innumerable unrighteous who bear responsibility for suffering and death.

When it was time for the mourner’s kaddish, a few stood in remembrance of their dead family members. I stood too, and though I have no faith, I prayed with the congregation, but in remembrance of the Palestinians who died a year ago today. They are my kin, as surely as the strangers sitting around me in that synagogue. All of us are complicit in the deaths of 1200 Israeli’s on October 7, in the deaths of 30,000 in Gaza since, for Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s continued murderous belligerence, for a primary cause of it all, Israel’s past and continued expansion into the West Bank, and for Israel’s tyrannical police presence throughout Palestine.

We are complicit, yet we are helpless to do differently. How can we fail to support Israel? It will always be a refuge for all of us whose ancestors were herded together and murdered. Yet how can we support doing precisely the same to Palestinians, who Israel brutalizes in its futile and self-destructive attempts to kill all its enemies, who Israel herds together and displaces by the hundreds of thousands, like cattle being moved from one pasture to the next?

I marvel at the tight correspondence between America’s response to 9/11 and Israel’s response to October 7. We too mounted a counter-productive war on an innocent people. We too handed our enemies a far greater victory with our self-destructive over-reaction than they had already won. We too killed 20 innocents for every one of ours that was murdered. We too created a political and social environment of hate and vengeance which was worse and more intractable than that which led to war in the first place.

I marvel in horror at the naïve hope that I can amend the wrongs of the past year and somehow induce God to seal my name in the book of life. What of my complicity in the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi’s, 30,000 Palestinians, 1200 Israeli’s, and counting? What of my indifference to the suffering of others when hurricane Helene swerved from a direct hit on my city but devastated towns 50 miles east instead while we never even lost power?

I marvel too at the dread with which I carry my complicity, as if the religious dogma of Yom Kippur has been transmuted into personal guilt. The sense of responsibility that I carry is, I believe, far greater than what I have done to deserve it or, for that matter, than what I can do to correct what I have done. Yet there is truth in it. I think that truth resides in my indifference to others’ suffering, That is a kind of sickness; it is called sociopathy. Indifference requires that I fail to recognize or acknowledge the humanity of another, that I ignore the simple fact that they are like me, that they could be me.

On October 27, 2018, a monster shouting, “ Jews will not replace us,” opened fire at The Tree of Life Synagogue. Three days later, the first of the murdered were buried. One was husband to my co-worker and friend. Eleven months later, I wrote “Unveiling.” The Jewish Chronicle turned it down but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published it.

Unveiling

Eleven lives taken
at The Tree of Life – hours later
and miles away, our writing workshop
canceled,
our chance for defiance,
however small,
gone.

I waited at the funeral
with hundreds to pass security,
newsboys on the street asking
with their cameras, “Who is afraid?”

I watched her halting walk to his grave,
reluctant like a child.
I followed like a child
with a shovelful of earth
to cover him.

I listened to the learned
seeking meaning, hundreds crowded
into the Beth Shalom basement,
police in armor at the entrance.

When the doors locked behind us,
I noticed the dampness
and a draft on my bare neck.

Today was eleven months,
hundreds standing witness
in the warmth beneath the trees.

I still live so I was there.

I wonder though
would we have
cancelled our workshop
for a drive-by
at a playground?