October 27th, 2018

It's been a month, I guess I should say something.  Saturday, October 27th, 2018 there was a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, PA.  Although I have been told there aren't, it seems like there are more and more of these incidents.  This one was quite literally too close to home.

At like 10am Marisa had returned home from a trip out for groceries.  The boy was playing with my sister, who had come in to celebrate my 50th.  I was in our room watching the news when I heard what sounded like a lot of sirens out in the street.

I checked out the window and saw quite a bit of emergency traffic, as well as officers in SWAT gear.  I also saw a very harried individual walking up and down the street talking on his cell.  I eavesdropped a little bit and heard him say there was an active shooter at Tree Of Life.  That congregation is a block and a half up our street.  It is likely Marisa was arriving home just as the shooter was entering the building.

I found all the folks in our house, checking to make sure nobody was outside.  I spent the next hour or so on and off the porch trying to see anything.  I ran a very boring Facebook Live video from our porch, but there wasn't much to see.

I texted a couple of friends.  The reality of Squirrel Hill congregations is that anyone could really be at any service on any weekend.  The week before there had been a Bar Mitzvah at Tree of Life and many of our friends and their children were there.  This week that turned out to not be the case and everyone I messaged was either at home or (about to be) locked into another facility.

I got a text from work putting all of campus on lockdown and cancelling all of Homecoming which happened to be that day.  There was a flurry of group texts trying to decide what to do with a scheduled opera, scenery strike, and mainstage install.  Somewhere in the middle of that conversation campus lifted the lockdown and so the decision was made that we would lose the opera - there wasn't time to put it together again - but go on with the other calls as scheduled.  That lasted maybe 20 minutes while the students involved made it clear they were not in a place to be able to move on and in short order everything for Saturday and Sunday was cancelled.

Somewhere in there Marisa got a call from the balloon vendor saying they couldn't get to our house.  That night was supposed to be my 50th birthday party and we were now wondering whether we should go on with that or not.  In either case we would be doing it without balloons.  That seemed like a reasonable decision.  Our street was blocked well into the afternoon.

We couldn't have gotten out of our driveway if we had wanted to.  There were people coming to the party from out of town and so we decided that spending the night with friends would be better for everyone anyway.  We messaged the whole cohort that we would be going ahead with a more subdued gathering.  People seemed to agree that was a reasonable decision.

The street opened up another block by 6pm and our guests arrived for our gathering.  We held off on any decorations and just kept each other company.  For most of the group I think it was a pleasant diversion.  Some of the guests came a little late so that they could attend a vigil that had been set up at Forbes & Murray that evening.  For a few that were closer to the community I don't think it was much fun.  Mostly they huddled together texting with others as the details started to leak out.

Sunday afternoon we went with some friends to the interfaith service at Soldiers and Sailors in Oakland.

It was a pretty big gathering. There were many public officials and many religious leaders from Pittsburgh.  The thing I probably remember most was the leader of the Pittsburgh Islamic community offering all kinds of assistance, and reminding us that this was the same assistance that community had been offered by Pittsburgh Jews after 9/11.

Monday things started to wind back to normal, except it really wasn't.  Wilkins was still closed from Murray to Shady.  Informal shrines started to appear at each spot where the road was closed.  There was one right up the street from us.

The funerals started soon after that.  We went to Irv Younger's service at Rodef Shalom.  There had been widely attended services the day before.  This one had a lot of people there, but not as many luminaries as the day before.  One of the folks the first day had some connection to the Steelers.  Ben Rothlesberger was there, and dozens of TV cameras, and many, many police officers.  Marisa knew Irv a little from around services, so it seemed appropriate to go to that service.  Toward the end of the memorial Irv's son announced that Jesus would save all of us, and that his father knew that and would have wanted us to know.  So there's that.

The next day the President came to town.  I went to work.  For me it felt better to stand my post as it were.  For some of our friends it was decidedly different.  I saw many of them on MSNBC as protests.  There was still an enormous media presence and more than what you would be used to seeing in terms of law enforcement.  Some guy flipped out on a bus I was on - nothing related to this, just b-flat wigging out - and when he got off the bus there was a TV camera on him within 30 seconds and within 2 minutes there must have been a half dozen Police.

The following Saturday morning we attended a joint Shabbat Saturday service at Beth Shalom.  There were more people there than one would typically see at a high holiday service.  I don't remember much beyond the regular service mechanics.  There was one speech that talked about gun control, but mostly I just remember community building.

It took about another week to finish processing the scene and open the street up to traffic.  The shrine at Wilkins and Shady was even bigger than the one closer to our house.

A couple of days later they moved most of this into the lobby at Tree of Life.  That was the lobby where a few years ago at a Yom Kippur service I passed out and needed to be taken away in an ambulance.  This was way, way closer to home than I have really discussed here.  There's probably a lot more to say, but I don't really have the words.  Thanks to everyone that reached out.