I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die.
During the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) we recite a pietistic poem that affirms God as an all-knowing judge and, in effect, executioner. The text reads, in part:
I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die, but not just through our liturgy. To grow up as the child of a rabbi is to know death closely. Its pace of being varies — frantic when it is close at hand, heavy and still when it lurks as a mere idea — but I am always aware of its presence. It is the part of congregational life that reaches out from the telephone and forces you to confront it. Nobody calls the rabbi at home if a baby is born in the early hours of the morning, or if a couple becomes engaged to be married on a Sunday afternoon; those calls wait and go to the temple switchboard during business hours. Phone calls about impending or just-transpired death wake up the house from the night. And so in real time and real emotion, disoriented in the dark, with sleep and grief in my eyes, I have always known:
Who died at the end stages of blood cancer, who by choking, who by accidental ingestion of a death-cap mushroom, who in a car crash, who in a plane crash, who after stepping through a plate glass window, who from galloping pneumonia, who from AIDS, who in service to his country, who in a mass shooting at an office building, who by suicide, who because of an undiagnosed heart defect: I know.
I learned to swim before I could walk because a few months before I was born, my father buried a two-year-old who had drowned in a swimming pool. My parents were determined that would not happen to me. I can’t have been more than eight years old when they made sure that I knew why. The dead boy’s siblings were more or less my age; and my parents explained: “Eve and Jonathan used to have an older brother.” It was matter-of-fact. Just like that, as if water safety could stave off the death that I already knew was all around us.
And so yesterday as my friends began to ask me how I felt about the synagogue shooting, I didn’t really know what to say. I don’t like to admit it, but I was sanguine. I know all the horrible ways a Jew can die; and in that deathscape, Judaism is just one more pre-existing condition of life, just one more unreasoning reason that can kill a person. It is a tragedy and it has uniquely horrifying features; but like any other fatality, being shot in a synagogue by an anti-Semite is just one more cause of death in the litany that I know by heart.
I have grown up privy to threat assessments and changing security measures. Snipers positioned in the dome, transforming it from a scale model of the Hagia Sofia floating above the city into a camouflaged, potential air raid? Of course. Federal agents standing at the back of the sanctuary? Go see what the lapel pin of the day is. Metal detectors, package scanners, screening off the wrought iron gates so that malicious passers-by can’t see the children playing in the courtyard? A revisionist architecture of contemporary Jewish life. Judaism can be fatal. And so, like teaching his child to swim so she doesn’t die by drowning, the rabbi fortifies his synagogue so his congregants do not die by being Jewish. Some children will always drown and some guns and bombs will always slip past security measures, no matter how fierce.
I know death too well to be surprised. It has been my most constant and reliable companion. I may feel it lying dormant but I know it is there, waiting to wake and ring the telephone or spill tears in the living room or at our kitchen table. This week, you have seen what I have already known.