Flashback 2010: Why were bombs sent to synagogues in Chicago?

Synagogue in Buenos Aires

      Anti-Semitism waxes and wanes, and if I seem nonchalant about it surging lately, that's because, in my view, it never goes away. If it seems fresh, it's because people forget, and anything short of the Holocaust tends to get shrugged off. Life goes on. This column from 15 years ago, written after two Yemeni bombs containing powerful explosives were sent to synagogues in Chicago, but intercepted due to Saudi intelligence.  Pause when the column gets to "the political philosophy now ascendant." Saw that one coming a mile away. And now it's here.

     "O despairer, here is my neck. By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me."
     Good old Walt Whitman. Always there in a time of crisis. I worried about tomorrow's election, I truly did. A year of angry ugliness, from 2009's summer of botched health care town halls to tomorrow, when the resurgent corporate interests and their Tea Party tools will have their victory dance.
     Then I dug out Leaves of Grass, and am not so worried anymore.
     "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."
      The deficit is indeed a problem — you don't fix it by cutting taxes, but at least they got people talking, if not yet actually thinking, about it. Which is a start. As is participation. The first words out of the mouths of Tea Party supporters are that they've never been involved in politics before. Well, bravo, welcome to the party. You always wondered who those people who didn't vote were, and now we know. They'll discover that political movements wax and wane. What's up today is down tomorrow. We'll find out whether spite has a future in politics.
     "All has been gentle with me . . ."
     It's natural to assume other people have things easier. It's also usually wrong. Don't mistakenly assume Whitman's boundless enthusiasm reflects an easy life. All was not gentle with him. His family was broke; he left school at age 11 to go to work. But that isn't what he wrote -- he saw America for all its brawny, sweaty, hay-stacking, lumber-cutting glory. It was not a stumbling slave-owning nation to him, even as the Civil War was about to tear it apart. He saw the "solid and beautiful forms of the future."
     I think that is my biggest problem with the political philosophy that is now ascendant — it assumes an American in decline, whose government cannot afford to govern, whose people cannot afford taxes, cannot tolerate the influx of a single new immigrant.
     "Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations."
     How could that be true in 1855 and not true today?
     "Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes."
     Lack of malice is a blessing — liberals forget that, enviously eyeing just how far compressed scorn can take a movement. But all biases are a kind of blindness — you aren't seeing things as they are, but seeing them through the filter of your own passions and dislikes. Sure, it makes action easier — you aren't reacting to unfolding events, but acting off an old script. Yet where does that action take you?
     "The fury of roused mobs."
     Since we have such a difficult time seeing flaws in ourselves, and such an easy time seeing them in others, I'll ask a simple question: Why do you suppose someone in Yemen would send bombs to synagogues in Chicago?
      The answers are obvious, but let's review them: 1) Because they hate Jews. 2) Because they hate Americans.
      Does that sound about right- Now ask yourself: What are the odds that the people putting those bombs in the mail ever met a Jew, or even an American- In Yemen, pretty slim. Yet they made those bombs and put them in the mail on general principles.
     Now ask yourself: Is abstract generalized hate confined to Yemen? Or do we see it in the United States?
     One of the Chicago synagogues a bomb was mailed to is the gay and lesbian Congregation Or Chadash. They're in Edgewater now, but they used to meet in a church in East Lake View, two blocks away from where we lived. For Yom Kippur 1996, my wife and I and our newborn went to Or Chadash for services because they were close and didn't charge much. The gay aspect didn't bother me at all, not until we were actually there, and I worried how we would be received, this pair of breeders with our spawn.
     Not that the congregants did anything to make us feel unwelcome. Just the opposite. We sat in the back, and every time Ross cried, we would rush him out of the room, so as not to bother people.
     About the fourth time this happened, I sprang to my feet. The rabbi stopped in mid-prayer.
     "You know," he told the congregation, "when I was growing up, I loved to hear the sound of the babies at the back of the synagogue. It's nice to hear it again."
     I stopped, fussing baby in my arms, and looked around. Congregants were not annoyed at this interruption. They were smiling.
     These are the people that some Yemenis acting under al-Qaida's murderous madness would have killed, sight unseen.
     If the lesson we take from this is the easy one — the world is filled with crazy people — then we're letting ourselves off the hook. Generalized malice at whole swaths of humanity is not confined to Yemen. The election tomorrow, alas, will not change that.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 2010