Last week was one of the most difficult weeks I’ve ever endured. I attended two vigils, one in downtown Greenville and one in the Daniel Chapel on campus, for the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately mass shootings have become fairly common in the 21st century, but none have affected me quite like this one. I feel real grief, as if the victims were friends or family. My heart aches like it does for my own grandparents, because many of the victims were middle-aged or elderly. And what’s worse, they were killed because they were Jews. In a horrible coincidence, we’re reading a book called Neighbors in one of my history classes. It depicts how the Polish inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941. With the approval of the German occupying forces, they rounded up the Jews and brutally killed some before herding the rest into a barn and burning them alive. Appalling as the recent synagogue shooting is, it seems even more atrocious in light of the Jedwabne massacre. The two events have become connected in my mind, so that I can only see an unbroken line of suffering and hatred. They have also become intertwined with the loss of my mother’s parents, which still hurts after all these years. Of course I’m not trying to equate my own pain with that of the victims’ families. My grandparents weren’t murdered; they died of “natural causes” like illness. But I want the families to know that I do feel a measure of their grief and that God too grieves for His slaughtered people.
At the campus vigil, one of my former professors shared the story of her relatives in Lithuania, who were murdered in the Holocaust. She reminded us that there are people today who praise the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews. Therefore we, both Jews sand Gentiles, must be united as a community. At the end we signed our names on two wooden Stars of David and sent them to the Tree of Life synagogue to show our solidarity with the mourning families. We also carried candles and wore a torn black ribbon on our clothes, in accordance with the Jewish tradition of rending garments. And we said Kaddish for the victims.