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WASHINGTON — I grew up in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. My parents taught Sunday school there. I learned to read Hebrew (sort of) there. I was a bar mitzvah there. My mother sewed a fancy velvet jumper for my little sister to wear there.
On Saturday morning — the Jewish sabbath — Jews at prayer were slaughtered at Tree of Life because and only because of who they were. It was possibly the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in this country’s history, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
My response is grief, of course, and the immediate realization that this horror is part of a larger pattern of mayhem and hatred in America and around the world. Churches, minority communities, gay nightclubs, politicians and journalists are threatened. We live in an age of assault rifles, pipe bombs and bone saws.
But I also have to admit — and am grieved to admit — that the mass murder at Tree of Life has shaken my perhaps naïve faith in this country, one that I began developing as a boy growing up in Pittsburgh.
The predominantly Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood has a bucolic-sounding name, and it fits. It is bounded on two sides by huge, wooded parks. The streets of mostly single-family homes are lined with lush trees; there is easy access to universities, civic institutions, playing fields and excellent schools.
I was reared in a Jewish paradise — a.k.a. America, my Promised Land. Not the one God gave us (though I love that one, too), but the one we chose for ourselves.
I http://goodforheavypeople.com/ was taught in Squirrel Hill that we were in the one country that was an exception to the history of the human race in general and the Jews in particular. Founded on Enlightenment principles of individuality, freedom, tolerance and justice, the United States was the only place besides Israel where Jews could live at one with their nation, unburdened by fear or confusion about identity.
Now I must wonder: If Pittsburgh isn’t safe for Jews, if Squirrel Hill isn’t safe, if the Tree of Life isn’t safe, what place is? Without diminishing anyone else’s suffering and death, it’s a sad fact that the Jews often are the canaries in the coal mine of social and political collapse. So, what does the bloodshed in the Tree of Life mean?
It is a sign that hatred of The Other is poisoning our public life. It’s always been a vivid strain in America, stimulated by the stress of immigrant waves, but one we have overcome time and again. Although we often honor it in the breach, our founding idea remains: that each person here is precious and born with unalienable rights. Now, political enemies in America deny each other’s humanity.
It is a sign that communications can foster something less than understanding. Social media allows us to be connected but also caricatured as propaganda in campaigns of dehumanizing division.
It is a sign that President Trump’s remorselessly cynical, jungle-style vision of how to conduct business and politics is ripping apart a society already under the stress of generational, demographic, technological, economic and social change.
In physics, the arc of a swinging pendulum diminishes over time. That has been my perhaps too-comfortable view of American history: that the swing of our political pendulum would always slow and find an equilibrium closer to a more perfect union.
In pursuit of that theory, as a reporter in Kentucky for six years and later across the country for decades, I chronicled the rise of the populist right as just another swing of the pendulum.
I covered Ku Klux Klan rallies, court-ordered busing, “dirty tricksters” of the right from Richard Nixon to Paul Manafort, and Trump rallies across the country. None of that shook my belief that the country could somehow harvest the energy of protest against “elites” for some eventual good.
Now I am not so sure. The pendulum seems to be swinging more wildly and widely every day. The whole machinery feels in danger of racing out of control.
But even as I begin to doubt that my Pittsburgh was the Promised Land, I remain guided and inspired by it. My late parents, Morton and Jean Fineman, were teachers who loved America even as they fretted about its shortcomings. They always reminded me that, in a democracy — and only in a democracy — people get the government they deserve, and that each new generation must work hard to win anew the rights and blessings that we take for granted.
I only hope that the martyrs of the Tree of Life — like those in Charleston, Charlottesville and other mass shootings motivated by hate — did not die in vain. America’s gifts are not easily preserved — even, I now know, in Squirrel Hill.
Howard Fineman is an NBC News analyst and a journalism lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
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