Joshua Safran

Opinion contributor

One of the things I’ve cherished most about being an American is the ability to walk around as a Jew without terrorists actively plotting to kill me. Over the years I’ve taken this freedom for granted, even while recognizing that it’s a luxury and a privilege that arguably only America has been able to provide. As any readily identifiable Jew traveling abroad will tell you, most of the rest of the world is stuck in the Dark Ages by comparison.

The last time I was in France, in the fall of 2001, I was routinely confronted by strangers yelling, “Juif, Juif!” (Jew, Jew!). On Yom Kippur, a man hurled a piece of rebar through the stained glass window of the little stone synagogue in Bastia, Corsica. The hunk of metal just missed my wife’s head. And when the services were over, we were forced to walk a gauntlet of shoving, spitting men shouting racist anti-Jewish slurs.

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During the holiday of Sukkot, in October 2001, we were forced to evacuate the Abravanel synagogue in Paris when a man attempted to drive his truck through the front doors. The police thought he had a bomb under a tarp in the back of the truck. Half an hour later, we were given the all-clear with the good news that there was no bomb; he was just trying to run Jews over. None of these events made the news, and our French friends dismissed them as business as usual.

This was more than a decade ago, but the situation appears to have gotten much worse since then. In 2014, the same synagogue was besieged by a mob chanting, “Death to Jews.”

An armed-guard pat-down just to pray

Participating in Jewish spiritual life outside of the United States gives me the same combination of dread and annoyance I get from a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint. Passports must be presented, photographs scrutinized, bags and pockets molested, strange questions asked. Abroad, going to synagogue is not the same as getting into synagogue. Actually being admitted for prayer involves a tense dance with armed guards who must be convinced that you aren’t there to kill Jews.

In the 1990s, when I was in Costa Rica and Spain, I didn’t do the dance well enough and spent the rest of Shabbat wandering around town asking myself, “Do I look like a terrorist?” In Rome, Istanbul and Rabat, Morocco, I found that faxing your passport ahead of time was the only way to ensure a peek at the inside of a synagogue.

The one destination where a trip to the synagogue does not necessarily involve a stranger’s sweep of your inner thigh is Israel. But if armed guards are not covering all the synagogue doors in the Jewish state, it’s only because the terrorists there have figured out they can get higher Jewish body counts at schools, shopping malls and restaurants. The country is everywhere vigilant, slightly flexed, tensing for the next punch. You can feel it in the handguns on the hips of bus drivers and the rifles on the backs of young women.

It is sometimes the hardest place in the world to be a Jew. At the Temple Mount, I once had an Israeli policeman warn me that if he so much as saw my lips move silently he would arrest me. Jewish prayer in Islamic Waqf jurisdiction is a crime. Such is the Jewish state at times.

We American Jews have been left with an understandable sense of American exceptionalism. We come from a free country, a place where you can pray if you want to, wherever you want to, whenever you want to, and no one can or will do anything about it. As Jews, we were guaranteed religious liberty by none other than George Washington, in his 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, and we danced with the Torah, firm in our faith in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. From 1790 to today, American Jews had a good 229 year run of religious freedom.

Land of the faithful living less free

On Oct. 27, 2018, an accused terrorist shouted, “All Jews must die!” and murdered 11 people, wounding seven more, during Shabbat morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Jewish communities across America, including my own in Portland, Oregon, held their breath. Was this a one-off aberration? Or did this portend a new direction for the land of the free?

We received our answer last week on the last day of Passover, when another gunman shot up another synagogue, this time at the Chabad of Poway, near San Diego. According to the accused terrorist's manifesto, he was seeking to send Jews to where they belong, namely, to hell. One murdered and three wounded this time.

Jewish communities responded quickly, raising funds for the victims and preaching unity, renewed faith and further partnerships with non-Jewish communities. But if you look at the new budgets being rolled out for the organizations, community centers and synagogues serving the approximately 2.2% of American adults who identify as Jewish, the newest line item is for additional security.

The Portland Jewish community, along with 39 other communities across the United States, is now bringing on a director of community security, and armed guards are being posted at synagogue doors.

This week, our community held an event for those affected by the Poway synagogue shooting. Security personnel patrolled the perimeter of the Jewish community center, and attendees had to present their identification at a checkpoint where they were screened by armed guards. We could have been in Europe.

“Is this the new normal?” I asked a rabbi friend.

He nodded. And just like that, we can no longer walk around as Jews without constant reminders that terrorists are actively plotting to kill us.

I’m told that lifting weights builds muscles by causing thousands of tiny tears that the body then heals by adapting the muscle fiber to lift heavier loads. By sad analogy, maybe all of this trauma will ultimately cause us to build stronger and safer communities. But from now on, American Jews will be everywhere slightly flexed, tensing for the next punch. We’ll be more like our Israeli cousins. Stronger, more vigilant and less free.

America might yet be a bastion of democracy, but for Jews, it is no longer truly exceptional.

Joshua Safran is an author, attorney and advocate for survivors of domestic abuse and the wrongfully imprisoned. He is a board member of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Portland, Oregon.