HISTORICALLY, PROGRESS (CHANGE FOR THE BETTER) IS KNOWN TO INCH TWO STEPS FORWARD ONE BACK

“American Jews Know How This Story Goes”

The way forward from Pittsburgh is written in our prayer books.

By Dara Horn

Ms. Horn is the author of five novels.

• Nov. 2, 2018

Image

The final resting place for Rose Mallinger, one of 11 killed in the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue.CreditCreditJeff Swensen/Getty Images

“There are no words.”

This was what I heard most often last weekend from those who were stunned by the news: 11 people were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — believed to be the largest massacre of Jews on American soil. But there are words for this, entire books full of words: the books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths. News reports described these victims as praying, but Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this.

When I told my children what had happened, they didn’t ask why; they knew. “Because some people hate Jews,” they said. How did these American children know that? They shrugged. “It’s like the Passover story,” my 9-year-old told me. “And the Hanukkah story. And the Purim story. And the Babylonians, and the Romans.” My children are descendants of Holocaust survivors, but they didn’t go that far forward in history. The words were already there.

The people murdered in Pittsburgh were mostly old, because the old are the pillars of Jewish life, full of days and memories. They are the ones who come to synagogue first, the ones who know the words by heart. The oldest victim was Rose Mallinger, 97.

The year Ms. Mallinger was born was the tail end of the *mass migration of more than two million Eastern European Jews to America between 1881 and 1924.   (Both my mother and father arrived during that time period as tots.) Many brought with them memories of 'pogroms', of men invading synagogues with weapons, of blood on holy books. (As a child, I remember feeling horrified while listening to both of my grandmas relating terrifying experiences of hiding in the bushes during 'progroms', which they and their neighbors had endured in Poland and Russia, compelling them, as young adults, to make the heart rendering decision to pack up their children, leaving extended family and friends behind upon deciding to emigrate to the safe harbor of America, where, though poverty stricken, my mother and father were raised and educated to believe that this nation, which welcomed the tired and poor, served as a safe haven to any who had mustered the courage to seek asylum from heartless abuse.) This wasn’t shocking, because it was already described in those books. (Our prayerbooks)  On Yom Kippur in synagogue, these Jews read the stories of rabbis murdered by the Romans, including Rabbi Hanina ben Tradyon, who was wrapped in a Torah scroll set aflame. Before dying, he told his students, “The parchment is burning, but the letters are flying free!”