A Massacre in the Heart of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood
The values that drove Robert Bowers to murder my neighbors are the ones we cherish — and will continue to live by.
'On a Saturday morning in March of 1997 I became a bat mitzvah at Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
I wasn’t supposed to be there. The previous October a fire had blazed through my family’s regular synagogue, Beth Shalom, less than a mile away.
Anyone who is from Squirrel Hill, or has ever spent time in the place where I was lucky to be raised, will not be surprised to know how the community responded to this disaster.
Jews and gentiles alike ran toward the fire. As Beth Shalom’s executive director told a reporter at the time: “I didn’t have to look — everyone came to me.” The line put me in mind of my favorite of Fred Rogers’ sayings. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Squirrel Hill, Mr. Rogers’ real-world neighborhood, is full of such people. His home was three blocks from Tree of Life.
He isn’t the only one. Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, lives nine doors away. Rich Fitzgerald, the county executive, a few doors farther. The mayor lives five blocks away. I grew up down the street from the synagogue.
While my family worshiped at Tree of Life for many years, none were in the sanctuary on Saturday morning when Robert Bowers, a 46-year-old man motivated by his hatred of my people, began gunning people down while shouting “All Jews must die.”
But 11 of our neighbors were killed. We are waiting to hear their names. My family will certainly know most if not all of them.
My parents, my sisters and my aunts and uncles will attend many funerals this week. That’s because Squirrel Hill functions like an urban shtetl.
In most American cities, Jews tend to live in the suburbs. Not so in Pittsburgh, where more than half of the Jewish community still lives in the city, mainly in Squirrel Hill. And unlike in other urban centers, like Los Angeles or New York, Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is small enough that we don’t stay in our religious and political lanes. When I spoke last weekend at my grandparents’ Reform synagogue in my hometown, there were liberal and conservative, Reform and Orthodox, American and Israeli-born Jews who waited to hug me — and argue with me — after. That’s Pittsburgh.
There is a phrase in the Talmud that has always felt especially relevant to our community: Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh. All of Israel is responsible for one another. For us that is not a lovely theory but a lived reality.
As with many synagogues in America, the door to Tree of Life and Pittsburgh’s other shuls on Saturday mornings did not have any security and were open to all comers. We live according to our values — the ones that Robert Bowers appears to despise. . .
Just this morning, he posted: “HIAS likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
The heartbreaking coincidence is that the Jewish emphasis on the open door, on welcoming the stranger, is exactly what the Jews of Tree of Life and the Jews of every synagogue big and small in every far-flung corner of the globe were reading about this Shabbat morning.
They were reading from the chapters of Genesis we refer to as Vayera. The Torah portion opens on Judaism’s founding father and mother: Abraham and Sarah. Three men show up to their tent — strangers — and the couple welcomes them: feeding them, giving them shade and washing their feet.
These strangers come with a shocking message: Sarah, then the ripe age of 90, will bear a child.
Sarah laughs, incredulous. But she soon gives birth to Isaac. And the strangers, tradition teaches us, are not strangers at all, but angels in disguise. . .
Every Jewish community in America will now have to make sensible decisions about how to ensure that they are not the next victims of someone like Mr. Bowers. But those hard choices should not make us forget the core values that make communities like Squirrel Hill what they are: welcoming, big-hearted and profoundly decent. One of the gifts of the Jewish experience in America is that because we have been so welcomed and so safe here, these values have been able to flourish.
Just as every Jewish couple gets married under a canopy open on all four sides — a replica of the tent modeled for us by Abraham and Sarah — so must Jewish communities keep our tents open. This is the true source of our longevity and resilience.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/synagogue-shooting-pittsburgh.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
and a pretty sad one, too, when we can say there's been a mass shooting in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.
A new low.
