Colleyville

In “Everything Foreseen Is Also Unforeseen,” the story I published for the High Holidays this last year (and which is now available in the revised and updated collection of my stories, To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011-2021), I divided the story into three segments, each with its own narrator, and ended the first two sections with two of those narrators’ descriptions of the same event. The external details were the same—where it took place, who was present, at what time of day it occurred, etc. It was, after all, the same event they were describing! But what I hoped to convey was how two people can perceive the same incident wholly differently not because they can’t remember if it was cloudy or sunny out or what color jacket the other person was wearing, but because each individual sets the incident into the context of a different life and so brings a different universe of facts, emotions, and history to the table, so to speak, when attempting to decipher even the most ordinary event, in this case something an outside observer would consider wholly ordinary: two men taking a walk around Meadow Lake near the old World’s Fair site in Queens and talking about their fathers.

I was thinking about that story as I read about the events of this last weekend in Texas. Like most Americans, I’m sure, I hadn’t ever heard of Colleyville and wouldn’t have known there was a synagogue there. I don’t know the rabbi personally or even by reputation. Even now it seems like a strangely out-of-the-way place for anyone to choose as a place from which to pressure the federal government into doing some specific thing. Nor are the now-deceased hostage taker’s motives at all clear. Was he so poisoned by his own anti-Semitic worldview that he actually imagined that, since Jews rule the world,  the four he took captive could just phone up the feds and order them to release a woman convicted years ago of attempting to murder American servicemen? Or, even more bizarrely, did he imagine that he could scare his hostages into placing a call to the Elders of Zion and asking them to order the federal government to release a woman convicted of the attempted murder of American soldiers and sentenced to a cool eighty-six years in prison? Did he think all Jews have access to the space lasers? I suppose we won’t find that out now. Or perhaps when some of the details that remain unknown, or at least unpublicized, become known—how the man got from New York to Texas, who financed his journey, why he chose that specific congregation to attack, why he wished to speak on the phone specifically with Angela Buchdahl, the rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan, or what his specific connection to Aafia Siddiqui, the woman whose release he wished to bring about, was—when some of those details become known, perhaps the larger story will clarify. More likely, though—and by far—is that the incident will fade from the front page quickly enough and be waved away by most as another crazy act carried out by a crazy person crazily hoping to pressure the federal government into doing something no normal person would imagine it ever would do. End of story. Don’t irrational people do irrational things all the time? Why is that even newsworthy?

Of course, Jews across the country (and the world) responded to the story entirely differently. To FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Matt DeSarno, who informed the world that the FBI did not view this incident as “specifically related to the Jewish community,” it was hard to know what to say. Did Special Agent DeSarno imagine that Malik Akram was just driving around Texas randomly looking for some folks to take hostage and—presumably because half the locals having breakfast at MacDonald’s were probably themselves armed (he was in Texas, after all) and the local Buddhist temple was closed on Saturday morning, he randomly hit on the idea of taking some Jews hostage in their own synagogue? And does he imagine too that this criminal act directed at Jewish innocents was completely unrelated to the extreme and unapologetic anti-Semitism of the specific individual he was trying to spring from prison? (This was a woman, after all, who asked the judge to administer DNA tests to perspective jurors to guarantee than none was Jewish or possessed of “Zionist or Israeli background.” What specific Zionist genetic marker the defendant, who holds an earned Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University, wished the court to check for was left unexplained.) And then, as if to make it clear that Special Agent DeSarno was not speaking just for himself, the FBI later released a statement to the Associated Press in which they said, unequivocally, that in their opinion the hostage taker had not “focused” on Jews, thus suggesting that in their professional opinion this was not an anti-Semitic act at all. When they furiously backpedaled just a day or two later and announced their revised opinion that Colleyville actually did have something to do with the hostages’ Jewishness, it made me feel slightly better…but it also prompted me to wonder how many people out there will just take this as yet another piece of proof that we Jews control the media and the government—and so can just order the FBI to revise its opinion in public when the original statement proved not to suit our tastes.

I myself view the world through my own eyes. And, indeed, for those of us who lived through the Pittsburgh massacre just three years ago—and for those of us for whom the image of Jews being murdered in their own synagogue evokes some of the most horrific stories of the Shoah (for example the murder of the 2000 Jews who were locked in the Great Synagogue of Bialystok on June 27, 1941, and who were then burnt to death when the Germans set the synagogue on fire—a massacre witnessed by the father of one of our Shelter Rock congregants who later wrote about his experiences on that indescribably horrific day)—the image of an armed man threatening to murder Jews in their own shul was not something we could explain away as an act of random political theater or as just another hostage-taking incident. For us, then, this was anything but something that could have happened anywhere and to anyone but which by happenstance just did happen to Jewish people gathering for worship.

We are not alone in this assessment. Indeed, President Biden himself contradicted the FBI’s initial statement in a statement of his own that was as clear as it was blunt: “Let me be clear to anyone who intends to spread hate,” the President said unequivocally, that “we will stand against anti-Semitism and against the rise of extremism in this country.” So that was satisfying. But, at least in the long run, rhetoric—even of the high-minded and wholly well-intentioned variety—is not going to make anyone feel safer in synagogue.

I’ve lost track of how many security seminars I have attended since Pittsburgh. I’ve watched the videos, listened to the lessons taught by local police officers and by government officials specially trained to respond to active-shooter and hostage-taking events. I can’t say how many meetings I have attended to discuss the specific security standards we have in place at Shelter Rock. I suppose more meetings will be scheduled presently. I even attended a Zoom meeting last Tuesday with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney-General Merrick Garland, and, yes, the FBI Director Christopher Wray. (The originally assessment by the FBI that this was not an anti-Semitic act was discreetly left unmentioned.) Everybody said all the right things. Mayorkas, whose own mother was a Shoah survivor, was particularly eloquent, encouraging us all to hold steady the tiller, to take security even more seriously in the future than we have in the past, to trust the advice of the police, and to remember how rare these incidents are and how unlikely we are, even now, to end up taken hostage by a madman seeking to leverage the government into doing something. So that was satisfying. And even a bit encouraging.

But there are plenty of people in our nation, I suspect, who thought the FBI had it right the first time, that anti-Semitism is how Jewish people interpret every slight, every insult…and certainly every crime of which they are the victims, like those poor people in Colleyville. Those, I suppose, are the same people who wonder how anyone can say that racism still exists now that we’ve had a black President and a black Vice President. Maybe it’s inevitable that these things look differently to those on the inside. But that the seizing of innocents at worship in a synagogue as hostages by someone intent on springing from prison a woman who blamed her conviction in an American court of attempting to murder American soldiers on Israel’s apparently irresistible power to dictate to American judges and juries how they must find, and particularly when the defendant is Muslim—to understand that an act like that is directed as much at all Jewish Americans as at those four unfortunates in Colleyville, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch at all.