Tree of Life Synagogue – Writers Resist

A Sunday in October

By Ariel M. Goldenthal

The day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I lied to my second-grade students: You are safe at Hebrew school. You will love learning the Aleph-Bet this year. Yes, you can open the windows and feel the early fall air ripple through the gaps between your outstretched fingers. You can have recess outside next week. Your teachers don’t need to be trained to apply a tourniquet. There’s nothing wrong with our classroom’s tall glass windows that look right into the front garden. I’m closing the blinds because it’s so sunny out. Let’s start with our usual morning activity. Today we’re learning about praying to God, which isn’t related at all to the reason your mom’s eyes looked red this morning and your dad whispered, “Maybe he should stay home today.” This happened in a synagogue very far away—not like where we live at all. No, this isn’t something that happens often.

I don’t tell them how the education director called all the teachers on Shabbat, a day when work is forbidden and rest is required, to tell us that despite, or perhaps because of, the horrific loss that day, religious school would still take place the next day; how the doors to synagogue, usually propped open on Sunday mornings to accommodate the flood of parents holding half-eaten bagels and their children’s hands, were locked; how we had to show our photo I.D.s to the officers in the main lobby who told us that we would collect our students and bring them to the classroom—parents wouldn’t be permitted inside; how Rabbis passed around handouts hastily adapted from the ones secular teachers received after the first school shooting this year, but didn’t need because they, like us, are used to the terror by now.

Ariel M. Goldenthal is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Flash Frontier, MoonPark Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com.

Photo credit: Sharon Pazner via a Creative Commons license.

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He Went to the City of Bridges

By Jack Ridl

For all the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue killings

He went to the city of bridges.
He stood in front of the synagogue,
dared shake the hand of the Rabbi. He

said what his daughter and son-in-law
told him to say. He went to the city
of bridges. He went to the city

of neighborhoods. He did not climb
the stairs of the Cathedral of Learning.
He did not look in the eyes of those sitting shiva.

He said he never saw anyone standing in lines
with their signs: “YOU are not welcome here”
in the city of bridges. He went to the city

of bridges to meet the Carnegies, to see where
the steel barons sat, hundreds now standing
at the church where Fred Rogers had knelt.

He stopped by on his way to his rally.
There was also a rally in the city of bridges,
a rally for HIAS, for peace, health, and love.

He went to the city of bridges built
by the iches, the icis, the ids, and the O’s.
And I’m pretty damn sure that he crossed

the irregular streets where my immigrant
Bohemian hunky great-grandfather drove
the horses that pulled a wagon with barrels

of beer in the city where his hunky son, only
sixteen, said he was 20 and for 49 years
day after day stood on the monotonous line

doing the irrelevant, replaceable job.
At the end of that line was what lined
the twill pockets of those at their desks

He stood there day after day so his family
could eat, own a car, house, and radio. I, born
a hunky, could now be an illegal immigrant kid.

He went to the city of bridges. Then on
to his welcoming “base” to proclaim
he was loved. Loved . . . Not by the dead,

not by the trodden, the poor, the betrayed.
Unforgivable for the sorrow-filled veils.
Not loved at the border where the hope-draped

will hand over their photos, their wallets,
their backpacks, toothpaste, and children.
The crowd at the rally, that base congregation,

will roar yet again, “Lock her up!” They
will cheer at the blasphemy “Great.” They
will hate. And somewhere someone’s making

a plan and a bomb, plotting a shooting,
shrieking on Gab while the bereaved sit
in shiva, while we wonder where next.

He went to the city of bridges.

Jack Ridl’s Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press) received the ForeWords Review Gold Medal for the finest collection of poems published by a university or small press. Broken Symmetry (WSU Press) was named the year’s best book of poetry by The Society of Midland Authors. Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was recognized by the Institute for International Sport as the year’s best sports-related book. Poet Laureate at the time, Billy Collins, selected Ridl’s Against Elegies for the chapbook award from The NYC Center for Book Arts. Ridl is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature (Bedford/St. Martin’s). His Saint Peter and the Goldfinch was published in April, again by WSU Press. Ridl served as Honorary Chancellor of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and the Carnegie Foundation (CASE) named him Michigan’s Professor of the Year. Ridl responded to the 2016 Presidential Election by launching “In Time Project,” sharing poetry and commentary with subscribers from every continent. For more information, visit Jack’s website at www.ridl.com.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash.