Friday again! I swear, this was the fastest week EVER. So weird.
Nothing going
on this weekend, thankfully, so I’m planning on diving into my bag of library
books. Maybe finishing up some of the homeschool prep – I only have like 1000
more pages (that’s not an exaggeration) of Language Arts curriculum to scroll
through (I check for materials needed and skim to see what we’ll be doing, so I
at least have a basic idea), and then I’ll start in on some of the other subjects
(where I already have some ideas, so no big deal!). I’m actually enjoying all
of this, though it takes up a lot of time.
Here's what I
found interesting on the internet this week!
July
5, 2022 Highland Park, Illinois parade shooting news
Highland Park
is a ritzy community about 45-ish minutes away from me. Movies like Home
Alone and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were at least partially filmed
there. It’s a nice area.
It’s also around
30% Jewish. For reference, New York City, which has the reputation of being
super Jewish, is about 13% Jewish.
I was sitting
in the living room on Monday, waiting to head to my sister-in-law’s for a
picnic, when the news of the parade shooting started coming in, and my heart
sank – doubly so, because of where it was.
If you haven’t
read further about this, seven people were killed. Four of them were Jewish. While
I didn’t know these people, the Jewish community is incredibly small; odds are 100%
that people from my synagogue knew these folks (another point of reference for how small this world is: someone from my synagogue lost her brothers in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018). Two of the people killed were a
married couple; their two-year-old is now orphaned and will be raised by his
immigrant grandparents.
May the
memories of the victims be a blessing.
This has been
a really, really hard week around here, both for the area at large and doubly
so for the Jewish community, because…
Shliach:
Shooter tried entering Chabad house on Pesach
(Definition
time. A shliach or shaliach is the male half of a married Lubavitch couple who work
to bring Jews into their particular Hasidic fold. Think missionaries but their
outreach is only to other Jews. The female version is a shlucha. Chabad is
their Hasidic movement; they’re also known as Lubavitchers. There are Chabad
houses all over the world; if you have a giant menorah in your town at
Hanukkah, it’s probably set up and maintained by the local Chabad house. Pesach
is Passover.)
So the
Highland Park shooter, who was covered in face tattoos and very obviously not
Jewish (and that’s not to say there aren’t Jews with tattoos; there very much
are! And Jews come in all colors, all nationalities, there’s no
one-size-fits-all for Jews), walked into a Chabad house during the Passover
Seder. If you’ve seen pictures of him, you’ll likely agree that something about
the guy seemed…off. The rabbi asked him to leave, since he very, very obviously
wasn’t a member of the community. This Chabad house is located two blocks from
the site of the parade shooting.
Now. A note
about walking into Jewish spaces.
Jewish spaces
are incredibly welcoming even when you’re not Jewish, whether you’re there for
a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah or you’re merely curious. BUT – and this is a
HUUUUUUUUUUGE but – just walking in is a bad, BAD idea. Due to our long history
of being targeted for violence, we take security incredibly seriously. Security
is often one of the biggest costs in a synagogue or Jewish community center’s
budget. You can’t just walk in to a synagogue when there’s no service going on;
there’s always an alarm with a code on the front door and you either have to
know the code, or you have to press the button and speak to the person in the
office to get them to buzz you in. And every service has armed guards out
front. (Lemme tell you, it’s bizarre to attend, say, a Simchat Torah service, where
we’re dancing for joy with our love for Torah, and saying prayers for peace,
and then we walk out the doors past uniformed men with guns because people out
there want us dead.)
All that to
say, if you’re wanting to attend Jewish services (that you’re not specifically
invited to by someone already there) but the community doesn’t know you? Call. Email.
Contact the synagogue several weeks beforehand, so they know who you are, they
know why you’re there, and they can trust that you’re not a danger to them. It’s
awful that it has to be this way, but this is our reality. My own synagogue has
been vandalized in the past; I’ve attended one that has been pipe-bombed. We
Jews aren’t safe, not even when we’re just there to worship.
And this
week, we weren’t safe at a parade.
There are
some media outlets that are claiming the shooter had no political ideology. The
Jewish community is calling BS on that. First off, there are pictures of the
guy wearing a flag draped around his shoulder with a politician’s name, and
pictures of him at a political rally (I’ll give you one guess as to who). He
was known in white nationalist corners of the internet. He posted about hating
Jews, Black people, Asian people. He wasn’t a member of a particular group; he
was, instead, just a regular white nationalist. This wasn’t a random attack.
This
couldn’t happen anywhere: How coverage of the shooting failed Highland Park.
While these
mass shootings are common and do happen everywhere, this article shows the
shooter’s ideology (I am *so* disappointed in NPR’s coverage). Elad Nehorai is
brilliant and I’ve followed him on Twitter for years; Highland Park is the
place he grew up in, and his wife’s parents still live there. He makes the
point that we need to be talking about these dark, ugly corners of the internet
that allow this deadly white nationalism to grow and spread, because mass
murders like this are the inevitable result. We’ve created places for the worst
of us to feed the ugliness inside them and to encourage each other to spread
that ugliness. And the fact that we’re hardly even talking about it only makes
it worse.
And on a
different note…
Fewer
chickpeas mean cheap protein and hummus could be harder to find.
Heads up,
friends. The war in Ukraine and climate change have combined to deprive us of
the friendly little legume that makes up our hummus supply and many other
delicious recipes. Expect prices for what stock does exist to go up, up, up.
And that’s it
for this week! I’m heading into this Shabbat saddened, stressed out, and
frustrated that there are so many people out there who look upon my community
with hatred. It has nothing to do with us and everything to do with them, but
our society feeds it in a way that makes things less safe for us, and…it’s hard to deal with. It’s painful. It’s
exhausting. Do me a favor. If you hear antisemitism in your life? Call it out.
Shut it down. Watch the young people in your life and be aware of how they
spend their time on the internet. Our lives literally depend on it.
Wishing you
all a peaceful weekend. Shalom, friends. : )
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