1/ A personal reflection on the Pittsburgh massacre, a week on
(short thread)
(short thread)
2/ The Tree of Life synagogue is a lot like the one I attend with my family every week. Similar denomination and by all appearances a similar outlook. Like my synagogue, it runs a refugee outreach programme (as it happens I'm spending tomorrow afternoon at ours)
3/ I usually turn my phone off from Friday evening to Saturday evening for the sabbath. So when I turned it on last week, like many Jewish people I saw the horror which had unfolded.
4/ I didn't want to say anything about politics on the day because it didn't seem the right time and, honestly, it didn't seem to be the right thing either - the murders seem to be by a guy acting alone, for his own racist purposes
5/ I don't know about cause and effect. Who knows if this guy would have done what he had done if not for Trump's extremism?
But.
But.
6/ There was something about Robert Bowers' social media which caught many people's eyes - he tweeted about @HIASrefugees. The Tree of Life synagogue has a programme helping refugees. Apparently HIAS has been a target of others on the far right newyorker.com/news/our-colum… 
7/ This got me thinking, as I sometimes do, why I love going to my synagogue. This may sound weird to people but I don't believe in god. I haven't for a long time. But I love being part of a religious institution.
8/ For me, it's to do with being part of of a *moral community*. I'm not saying at all that other kinds of community can't be moral, but I think religious communities can be good at that - institutions where the primary focus is being good people, making the community better
9/ I am a human rights lawyer and activist and I see human rights as a key bulwark against extremism (see theguardian.com/commentisfree/…). But increasingly, I see that a world based on human rights needs so much more than rules and principles
10/ We desperately need human rights to be "in the small places", as Eleanor Roosevelt said. It is about how we treat each other. And no amount of rules will make us treat each other better - it has to be about moral communities where incentive structures are set up to do that
11/ And I think that's where the connection to Trump is important. In a way it's not about his policies, though they are in many ways repugnant, it's about his outlook. About the kind of moral communities which his movement is formed of and motivates. As David Remnick put it...
12/ With politics we sometimes forget that ultimately they - like human rights - aren't just about grand ideas, shaming, changing the world - they are about how we behave towards each other. I think you can tell a lot about an institution from how people are treated in it
13/ Tree of Life just sounds like a wonderful place, just the right kind of religious community which I would want to be a part of. Not obsessed with dogma and shaming but outward facing, idealistic, a place where people are treated as ends not means
14/ I think that's what bothered Bowers. And in a way it probably bothers Trump too. The kind of moral community which is Kryptonite to Trump's intolerant egoism.
15/ I can't leave this without mentioning UK Labour. I will say no more than this. I think it is a useful litmus test of how an institution is working as a moral community to look at how people treat each other within it.
16/ I don't really know how to end this. Perhaps just to say that I hope that what happened at the Tree of Life may motivate us to focus on what's important, to build moral communities, to put kindness and open-heartedness at the centre of our institutions.
17/ And I hope they make it through this. I'm not sure I could. /end
Oh no I said short thread
