“There are no words,” was the comment Dara Horn heard most often in response to the recent slaughter in Pittsburgh. But, she writes, that’s not quite accurate:
[T]here are words for this, entire books full of words: the books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths. News reports described these victims as praying, but Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this. . . .
When Ruth Mallinger [of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life congregation] was ninety-seven, she and ten other Jews were murdered in their synagogue. There are words for this, too, a Hebrew phrase for 2,500 years’ worth of people murdered for being Jews: kiddush hashem, death in sanctification of God’s name.
[But], in the old stories, those outside the community rarely helped or cared; our ancestors’ consolation came only from one another and from God. But in this horrific week, perhaps our old words might mean something new, [as evidenced by the response of] Americans of every background who inspire more optimism than Jewish history allows. . . . As George Washington vowed in his 1790 letter to a Rhode Island synagogue, America shall be a place where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Those words aren’t his. They’re from the Hebrew prophet Micah, on the shelves of every synagogue in the world.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/sunday/jews-pittsburgh-anti-semitism-prayer.html