Seven years ago, in the calm of a Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, the world convulsed. The Oct. 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha, when 11 Jewish worshippers were killed, did not merely shatter bones and hopes; it bent the axis of everyday life in my hometown neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. In this seventh year, the hard work is no longer remembering what happened or responding with declarations of unity; it is to reckon with how memory demands us to live differently.
We often think of memory as a vault, something protective. But memory is not archival; it is combustible. It asks of us radical attention: to linger in the margins, to name the silences, to feel the echo. For those of us raised in or living in Squirrel Hill, memory is not a ceremony we leave behind; it is the air we have learned to breathe.
Each October, the streets feel different. The leaves, the light, the smell of late autumn—they all carry a load. When I’m in town, I make it a point to walk past the corner of Shady and Wilkins avenues, and feel, as though through a filter, that the city is holding its breath. It is an involuntary pause; the neighborhood itself is turning a corner cautiously, afraid of what it might see.
One year, I asked myself: If those 11 people had not been taken from this Earth, what would this incredible neighborhood look like now? Would they have had one more life cycle, one more handshake in the lobby, one more voice in the cantor line?
That question is not rhetorical; it is a wound, as these are questions that can never be answered. I want to say the community still inhabits that absence. There is a majority of the everyday, school runs, coffee shops, buses, synagogue doors swinging open, into which that absence seeps. You carry it across your day. It doesn’t let you forget, nor does it let the city forget. This is for all of us who have “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” deeply embedded in our roots.
Every year, I write about the Tree of Life massacre, and every time I’ve spoken of hope, of resilience, of refusing to yield to despair. But with a distance of seven years, hope must evolve; it cannot remain an abstract note on the refrigerator door. It must bear weight. True hope must reckon with what is broken and with what cannot be repaired, without pretending that we can reverse time. Hope now must be a kind of moral imaginative labor asking not only “how do we heal,” but “how do we carry forward?” How does the everyday reclaim its purpose when something so profound has intervened?
We think of heroism in grand gestures. But in Squirrel Hill, heroism lives in small places: a neighbor walking an elderly congregant to services; a parent explaining memorials to a child; a volunteer keeping the grounds immaculate around the Tree of Life building. These acts are not loud. They don’t make headlines. And yet, they are the warp and weft of perseverance.
A couple of Octobers ago, I visited a local cafe on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill before dawn, just to sit and watch the morning grow. I looked across at storefronts where congregants once passed, shops they frequented. In that quietness, I felt a tremor—a sense that the continuity of the mundane is itself defiance.
Too often, we pressure ourselves, and each other, to “move on” or “return to normal.” But normal is what has changed. Grief is a claim. Let it not be a burden we carry in isolation but a ballast that keeps us rooted in honesty. Let it be allowed to swell, to recede, to surprise us. Let us also allow collective memory to carry dissonance: the anger, the doubt, the guilt of surviving. Let us name the hard questions. Why didn’t someone intervene sooner? Why did no red flag persuade? How do we live when we know such depths of darkness are possible here?
This year, I find myself reflecting on three quiet gestures that feel right. Spend time simply witnessing: In the week leading up to Oct. 27, choose one place in your own neighborhood and spend 10 minutes just observing; the storefronts, the foot traffic, the rustle of leaves. Let memory inhale the present. Speak the names of the victims aloud. Don’t bracket them as “those 11.” Let their individuality remain alive in conversation so that new generations will hear their names and ask who they were. And do something that unsettles a routine—at Shabbat that week, light an extra candle, shift the order of a prayer, invite someone unfamiliar—so we remember that nothing is immune from change.
Seven years is a reckoning. The gap between before and after is widening, for those close by and for the next generation that mostly only learns of Oct. 27 through tributes or textbooks. Our responsibility is to keep the gap visible. Because if the gap is erased, we betray the weight of the event. If memory becomes a sanitized background, we lose the force it exerts on who we become.
In the end, what makes us “great” in memory is not how loudly we proclaim, but how faithfully we live. That is my deepest commitment: to let memory shape tone, ethic and choice so that what was lost continues in what we do. And to do so not in spite of grief, but through it.
May the names of Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Cecil Rosenthal, 59; David Rosenthal, 54; Bernice Simon, 84; Sylvan Simon, 86; Daniel Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 87; and Irving Younger, 69, always be for a blessing.
