#PittsburghStrong

Of all the gut-checking, gulp-inducing moments of this past week, the one I want to focus on this morning was, relatively speaking, rather modest. At the top of the list, no question, was the moment when my oldest daughter walked into the back of the Sanctuary around this time last week and greeted me stone-faced with the words, “Everybody is fine, but there has been a shooting at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh.” To process that distressing information, to think through the safety concerns – there, here – in real time, in the midst of a packed sanctuary remains, to be honest, a blur – a blur that will take a very, very long time to unpack. Nor, I imagine, will I soon forget our Shabbat lunch last Saturday, as Debbie and I tried, as best we could, to be gracious hosts, all the while existing in that “next of kin” temporal gap, nervously anticipating the names of the dead yet to be announced, names which, by Sunday morning, we knew we knew. And then, of course, there has been the overwhelming dry heave of sorrow this week. The sorrow of sitting this past Wednesday in the very sanctuary in which Debbie and I were married, only this time, for the funeral of the mother of one of Debbie’s high school classmates. One week later, we are all still reeling, pivoting from one moment, one emotion to the next, trying to make sense of this world of ours forever changed by the murderous anti-Semitic rampage of a gunman in an American house of prayer.

So early this week, when someone texted me: “Have you seen Zoe’s Instagram account? You need to read it,” it was not, relatively speaking, a gulp moment of the same magnitude. In this day and age, parents of teenagers live with varying degrees of vigilance when it comes to our children’s social media presence, and as the parent of not one but four teenagers, I am well aware of the tripwires that abound. My concern, truth be told, was not that Zoe had posted something untoward; she has heard more than one speech from me on that front. My concern, rather, was the question of what she had apparently said to the whole world but not yet to me. The blessing and curse of social media is that while teenagers may be characteristically reserved in sharing their thoughts with their parents, they now have a platform to give voice to their thoughts to a far-flung reading public, including in this case, a family friend. What, I nervously wondered, was going on in my daughter’s head? An unprecedented trauma had struck Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, the Pittsburgh community, the Jewish community, and America as a whole. I know I have been crushed by the events of this past week, and as an adult and a rabbi, I at least have some coping mechanisms. How was my fifteen-year-old daughter coping? What had she posted in that shielded and yet altogether public forum of Instagram?

Most likely, I thought to myself, she had shared her fears about personal safety in the face of violent anti-Semitism. In my household, discussions about anti-Semitism, historic or across the ocean, are not new. Israelis have no shortage of enemies and we have grown accustomed to hearing news reports out of Israel and to be sure, Europe. But here, in America? Eleven Jews murdered in shul, for no other reason than that they were Jewish, in the heart of a quiet and shady suburb upon whose streets my daughter has played for as long as she can remember. What the Munich Eleven, the eleven Israeli athletes gunned down in the 1972 Olympics, were for one generation, for my daughter’s generation has become the Pittsburgh Eleven. In every generation, the Haggadah reminds us, our enemies have risen up seeking to destroy us. We had hoped that our generation, our America, would be different. And here we are once again, on this week marking eighty years since Kristallnacht, the protective glass of our security shattered. My daughter knows that most of her British cousins have left for Israel. Are American Jews next to go? Are Jewish institutions safe? Can she walk down the street with visible signs of her Jewishness? My daughter also has a father who is a rabbi. Maybe she wrote about the fear of seeing her dad go to work every day in a synagogue, leading services every Shabbat, knowing that anti-Semitism, the oldest hatred, is very much still alive. Maybe she is trying to figure out why her Sabbath-observant father now carries a cell phone in his pocket when he goes to shul on Shabbat – just in case. “Just in case what?” she may be asking. What does it mean to live in a country where Jews need to ask such questions? Maybe these are the sorts of questions she was posting about.

I imagine that if I were a teenager, I would be a bit confused about anti-Semitism. This act was perpetrated by a white nationalist from the far right. But what about the anti-Semitism on the far left – BDS and otherwise? Are all anti-Semitisms equal and equally threatening? It is hard to sort out, for adults and for teenagers. My daughter has been taught to believe that what is good for Israel is good for the Jewish people. But what about our moment, when the political left, the historic stronghold of Jewish liberalism, is proving increasingly inhospitable to any expressions of support for Israel and its supporters? And on the political right, segments of the Jewish community have given a pass to behaviors and politics antithetical to Jewish values, a political calculation that is believed to be in Israel’s best interests. I don’t think my daughter would use the words “Faustian bargain,” certainly not on Instagram, but if she did, maybe she would ask: at what point will these Jews wake up to the fact that at stake is not just the security of Israel, but also the security of Jews here in America, and, for that matter, the very integrity of the Jewish value system we purport to hold dear? Interestingly, Zoe was not at Park Avenue Synagogue last week, nor for that matter is she here this week. The last few months she has been making her rounds of Orthodox shuls, and even more interestingly, she recently joined the young conservatives club at her school. (Every kid has to rebel against their parents.) Zoe is a critical thinker; maybe she is asking at exactly what point her newfound friends will demonstrate the requisite courage to publicly disavow policies and behaviors that are contrary to core Jewish values and communal interests.

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.