Anti-Semitism in Poway

Ruger AR-15 for sale -- semi-automatic rifle

I am disgusted to know that a young man went out to hunt and kill Jews with a semi-automatic rifle on Shabbat, the last day of Passover, in Poway, CA.  

I am embarrassed that he was part of a tiny right-wing splinter group of a Christian church.  These nuts split off from the Presbyterian Church-USA in the 1930s, and the PCUSA is a mainline denomination of which I'm a member. 

I grieve for the death of Lori Gilbert Kaye.

I am heartened to read the words of Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein in the New York Times on Monday.  He must have been writing on the day after the shooting.  Where did he get the strength and presence of mind to do that?  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/opinion/rabbi-chabad-poway-antisemitism.html

What a great move by the NYT to invite Rabbi Goldstein to write a commentary for the opinion and editorial pages.  My husband, John Arthur, pointed out to me the quick-thinking of some editor to offer this platform to the wounded rabbi.  John used to work as front-page editor for the Los Angeles Times.

To kill anyone--Christian, Muslim, Jewish--in a house of worship is horrific.  It breaks every human value, every minimum level of behavior we teach our kids.  

• Share your toys--your space--your city and country.
• Show respect for those who disagree with you.
• Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

To be shot for being Jewish or Christian or Muslim or black or white should have stopped years ago.

Thank you to the wise editors of the NYT, and thank you to Rabbi Goldstein for these words:

 "I pray that my missing finger serves as a constant reminder to me. A reminder that every single human being is created in the image of God; a reminder that I am part of a people that has survived the worst destruction and will always endure..."

Thank you to the Creator that the attacker's gun jammed leaving fifty bullets unused, and thank you to the two men who rushed toward the shooter to stop him.

One blood-curdling aspect of the shooting is that the 19-year-old shooter was raised in an Orthodox Presbyterian Church-- a small evangelical denomination founded to counter liberalism in mainline Presbyterianism,  as the Washington Post describes it in a report by Julie Zauzmer that appeared today, May 1.  My friends in a Hebrew class I take at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles alerted me to reports of this connection of the shooter to a Presbyterian church.

Let me tell you some other things about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church:

• The OPC does not ordain women as pastors, elders, or even deacons--though the PCUSA has had women pastors for over sixty years.
• They are anti-gay--whereas the mainline PCUSA ordains gay pastors.
• They are anti-abortion--they don't want women to have legal access to ending a pregnancy.
• They have only 270 churches in the US and some 30,000 members--whereas the PCUSA has over 10,000 congregations and 1.7 million members.  

An anti-Semitic shooter like this would have to come from one of these screwball splinter groups of right-wing Christians if he was going to be associated with any church at all.

However, the roots of anti-Semitism are evident in the New Testament.  In the first and second centuries, groups of Jews who followed Jesus and those who didn't were bitter rivals.  The Jesus-following Jews started converting Gentiles, and the new converts started blaming all Jews for the death of Jesus.  As time passed, many Christians tried to overlook the central fact that Jesus himself was a Jew.  These are the roots of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

And in fact, tomorrow, May 2, is Yom HaShoah--Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day in Israel for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.  (The UN observes Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, and European countries observe various days, often related to the liberation of a concentration camp.)

For a sketch of the rise of anti-Semitism currently in the US and elsewhere, see this article in Vox by Zack Beauchamp.  

It's going to take a long time to overcome all these hatreds, but there's one thing we can do now, as New Zealand has done: Ban the sale of semi-automatic rifles in the US. 

If we keep selling these machine guns, we will keep burying their victims.