Now that it's a new day and I'm slightly less inarticulate with grief and fear and rage:
They had gathered to celebrate a bris. In a broader sense, to celebrate the birth of a child. Don't know if you've ever been to a bris or a baby naming ceremony, but it's a deeply moving experience. I described one I attended to my therapist once; she said it gave her goosebumps.
Because here's the thing, the knowledge standing in the room like another person, at a ceremony celebrating a living Jewish child: that child is a miracle. Not in a religious sense--in the sense of if various civilizations had had their way, that child would never have been born.
The earliest known textual reference to the Jewish people is the Merneptah stele, from around 1200 BCE. It says "Israel is utterly destroyed, his seed is gone."
(It is customary, when hearing of this inscription, to munch a bagel and mutter, "Surprise, motherfucker.")
(It is customary, when hearing of this inscription, to munch a bagel and mutter, "Surprise, motherfucker.")
The Babylonians tried to wipe out Israelite/Jewish identity. So did the Romans. 2000 years of Christian pogroms and other genocidal activities. The Shoah.
I read a paper, years back, by a team of researchers that study population growth and dynamics. They estimated that, based on the population of Judea under the Roman occupation, there should be over 300 million Jews alive today. Basically the population of the United States.
Instead, there are 14 million.
I don't know how many people know that stat, know the actual numbers, but I think everyone has a SENSE of it. So when you're at a baby naming or a bris, there's a sense of, for every person in the room, there are supposed to be 20 more.
And I'm not talking about Jews who don't really affiliate. I mean *people who are not alive.*
So it's an intensely poignant experience. And, like, I have usually zero maternal instinct for babies. Plenty for animals, and some for adult humans, and even non-adult humans once they can carry on a conversation, but babies unnerve me.
And yet, each time I've been to one, I feel this sense of investment in the baby. It's, I guess, a community thing, a tribal thing--the sense that through this child, the community goes on. There will be someone who remembers us.
Perhaps there are 20 missing people for each person standing in the room, but a beautiful, living child has just been born, in defiance of all that death. We go on.
And that child at the Tree of Life synagogue should have grown up to remember Cecil and David Rosenthal. Bernice Simon and Sylvan. Joyce Feinberg. Richard Gottfried. Jerry Rabinowitz. Daniel Stein. Melvin Wax. Irving Younger. Rose Mallinger. May their memories be a blessing.
Obviously this would be horrific regardless of when it happened or what was going on. But for it to happen at the celebration of a baby is an especially cruel irony.
And also, remember, that the shooter was targeting congregations who'd participated in the HIAS refugee Shabbat. Jewish congregations studying how to protect the vulnerable. To use the Jewish experience of vulnerability, of being refugees, to help others.
(Deleted Tweet about Rose Mallinger being a Holocaust survivor, since that was apparently misreported.)
The shooter, and everyone like him, may want to stop the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, of repairing the world, of pursuing justice, of sheltering the stranger, but it's not going to work. It never has.
Merneptah and his dynasty are dust. The people of Israel live. The shooter will be dust eventually, too, and the Jewish people will go on celebrating births, pursuing justice, welcoming the stranger, and repairing the world.
