Second Thoughts about Bondi Beach

I went to our Synagogue on Sunday night thinking it would be the worst Chanukah ever. It was hours after the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and it felt like a pall had descended on the Jewish world. Fifteen dead Jews is no small number. You couldn’t wave it away as random violence. This had the smell of a concerted effort, an intuition that was confirmed in the days that followed.

Complicating matters was that it was an outside event. We have lately experimented with using the whole of our campus, projecting Jewish ideas and feelings into the community at large. We are, in many ways, an urban congregation. There are no walls that separate us from our neighbors. B’nai Emunah is not a gated community, set back from the street where you can’t really find us. We exist in a densely settled neighborhood, and it has been the same since 1916.

The whole point of our renovation between 1999 and 2000 was to open ourselves still more to the city, to let in the light, to let our neighbors see us. I was deeply influenced at the time by Daniel Liebeskind who built a glass-walled courtyard for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The same program dictated a new synagogue in Marberg. If they could do it in Germany, we could do it in Tulsa. The next time we renovate, we should build a simple glass cube

The problem, of course, is that glass buildings are vulnerable, hard to defend from mischief and mayhem. Kristallnacht was the proof that no one needed, with German Jewish civilization reduced to shards. I worried that people would not come to the shul this Chanukah, that they would carry images of Munich and Sydney, and hunker down at home with their children. It’s a big ask for parents with babes in arms to come to the Synagogue just hours after Bondi.

And yet that is exactly what they did. My friend Harvey, our unofficial crowd counter, estimated that there were four hundred people on Seventeenth Street on Sunday. That’s hundreds of people just steps from Peoria, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. The power elite saw to the security, with several Tulsa cops in full regalia. While their presence was notable, it was not oppressive and did not give off the vibe of a frontier fortress.

Instead, people milled and chatted and ate colorful donuts, just like they always do on Chanukah, with a million little kids darting between their legs. The entertainment was a thrilling display of fire-handlers, masterful circus folk with dazzling pyrotechnics. I love the combination of danger and fire extinguishers, in case a spark fell into the discarded donut boxes.

And underneath all of this was a subtle kind of swagger, people who would not have their Chanukah ruined. I wouldn’t call it defiance, but I wouldn’t not call it defiance. It was the confident exercise of religious freedom. The men and women of Jewish Tulsa announced that they would not be squashed by their enemies, that we would embrace the joys and satisfactions of the calendar.

I’m a nervous man, prone to paranoia, but I felt it, too, on Sunday night at B’nai Emunah. Stuff will happen, but no one can stop us. We’re going to light our candles, eat our latkes and donuts, and bring light and courage into a hurting world.