#PittsburghStrong
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My daughter, like most teens and adults, spends a bit too much time with a screen in front of her. Given the world of social media she inhabits, maybe she wrote about other things she reads online, everything from the bile of blogosphere bottom-feeders to the fire hose of hatred tweeted from the highest office in the land. My daughter does not have to be as politic as her father. Perhaps she wrote about what it means to grow up in a time where the occupant of the White House has completely abdicated any semblance of moral leadership. Maybe she has seen a clip of President Bush with his bullhorn at Ground Zero, or President Obama and his beer diplomacy and wonders how it is that this president demonstrates on a daily basis the precise behaviors that her parents have taught her are totally unacceptable. Maybe she is just confused as to why, when tragedy strikes, the media turns to this man for comfort or moral guidance, an act as nonsensical as turning to the Salvation Army for counsel on matters of national defense. It would defy logic for my daughter and probably for all of us to imagine that a president with Jewish children and grandchildren could be an anti-Semite. But any high school or even grade school kid knows that hurtful speech leads to violence, that – no different than the run-up to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination – unchecked speech can be weaponized. My teenage daughter knows that the president’s thoughts as to how many guards should or shouldn’t be deployed at a house of worship should be preceded by a commitment to demilitarize our rhetoric, to guard our lips from speaking evil, and to cease being a complicit enabler to the very hatreds that have taken root across our land.
Maybe my daughter is scared, maybe my daughter is angry; most likely, I imagine, my daughter is just sad. First and foremost, sad at the lives lost in an attack on Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. But maybe she also senses that Saturday’s attack was an assault on a certain vision of America itself. A vision of an America that welcomes the stranger, the huddled masses yearning to be free. An America that celebrates difference, that dignifies views not one’s own, that embraces the other, that knows itself to be only as strong as its weakest link. Maybe her online thoughts reflected a deep and searing sadness brought about by the chipping away of the rule of law, civil liberties, and the vital institutions of our democracy. She is too young to vote, but maybe her sadness prompted her to remind people to vote. After all, with an election just days away, maybe she wanted to stand up on a soapbox or even a bimah and yell out that if you don’t vote, if you don’t get involved in the political process, then all your kvetching isn’t worth a dime. Maybe she wrote that the liberties we enjoy as Americans should not be taken for granted, that they are liberties that oblige us to support the work of those individuals who represent our highest hopes for our country.
Zoe could have written about all these things. She could have written about gun laws, she could have written about immigration laws. She is a resourceful sort; maybe her post included a link asking everyone to give to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to support a community in crisis. Well, I finally read what she said, and, having been granted permission, I will share it with you now. In order to understand the post, you need to know that it was posted with a photograph attached: an adorable picture of Zoe with her siblings and cousins at their grandmother’s house in Squirrel Hill. The post reads:
I got home from shul on Saturday morning and Jed told me that there had been a shooting in Pittsburgh. The three seconds before Jed told me our family was okay my heart dropped. I couldn’t breathe if a shooting had been what killed my grandparents or cousins. The other main Conservative shul in Pittsburgh was where my parents got married and my mom had her bat mitzvah. This picture was taken at my grandparents’ house in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, less than a mile away from the Tree of Life Synagogue. I’ve been going to Pittsburgh for as long as I have been alive. I even want to live there when I am older and the shooting that happened does not change that. We become numb to shootings and tragedies like this and don’t think so hard about them until they become personal. This shooting was personal. My mom knows people who died. My grandparents, friends and family all know the 11 people who we lost yesterday. A lot of people posted about what happened or just mentioned it some way and then went on with their lives whether that is a Halloween party or homework or something else. Not half an hour this weekend went by without me thinking about this. However, with all of this said, we must live for the people who have died. Remember them by finding joy in our lives and of course not forgetting their names and honoring the lives they lived before they were gone.
I read her post, and then I read it again. I was comforted, and I was humbled and I was proud. Proud of her, proud of her wisdom, proud of her resilience, and proud to be reminded that even rabbis have a lot to learn about what people need to hear in times of loss and sorrow. That there is a time for everything under the heavens, and that first and foremost right now is the time to mourn and to weep. That in this world where adults never fail to wag their fingers at the next generation for possessing an ever-diminishing attention span, it can be a teenager who reminds us that we dare not go back to business as usual. It is teenager who reminds us that our first task is to remember. To remember Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. To remember and honor each one of them, to pray for their souls, and to comfort their grief-stricken families. And then, like our patriarch Abraham himself after the death of his beloved Sarah, to redouble our efforts to the living, to build a future that embodies our highest hopes for this world, that exemplifies the very values of those whom we are remembering, and to honor their lives by finding joy in the brief and uncertain span of our own lives.