“I felt like laughing, drinking the rusty water from the faucet and urinating. I stood for a while by the sink staring, as if seeking the means to fulfill all these three needs simultaneously. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and looked out into the wet street, its black windows, flat roofs, the glowing sky, without a moon, without stars, opaque and stagnant like some global cover. I leaned out as far as I cold, deeply inhaled the fumes of the city, and proclaimed to myself and to the powers of the night:

I am lost in America, lost forever.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Lost In America.”

As a young writer, I worshipped the Nobel Laureate  Singer, I read everything he wrote.

I even made a pilgrimage to the Upper West Side coffee shop where he was said to go every morning to speak in Yiddish wish his friends and fellow refugees. And I found him there.

I wished to be a great writer like he was, and even though I never made it that far, he has always been in my consciousness.

I loved his writing, his mysticism, his humor and pathos, his chronicles of his lost Eastern European world, destroyed so viciously and completely by the Nazi’s.

He was as thin as a bird, almost translucent, but so gracious and courteous to a young writer who felt little connection to the Jewish Faith in which both of  us were born. His world, the very foreign world of the shtetls and villages of Poland, was even more remote to me, yet in some way I felt close to it when I read his books.

Of course, it could have been me in Europe. If not for my grandmother, it would have been.

Singer shook my hand, and smiled, but as he spoke no English and I spoke no Yiddish, we could do little more than nod and smile at one another.

A friend  of his translated a few words and Singer was gracious enough to hand me a galley of a book he was working on called “Lost In America.” It was published in 1981, it was  a wonderful book. I lost the galley notes long ago, I am sorry to say,  a casualty of too many moves.

But I bought the book when it came out, and I thought of this passage, of  the book’s ending this weekend, as I tried to digest another mass shooting in a place of worship, this time of eleven Jews, most of them elderly.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the older victims in Pittsburgh, some alive during the Holocaust, who lived into their 80’s and 90’s through all of that horror only to be gunned down while worshipping in their synagogue.

As with the shootings in Texas and South Carolina, it was simply impossible to get my head around so much hatred.

As an older person, I feel so much more sorrow than rage, I felt over the weekend that I was lost here in America, for the first time in my charmed life. I could not make sense of it.

I do not presume to be a pundit. If you think I can add any great wisdom to  help make sense of Pittsburgh, and add to all of the words written about this, you may be disappointed.

I can’t tell anyone else what to think, I can only relate what I think, and hope it is helpful to someone somewhere.

Except for Maria, the person in this world I was closest to in my life was Minnie Cohen, my grandmother. She came her from Kiev, fleeing the butchery of the Cossacks. She saw Jews killed almost every day.

People thought she was aloof and remote, but she was never that way with me. Minnie Cohen knew a thing or two about what can happen to the Jews, a lot of it happened to her and her family before she walked across Europe to get to America.

Minnie was devour,  a person of faith, she worshipped every day, she never stopped telling me how lucky she was and I was to be living in America, where nobody could come rushing into a Jewish neighborhood or village and slaughter Jews.

Not here, she would say in America. Not here. That was why she had crossed the earth to get here. So her family – and me – would never know that fear.

I have never been an observant Jew, and will never been one.

I have no desire to go to Temple, I have no connection with Israel. I became a Quaker when I was 14, and have never been  drawn to return to a  faith I never quite understood or related to.

Until Saturday.

I felt very Jewish on Saturday, which surprised me.

I have been carrying around a heavy heart all weekend. I know we have lost something precious over this awful weekend, I don’t know if we can ever  get it back.

Now, no one can ever say it can’t happen in America, it has been happening again and again, and not just to the Jews. No culture has a patent on horror.

I have no pearls of wisdom for anyone else, but I have been thinking about myself, and how I feel lost in America sometimes these days, like Singer, and yet determined to find myself  again here,  to stay grounded and be whole. I don’t intend to stay lost forever.

For me, the answer is to care, and to not stop caring. The Mansion and refugee work remind me to care, every day. I am grateful for that. They have kept me grounded.

I wonder if I am sometimes so concerned with being different from the others that I can no longer lay down the heavy armor that protects me,  and come together in the mutual vulnerability that we all share, that is the human condition.

I don’t wish to be so full of my own opinions and convictions that there is no room left for me to comprehend or listen to or feel for the other,  and learn what I can from him or her, even for the tormented and gravely ill man who shot and killed eleven people while they worshiped in what they thought was a sanctuary.

How broken he must be.

To care.

To care for me means to get away from myself and allow others to come closer. Daring to care means accepting that nothing that is human is foreign to me, fear and joy can  be found in  all of our hearts, mine and theirs.

When others hate, I have hated. When others kill, I might have killed too. When others torture, it could have been me. When others are  gunned down in prayer, that could have been me too, or my daughter, or grandmother, or mother.

And when others heal and seek to do good, I might have done the same, and still do the same. If I wish to understand the power of empathy and compassion, I might even try to understand a person who could do this to other people rather than call for blood.

Everyone has it worse than me, everyone is fighting their own battles. The God I seek to worship cares, not just for the powerful but especially for the powerless, not to be different but to be the same, not to take all pain away but to share it and care about it.

I will honor my grandmother, Minnie Cohen, by loving my country in the same way she loved our country. She understood what it meant to be an American, so many people seem to have forgotten.

Our country has so much promise and noble intent, this will be how I find my country again, I will remind myself of that every time I feel low.

I love my country, I love my country, I love my country.

It has always stood for good, even though it could not always be good. That is something to hang onto. Pittsburgh is not what we came so far for, and when I stop believing that, I  will be lost forever.

Perhaps in this way, we can one day open our hearts to each other and resurrect our lost sense of community. Or build it anew.