Tags
Anti-Defamation League, Anti-semitism, Holocaust survivors, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, South Armagh, Tree of Life Synagogue, Trump
They say he yelled “All Jews must die,” when he stormed into the Tree of Life Synagogue on the Sabbath in Pittsburgh this morning. Armed with an assault rifle and three hand guns, he slaughtered 11 people within minutes, silencing forever their joyful prayers. I read that when Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the shooting, not quite a mile away from his synagogue, he ordered the doors locked. Although his congregation was terrified that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach – praying not for their own protection, but for the healing of others.
There are reports that a few hours before he went on his deadly rampage, the shooter posted on a social media site, ” HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, began as a relief-and-resettlement agency for Jewish refugees from Europe in the late 1800s. It has evolved to help displaced people from all over the world – the refugees, the persecuted, and the most vulnerable and desperate. The mission is one of goodness that represents those ideals that make America great:
Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.
Representing these values, HIAS is a target in today’s America, vilified for its vision and values.
The Attorney General of the United States announced earlier that the Justice Department intends to file hate crime and other charges against the accused shooter. He says the killings are “reprehensible and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.” He doesn’t say anything about the guns. He doesn’t say anything about the President of this country’s reprehensible and utterly repugnant rhetoric that daily fans the flames of bigotry and hatred in this country. We have seen the result, with neo-Nazis empowered to march in the streets of Charlottesville last year, chanting proudly that “Jews will not replace us,” and hate crimes in schools and bomb threats against Jewish churches increasing by almost 60% last year according to the Anti-Defamation League. Hate is blossoming in America.
The rest of us grapple with why 11 people died today in America, some of whom were children during the Holocaust, as we simultaneously brace ourselves for the likelihood of another shooting – sooner or later. We know, even we listen to the President use words like “unthinkable,” or “unimaginable” to describe the horror, that the execution of 11 people at prayer was also inevitable.
Where do we turn? Not to this American President, a man who does not know and has not learned how to speak to the country on such a tragic day, a man who has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the goodness and gravitas to lift us up in a time of grief, a man who condemned the atrocity as an unthinkable act, but nonetheless continued an unnecessary campaign rally hours later, where he made jokes about his hair. He ended the day by taking to Twitter to criticize LA Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, for taking out a pitcher in the seventh inning of Game 4 of the World Series. Meanwhile, 11 families are mourning.
Where do we turn?
Tonight, I am turning to a crossroads in Northern Ireland on January 5, 1976. It is dusk, and sixteen men are in a red van on their way home from work at the textile factory. Four of them get out at Whitecross, and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and which team will make it to the top of the First Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered, ripping apart the Reavey and O’Dowd famlies. Give this, the men aren’t surprised when they spot the red lamp swinging up ahead near the Kingsmills crossroads. Increased security would be expected following the previous day’s murders.
What words work for what happens next? The men are ordered out of the van by masked men with guns – this is not a British Army checkpoint. The gunmen have been waiting in the hedges and order the workers to line up and put their hands on the roof of the van. Frightened and vulnerable, they are asked to state their religion – Protestant or Catholic. There is only one Catholic among them, and when he is asked to identify himself, his Protestant workmates are terrified. In their dread, in their desire to protect him, they cover his hands with theirs.
It is this moment that is forever lodged in the corner of my heart that never left Northern Ireland. It is this moment – this split second of humanity – that Seamus Heaney recollects in his 1995 Nobel lecture
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA
All in vain. In less than a minute, ten of the men are gunned down and left to die on the side of a road slippery with rain and blood. Tit-for-tat.
The answers may never come for those left behind, nor justice. But what remains for us and what belongs to us, is the humanity on the side of a country road in South Armagh. So far away from that roadside, may we find it in America soon:
The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
