Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to be around the kind of dedicated, wise and learned Jewish people who made Tree of Life their spiritual home.
The people who were gunned down were the ones who arrived at the very beginning of synagogue services for the first “bet” of the first “barukh,” or Hebrew word for “blessed,” that begins the first prayer of the morning.
The people who arrive first are generally those who are older, as they are unburdened by children and indifferent to fashionable pursuits that would take them elsewhere on a Saturday morning. But most importantly, they are people who take special satisfaction in engaging with the full experience of prayer, study and kibitzing that is the communal centerpiece of observing and celebrating Shabbat, the Jewish sacred day of rest.
When I was about 15 and first developed a serious curiosity about Judaism, I would go to a small service in my synagogue library where I encountered the early morning crowd of mostly older folks. They impressed me as spirited, smart, opinionated and often quite learned. There was an older woman I’d seen around for years who loved to sing the prayers and who surprised me both with her feminism and her impressive knowledge of Hebrew. Another man was bombastic, pompous and rather self-righteous, but he wove compelling arguments from his thorough knowledge of the Torah.
One of my favorite people was a charming and naturally funny elderly man who shared his encyclopedic knowledge from his yeshiva days and once revealed to me the elusive answer to The New York Times crossword clue “Hebrew dry measure (omer).” Even at 15, I wanted some of what they had gathered from all of those years of coming to early morning services: the wisdom, perspective, insight and, most of all, the groundedness that comes from knowing Jewish tradition from the inside out.
As a rabbi, I have a special relationship with the people who arrive early to services at Congregation B’nai Israel. They’re the ones who see me as I really am when I first arrive at shul, before my caffeine has kicked in, and they appreciate me nonetheless. They are the people I can schmooze with about some of the arcane features of that day’s service — the extra Torah reading, the additions to the service, the ins and outs of the bar or bat mitzvah. They are also among the most patient and flexible people in the congregation, happily going along with whatever adjustments I make at the beginning of the service to speed things up or slow things down.
This all too brief description conveys a sense of the kind of people whose lives ended at Tree of Life on Saturday. As their biographies in The New York Times showed, they were people with full lives, some quite accomplished professionally and some who had witnessed the horrors of humanity; all joined together by their ongoing commitment to gather in a way that was noble, dignified and innocent.
When I heard the news of the shooting from a member of the community during Shabbat services on Saturday, I reacted not as a leader of a service, or as a pastor, but as someone who had come to pray. It was the middle of the service, and so I asked myself, “What should a group of Jewish people do?”
The answer was simple: Continue to pray. There is a way in which finishing the service is its own imperative. For one thing, there are moments of the service that are viewed as obligatory; interrupting those moments would leave people feeling even more internally disturbed than if we had simply stopped the service. But there is also a way in which ceasing to pray in the face of tragedy would silence our humanity, or at least the part of it that brought us to be with other people to give expression to our inner yearnings.
We began by chanting a simple prayer for healing, and together with a wordless melody and a space of meditative silence, created a sense of weighted energy that was palpable. We then continued meditating silently on an ancient cycle of prayers that takes us through the themes of spiritual strength, holiness, the sanctity of Shabbat, restoration, thanksgiving and peace, and then we repeated them out loud, singing as one voice. In doing so, we invoked God who “lifts up the fallen, and heals the sick.” We echoed the angelic choirs of the Bible who proclaim that the divine holiness fills the universe. We affirmed that people should receive the blessing of compassion, be aware of daily miracles and, most poignantly, receive from each other the love of kindness, charity, compassion, life and peace. We then finished the service with some concluding prayers and a prayer for mourners, after which we gathered for a beautiful communal lunch prepared by members of our community, some of them children who were proud to dish out bowls of homemade vegetarian chili and cornbread muffins.
This is what we do in our Jewish community, week after week. We gather, we pray, we wait for a minyan, we sit in silence, think, talk, sing and, finally, eat and schmooze. It is the formula for celebration, and it is a powerful container for grief.
This rhythm is also a form of resistance as we move from grief to action. The week before the shootings, we joined with 300 synagogues around the country in reflecting on how we can advocate for refugees as part of a National Refugee Shabbat sponsored by HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the same organization trolled by the Tree of Life gunman. As I anticipate this coming Shabbat, I can predict that there will be animated conversations about how we might mobilize yet again to combat the hateful speech that has become a hallmark of our nation’s mainstream discourse in the government and media, and the access to guns that makes this speech deadly. I am sure that people will discuss the connections between Tree of Life Synagogue, Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, all targets of white supremacist violence emboldened by government rhetoric and policy.
As with each Shabbat, I will anticipate who will show up and when, beginning with those who come early, those who arrive in time for the Torah service, and those who make it just before the end. While I will be grateful to everyone for joining together, I will harbor a unique sense of accountability to those who were there for every word of every prayer, song and reflection.
And so, I can only imagine the gaping void at Tree of Life and how that community will go on to heal and renew itself. New people will have to take on the role of arriving early, commenting on what’s to come in the service, and connecting in the wise, incisive and gentle manner of old Jews, or younger Jews with old souls.
If I were there, I would strive to be one of them.
Justin David is rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel, Northampton.