The Places We Thought Were Safe

 There is no justification for walking into a place of worship with a weapon. No cause, no grievance, no theory—nothing—can make sense of that kind of cruelty. To kill people in the middle of prayer is not rebellion, it is desecration. It is not rage—it is rot. The kind that begins in the soul and spreads through history, disguised as ideology.

On October 27, 2018, a man entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. Eleven people were murdered. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history. And yet, somehow, it wasn’t surprising.

The world had been inching toward this—subtly, then shamelessly. Hatred no longer hid. It posted. It shouted. It ran for office. It wore suits and badges and usernames and smirks. And when it pulled the trigger that morning, it did so with the confidence of someone who had already been told: yes, you belong here too.

The Tree of Life. Etz Chaim. A name that echoes through both scripture and longing. A symbol of connection, rootedness, memory. What do you do when someone walks into a symbol and tries to set it on fire?

This wasn’t just murder. It was an interruption. A severing. A forced dissonance in a place built on continuity. Synagogues, like all sacred spaces, are not just about belief. They are about rhythm—rituals that remind people who they are, and who they’ve been. What happens when violence punctures that rhythm? When grief becomes part of the liturgy?

The shooter had posted anti-Semitic hate online. He believed Jews were orchestrating a global invasion through refugees. A conspiracy theory, recycled and dressed in digital clothing. This wasn’t madness. It was indoctrination. He acted on a logic constructed by centuries of scapegoating, sharpened by platforms, and tolerated by silence.

White supremacy doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it whispers into the algorithms. Sometimes it jokes on national television. Sometimes it folds itself into policies, borders, slogans. But its end is always the same: erase the “other.”

And still, in the aftermath, the community gathered. People showed up. They wept, yes—but they also resisted. In candlelight. In song. In names spoken out loud. Joyce. Richard. Rose. Jerry. Cecil. David. Bernice. Sylvan. Daniel. Irving. Melvin. People whose lives were made of routines and loves and imperfections. People who did not die as symbols, but as themselves.

I think about sacredness—not as something handed down, but something chosen. We sanctify places with our presence, our prayers, our persistence. And we keep them holy by refusing to let violence define them.

Some say: don’t politicize tragedy. But there is no neutral ground in the face of hate. To be silent is to be complicit. The luxury of abstraction does not exist for the hunted.

The Tree of Life will never be the same. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe sacredness is not in what remains untouched, but in what refuses to vanish. In the voices that rise again. In the doors that stay open. In the rituals that continue—even with trembling hands.

Because even when the branches are scorched, the roots remember. And the tree, impossibly, begins to grow again.