Fineman grew up in Pittsburgh, in the community of Tree of Life Synagogue. Early today when he was talking on MSNBC I could hear the heartbreak in his voice.
His column is called Shaking My Faith in America and on the Times website the subtitle is The bloodshed in the Tree of Life synagogue is a sign that hatred of The Other is poisoning our public life.
In his third and fourth paragraphs, he offers these words:
My response is grief, of course, and the immediate realization that this horror is part of a larger pattern of mayhem and hatred in America and around the world. Churches, minority communities, gay nightclubs, politicians and journalists are threatened. We live in an age of assault rifles, pipe bombs and bone saws.
But I also have to admit — and am grieved to admit — that the mass murder at Tree of Life has shaken my perhaps naïve faith in this country, one that I began developing as a boy growing up in Pittsburgh.
There is so much more.
Here are just two more paragraphs:
I was taught in Squirrel Hill that we were in the one country that was an exception to the history of the human race in general and the Jews in particular. Founded on Enlightenment principles of individuality, freedom, tolerance and justice, the United States was the only place besides Israel where Jews could live at one with their nation, unburdened by fear or confusion about identity.
Now I must wonder: If Pittsburgh isn’t safe for Jews, if Squirrel Hill isn’t safe, if the Tree of Life isn’t safe, what place is? Without diminishing anyone else’s suffering and death, it’s a sad fact that the Jews often are the canaries in the coal mine of social and political collapse. So, what does the bloodshed in the Tree of Life mean?
For many of Jewish heritage, there have to be some doubts right now. If the President, with Jewish grandchildren, cannot recognize the threat his rhetoric presents to those of Jewish faith or heritage, if he cannot recognize that the son who bears his name regularly retweets things with memes that are clearly anti-Semitic, if he cannot realize the horror is unleashing, it is totally reasonable for those of us of Jewish background might question our faith in America.
My family came to this country from Poland and Lithuania, starting in 1862 and ending in 1906. They came believing this was a place where they would be safe from persecution because of their religion. When I look through my extended family, full of lawyers and teachers and judges and businessmen and social workers and stockbrokers, in some sense we were able to rise from our immigrant roots and participate in the American dream.
But all of us are shaken after this worst atrocity against American Jews in our history. And yet after all this the President chooses to attack by name a prominent American Jew who criticizes him, Bill Kristol.
And yet those of us of Jewish origin somehow remain incredibly optimistic. We have somehow survived despite millennia of persecution. We most often speak up for others who face the kinds of discrimination that are so much a part of our collective history.
So let me offer Fineman’s last paragraph, which has within it the inevitable Jewish optimism:
I only hope that the martyrs of the Tree of Life — like those in Charleston, Charlottesville and other mass shootings motivated by hate — did not die in vain. America’s gifts are not easily preserved — even, I now know, in Squirrel Hill.
Go read the entire column.
You will be glad you did.