It’s 4 a.m. and I can’t sleep.
I think I’m writing because I feel relief.
Yesterday, there were children inside Temple Israel in West Bloomfield when a man drove a truck into the building and opened fire.
And those children went home.
Thank God for the security, the training, and the people who knew what to do when it mattered most. And thank God those children went home.
It’s 4 a.m. I can’t sleep. And as a parent, I feel enormous relief.
But relief is not the same thing as okay.
What happened does not feel like an aberration. It feels like an exposure of normal life, or at least normal life as many Jews in North America have come to know it.
Look…I know Jews are not the only community living with fear. Black churches, mosques, gurdwaras, and other targeted communities also know what it means to gather under threat. Naming what Jews are carrying does not erase anyone else. It simply tells the truth about this reality too.
And… it is also true that Jews are being targeted at a disproportionate rate, and too few people fully grasp how much that has reshaped ordinary Jewish life.
This week as synagogues in Toronto were being targeted by gunfire, Tucker Carlson was amplifying a false conspiracy theory about a particular Jewish group, a reminder that Jews are contending not only with physical attacks, but with a wider atmosphere of distortion and incitement, one that is becoming more common, more public, and more dangerous.
Every synagogue and Jewish community I’ve been a part of for my entire life has had security, along with the steady presence of threat-awareness and vigilance.
Not once in my life have I known Jewish communal life without that layer. Cameras. Guards. Locked doors. Plans. Drills. The quiet understanding that someone, somewhere, may decide that a place full of prayer or preschoolers is an acceptable target.
The church around the corner does not even lock its doors.
That is not a complaint against them. Good for them. May they never need too. I mean that.
And that contrast has a real impact. Jewish communities have had to normalize what should never have become normal.
And this is not only frightening. It is expensive. It is exhausting.
Across Charlotte, we are spending well over a million dollars a year protecting Jewish institutions from credible threats and radicalized individuals. Year after year after year.
I have no problem spending money on security. I want strong security. I want protected facilities. I want teachers, students, clergy, and families to be safe. It’s non-negotiable.
And we also need more than that.
Every dollar spent defending Jewish life from hate is a dollar that cannot also be spent on building Jewish life itself. On children, teachers, scholarship, music, care, learning, joy. On the things communities are actually for.
We need both. We need security, and we need Jewish life in all its fullness.
That is one of the hidden injuries of antisemitism. It does not only threaten Jews physically. It reroutes communal energy. It takes money, attention, imagination, and tenderness, and forces them toward survival.
And then there is the other pain. One of the loneliest parts of this moment is how often hatred aimed at Jews is treated as debatable. Don’t read the comment sections… what a mess.
Words that would horrify people in almost any other context suddenly become normalized. Threats become discourse. Vileness gets explained away. The human heart can only take so much of that before something in it begins to fray.
I want my Jewish friends to know that if you are angry, exhausted, heartsick, or simply tired of carrying this, I see you.
And I want my non-Jewish friends to understand that antisemitism is not theoretical for Jews. It reaches all the way down into ordinary life. Into the buildings we enter, the doors we lock, the drills our children practice, the money we spend, and the vigilance we carry before we can simply gather and breathe.
And still, we gather.
Still, we teach our children.
Still, we show up for prayer and grief and celebration and learning and song.
Still, we insist on building lives of meaning and warmth and connection inside conditions that too often ask us to become harder than we want to be.
That, to me, is resilience. Real resilience. The kind that lets you be angry and grateful, frightened and defiant, exhausted and loving, all at the same time, and still come back the next day to build something beautiful.
We are still here. We aren’t going anywhere.
