In my shul, in my synagogue, I have an escape plan. What would I do? Where would I go? How would I hide? If someone came in with a gun while we are praying.
Last night, with not context, my sister told me that she had a hiding place in case someone came into out home to attack us. “We’re jews, we can never be to careful” was her argument.
A week before the Pittsburg shooting my teacher asked us if we were ever afraid to leave our school buildings because there is a logo with a torah on most of our doors.
In front of the school that my siblings go to there is a sign with the name of the institution on it. The sign is white and the letters are black. That’s it. There is no big, impressive, welcoming banner. You might chalk that up to a bad advertising department or a lazy graphic designer but the truth is so much worse. Parents were concerned because the school is on a busy street so now a sign that was once big and colorful is black and white. Now, no one driving past will know that it’s a Jewish institution.
It’s difficult to describe what praying in a synagogue feels like. The best I can do is that for the hours or minutes that you are there nothing but yourself, your thoughts, and your community matter. For those precious moments you are an individual with individual thoughts between you and God but you are an individual within a community that surrounds you. For those precious moments you wrap yourself in the words of the prayers and think about the things that are important to you. They are moments of peace and sometimes pain that are simultaneously solitary and shared. They are moments of beauty and thought that don’t just leave when you leave the building.
Despite all of this every time I walk into a synagogue, whether it’s mine or I am visiting a different community, those questions seep into my head and once they start they don’t stop. What would I do? Where would I go? How would I hide?
In my own shul the answers a supply closet. At School the answer is hopefully I can make it to the bathroom. In my cousins shul I would climb out the window.
Some people describe Jews as “traumatized” sometimes I argue that we are not “traumatized”but prepared. The truth is that both sound crazy.
Today for the 2nd time in 6 months American Jews were murdered because the were Jewish.
Tonight my family should have been putting away our pesach dishes. Instead we spent an hour making sure my grandfather wasn’t the unnamed person injured today.
But as Rabbi Goldstein said today, in the face of absolute horror, “what happened will not break us” and so I’m here, in my kitchen, in my pajamas, at midnight, putting away my pesach dishes.
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