Bentley Addison

A student of Sociology, Political Science and Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University

I’ve been noticing something recently. Each Shabbat when I go to religious services, I unconsciously choose a seat where I have full view of the door. I find my eyes drifting from the siddur in my hands to the fragility of the wooden door frame in front of me.

The room that was once so special to me, that I long to pray in each week, has turned into a room in which I cannot stop daydreaming of my own death by white supremacy.

I used to enjoy closing my eyes, hearing singing voices cascading over mine, feeling united with the others in the room. Now, closing my eyes is just a guarantee that I’ll be a moment too late when it comes time to flee or fight for my life.

Pittsburgh showed me that our houses of worship are by no means impermeable to the violent far right or to violence.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the very conspiracy theory that the Tree of Life assailant used to justify his murders has been furthered by the sitting president of the United States. Multiple times, Trump has invoked the imagery of a conspiracy of immigrant caravans paid to attempt infiltration of the American border to radically transform the U.S. The man who murdered 11 of my siblings in Pittsburgh made this dogwhistle explicit, targeting Jews in this community in large part because of HIAS’s relentless advocacy and work on behalf of largely Muslim refugees in this country.

The wide-ranging nature of these conspiracy theories and hatreds also scares me. It may sound strange, but we can’t make the Tree of Life massacre just about anti-Semitism, because that makes massacres like this much harder to fight. Inherent to the shooter’s logic and to the logic of white supremacists like him is a virulent hatred for Muslims and people of color.

Mosques and Black churches are often targets of the same style of massacre, and we’ll all continue to be unsafe if we don’t commit to understanding the hatred that confronts all of us and eradicating it- together.

I’ve been noticing something else as well. Each time I visit a new synagogue, especially during High Holidays, police cars line the parking lot, and an officer or two waits inside the shul’s foyer. For many Jews, this is unremarkable; the understanding is that police keep synagogues safe.

But for myself and many other Black people walking through the foyer of the synagogue, the first thought isn’t of newfound security. It’s of an endless list of people turned to hashtags in mere minutes, endless stories of miscarriages of justice, endless stories of our siblings slain by police, and the knowledge that we could be next.

Pittsburgh didn’t actually change much. White supremacy wasn’t born that day, and the physical safety of Jews, by and large, wasn’t fundamentally shifted on October 27, 2018. What changed was our awareness of the problem that white supremacy poses to our safety, and our understanding that something must be done about it.

And strangely enough, this is what gives me some semblance of hope. Pittsburgh was a watershed in Jews’ understanding that we’ll only defeat white supremacy by allying with other groups endangered by it. If this sentiment can grow and expand, we will, one day, be safe.