On a shooting in a synagogue

After this weekend, I am thinking of ripples.

I started thinking of ripples yesterday morning. It was a Saturday, and I was in no particular hurry to do much of anything. It was rainy, and it was dreary, and it was cold. I was brushing my hair in my upstairs bathroom when I heard the pop-pop-pop.

The pops were loud.

I have heard gunfire exactly once before in my life–about a month ago, actually, when there was a (non-fatal) shooting at a nearby park one crisp Friday evening, during youth football practice.

This gunfire was different. Faster. But I knew what it was.

What I didn’t know was where it was coming from. Where does your mind go in a moment like that? I’m not sure–for me, my mind went many, many places.

Soon, though, the texts and calls poured in, and I learned that the shooting was occurring at a synagogue about a block and a half away from my house.

Then there was a new and different emotion. Exactly what was I listening to?

The noises lasted for what seemed a very long time–it was an hour and a half after they began that the police announced they had the gunman in custody. Some time after that, his details came out: name, address, background, social media posts. Earlier today, the names of the dead were released.

But ripples.

I’m not Jewish. I think of the work I’ve done with the Jewish Family and Children’s Community Service here in the city, and I think of how closely knit that community is, and all the good, strong things that its members do. Refugee resettlement. Immigration law. Translation services. Elder care. Free clinics.

I’m not Jewish. I think of the loss and the confusion and the terror following a hate crime against you, your family, your friends.

No, I’m not Jewish. I think of watching the Tree of Life’s congregation walk to service every Saturday morning, and how the congregation swells on certain high holidays, like recently during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and Sukkot, or for funerals.

I’m not Jewish.

Ripples.

Our neighborhood, these streets and these houses, the bakery and the coffeeshop and of course the places of worship, they have fingermarks on them now. Trauma is not something, I believe, that washes out. How long will every trip to work or school or the grocery store or anywhere, really, be stained by a momentary thought of those noises? The sirens? And the people huddled dazed along the sidewalk?

For how long, when I mention living in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, will that flicker some brief memory of yesterday, an uncomfortably intimate familiarity?

For how long will that man’s name be inextricably tied to this place and that synagogue, in an unfair and unholy matrimony?

Trauma stays. I know other things come, resilience and new ways of remembering, and eventually, maybe, a bit of joy in the birth of new things. And I have no doubt that those better fruits will arrive, and some may already be here.

But they will co-exist with this numb gnawing, the gut-emptiness of eleven of your neighbors gunned down in a building that is their community base and your designated poll station, of the families this shooting ripped a hole into, and of the sound.

I couldn’t watch the videos on the news last night because of the sound.

These moments after this terrible thing–so bitter and sour, so sweet and sick, like curdled milk.

Ripples.