There is a way my phone rapidly buzzes from incoming text messages on any given Michigan football Saturday. It’s a touchdown, it’s a fumble, it’s a sack. Everyone needs to chime in.
I learned yesterday my phone also buzzes like that when a terrorist attacks your hometown synagogue.
I was on a call when the phone started dancing. I flipped it over:
Do you know the synagogue?
Is that near your hometown?
Are you from Bloomfield Hills or West Bloomfield?
But the very first message read: “Is DETROIT OK?”
It was from my Israeli cousins texting from their Mamad — their safe room — in Tel Aviv.
“You’re worried about us?” I texted back. “We are targets here too, but I’m worried about you. Now you be safe.”
His response: An emoji of a dancing Rabbi.
The dancing Rabbi is who I want us to be.
I could have told him Detroit is not okay.
There may not be a place of worship where I’ve attended more weddings and B’nai Mitzvot than Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. And today it joins a growing list of cities that is not okay because Jews, this time four year-olds, were targeted.
But this is not the entirety of our Jewishness.
A slew of books and Jewish leaders have said “enough.”
In Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews, she calls for a celebration of Jewish life, not “Dead Jews Tourism.”
Bret Stephens in his State of World Jewry argued for focusing on Jewish joy, calling some of the fight against antisemitism a well-meaning but wasted effort.
In As a Jew Sarah Hurwitz argued that for many American Jews our entire existence comes through trauma: the Holocaust, antisemitism and holidays which focus on historical persecution.
In a few weeks we celebrate Passover, my favorite holiday focused on family, tradition and freedom.
Yes, the story begins with oppression. But that’s not where it ends.
So I would say: “No — Detroit is not okay.”
The war is here.
But so is Passover.
