All of us who are Jewish spent much of yesterday feeling a tight belt of anxiety around our hearts as we heard the news coming out of Colleyville, TX.
Not long after the Tree of Life massacre we all did a drill for shooting event at our synagogue.
When I was a kid, blatant antisemitism was thought of as uncouth. I did grow up in a town with beautiful streets with covenants that would have excluded me from living in their lovely homes. Those covenants were in place until I was in middle school. There were towns in Massachusetts with similar covenants as there were all over the country. Unfortunately, hate speech, not just about Jew,s has been normalized and in some cases actively encouraged in the past several years.
The first time I felt that belt of anxiety around my heart was during the horrors of the 1972 Munich Olympics. For much of my life that incident was an outlier. Unfortunately, that is no longer true.
Yesterday, when so little news was coming out of Colleyville, I started obsessively following the events on Twitter to see if any new scraps of information would appear.
I was touched to see the support and love expressed by local Muslim clerics in Colleyville. Clearly, Rabbi Cytron-Walker had forged deep bonds with the local Islamic community. There were many many voices of support and love.
Unfortunately, there were also many hostile crazies out there. There were the pro-gun crazies who said that the hostage-taking was the Jews's own fault for not packing pistols in synagogue.
I read some Muslim voices that stated that if the hostages weren't Zionists then the writers were sympathetic to their plight but if the hostages were Zionists then they deserved whatever fate would befall them.
I know that it has become a popular trope for people to say, "I have no issues with Jews or Judaism, but Zionists are an entirely different story. Zionists are BAD." Several years ago I had a series of increasingly disturbing email conversations with a woman I know from the world of sewing who lives in Jordan. Our emails started out very friendly and were friendly for several months. Then she wrote something about it being OK that I was Jewish but of course, I was so lovely that I couldn't possibly be a Zionist.
That's when things got unpleasant. For a while, she sent me essays about how Israel really ought not to exist because Jews have no ties to the land of Israel. I actually ended up doing a deep dive into the demographics of the land from the 1300s on and learned about how Jews kept being prevented from settling in the land and despite that did their best to just show up. I also learned that most of the Arab population in the land in 1948 had parents and grandparents who had been born elsewhere in the Arab world.
Soon this woman who I had thought was my friend began sending me essay after essay that was virulently antisemitic. It was, to say the least, disturbing. I am no longer communicating with this woman.
My brother-in-law likes to remind me that after the Crusades so many Jews had been killed, that worldwide the Jewish population had been reduced to just 10,000 souls. That means that Jews tend to be related to one another. Jewish camps and youth groups created during the 20th century have created a way for Jewish teens to meet one another, not bound by strict geography.
That means that if I go to a synagogue in a town I have never been to before I will probably have a two-degrees of separation connection with at least a couple of the people at services.
So yesterday, I was worried about the people in Colleyville in a general way but also knowing that those four people also are probably closely tied to people I care about. Friends who had gone to rabbinical school with rabbi Cytron-Walker wrote about what a truly lovely human being he is.
When I was in third grade G'veret Cohn my teacher introduced us to the concept of
כל ישראל ערבין זה לזה
All Jews are responsible for one another
I probably read those words for the first time on a mimeographed printed on green paper, because G'veret Cohn liked to use colored paper for lessons she thought were really important for us to remember.
The man who took Jews hostage in a synagogue yesterday may have been mentally unstable as his family states. He may have been upset at the jail sentence given to a Pakistani woman who is serving time in Texas.
He didn't go to a government office to take hostages in protest. He didn't go to Walmart to take people hostage. He took hostages at a Texas synagogue near the airport.
This is an act of hate. We Jews, are for that man, and a whole lot of other people, a symbol for all that isn't right in their world.
now and forever.
So sad...I remember reading a Readers Digest Condensed book back when I was about 4th grade; in it, the young protagonist was jeered at by his peers simply because he was Jewish. I asked my mother why they did that and she really couldn't answer that, other than 'Some people are prejudiced against Jews.' It didn't make any sense to me then and it makes less sense now.
ReplyDeleteSending hugs.
Thank you Lisa. I was fortunate to have been brought up in that post WWII ecumenical bubble where people made an effort to reach out to those who worshipped differently and find the deep commonalities between religions.
ReplyDeleteMy parents had less pleasant experiences growing up. Many adults in my synagogue had changed their names when they signed up for the army so they would not be targeted by others. It was just a fact of life that you could be openly Jewish at home but you needed to be a bit careful in public. I never thought that those times of having to be careful would return.