Update

Yesterday when I posted that David and Rebecca were safely back from Israel, I started to put in a joke about "if you consider being in Chicago safe."

Sometimes one shouldn't joke. Here is an excerpt from Tom's blog for his family this morning:

As it turns out, my relief at seeing Rebecca and David back in Chicago was, well, quickly displaced by reality.

I got a call from Rebecca last night just before bedtime.

The neighbor across the hall in their condominium, a Nigerian, went berserk when he learned that they were just back from Israel. He forced his way into their apartment, and amongst the usual slurs about "bloodsuckers" and rants about international conspiracies, the man made a clear and immediate threat to their lives, and was, apparently, prepared to carry the threat out.

By the time Rebecca called, the Chicago police were on site, had the man in custody, and were preparing to transport him to overnight lockup. He will almost certainly be charged and released this morning, pending a February court date. A restraining order will almost certainly be put in place, for all the good that will do, which amounts to zero. The police urged Rebecca and David to reset their locks and strengthen the security of their apartment, but that, of course, will not remove the threat or the danger.

We've had a number of conversations back and forth this morning about the next steps, and are making arrangements for Rebecca and David to move out of the apartment into another family apartment in the neighborhood until the situation is clarified.

I have lived with the knowledge of the deep-seated and unrelenting hatred aimed at Jews as long as I can remember, and I have never trusted the surface calm of the last two or three decades in this country. The tough economic times which are now upon us, as Sank pointed out in a comment to yesterday's blog, is likely to increase the intensity of surface anti-semitism in our country, as hard times bring on the search for a scapegoat, and I expect that the volume will ratchet up a notch or two.

But while I have lived with the knowledge of anti-semitism, and slept with one eye open so to speak, I have never understood what drives anti-semitism, unless it is an irrational fear of the "other". The search for rational explanation -- see Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin's 1985 book "Why the Jews?" for a thoughtful, if somewhat provocative, examination of the root causes of anti-semitism -- seems to me to be a surface search, a search for the symptoms, when the disease is the sickness of the human soul...

Tom goes on to reflect on what it is that drives our fear of the other, whether that be Jew or Muslim or Catholic or black or white or gay or straight or liberal or conservative.

This whole tragic episode put me in mind of an old Hasidic story about a rabbi and his students.

As they walked along one day, he asked, "How can we know the hour of dawn — the time at which the night ends and the day begins?"

No one ventured an immediate answer, so they continued to walk.

Then one of the rabbi's disciples offered something. "Is it when you can look from some distance and distinguish between a wolf and a sheep?"

"No," said the rabbi.

And they continued to walk.

"Is it when there is light enough to distinguish between a grapevine and a thorn bush?" ventured another student.

"No," said the rabbi.

There was a long silence.

"Please tell us the answer to your question," said one. "How is it possible to know the precise time at which the dawn has broken?"

"The dawn comes for each of us," said the wise old teacher, "when we can look into the face of another human being and — by virtue of the light that comes from within us — recognize that even a stranger is our brother or sister. Until then, it is night. Until then, the night is still with us."

Sadly the night is still with us.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and darkness moved over the surface of the deep, and the breath of God stirred the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. (Genesis 1:1-4)

Let there be light!