The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  If you hid under a pew, you might be safe if there was nothing sticking out. Who might be able to do this? Deborah Manheim, a quiet girl who tended to press herself into a corner of the Hebrew school playground while the other kids played tag; she could maneuver herself under here. Or Chaya Weiss, the secretary for the Ladies Concordia Society for forty-seven years, who seemed to become a chair during the contentious meetings and emerged two hours later with several pages of meticulous notes; perhaps she could effectively hide under a pew. I tried to think of others who would not be noticed by a gunman, but who would reveal themselves through a too-loud gasp or tendency to sprawl.

  But I imagined a guy running in, firing his gun at everyone around him, then simply bending over to look under the pew. There he might see Chaya Weiss lying very still, her hands over her eyes. It wouldn’t matter how quiet she was. He’d kneel and point the gun at her head.

  “This won’t work,” I said.

  Eva paused. She held on to the edge of the pew.

  “There’s enough room,” she said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because I hid under it,” she said. “A year ago.”

  Eva told me that, one afternoon, she slid under a pew. This was right after Al’s accident. A Ford Explorer hit her husband as he crossed the street, and for a month, he was in the ICU; he never woke up. Eva told me this: she had been sitting in the synagogue praying for him when she felt suddenly exposed, the room filled with cold air. What she knew, with perfect clarity, was that she wanted to be under the pew.

  Eva looked around the sanctuary, which was empty, and slowly arranged herself on her hands and knees. She lowered her head, slid under, and turned on her back so that she was staring at the bottom of the pew. The carpet flat against her back, surprisingly musty, a smell of earth coming off of it, she lay there thinking. It was not clear what she wanted, resting there. There was no peace to be found. She said she did not feel calmer, for there was no calm, not then nor when he died three weeks later, but she said there was a comfort knowing that no one could find her. No one would look under a pew, she said. No one would ask her how she was doing. Closing her eyes, she tried to press herself into each moment. She did not want, just then, to be a person, but under the pew, she felt, briefly, like something else.

  “You didn’t tell me you did this,” I said.

  “Honey,” she said. “Why would I tell anyone I slid under that pew?”

  I was, I’ll admit, a little jealous she had come up with this, her own strategy to deal with fear.

  “It’s a good place to hide. You just keep your arms by your sides and legs together.” She considered. “Maybe we can show them the best way to hide under a pew,” she said. “I can bring them here and show them.”

  We walked across the bima and approached the ark. Now I regret that we did not take security concerns into account during our recent renovation. The ark, where we kept the Torah scrolls, had a large door concealing the closet that made up its interior. The doors were made of oak, and they were about two inches thick. Opening the doors of the ark, I stood back, examining what was inside; the three Torahs were arranged, a pale light glowing behind them. I was frustrated by the shallowness of the space, which I now thought could have been developed more strategically. Perhaps there was enough space here to store a gun or other weaponry. What kind of gun would be best? A handgun? A rifle? As I inspected the ark, I decided it could accommodate three members. However, the members would, unfortunately, have to throw the Torahs onto the floor.

  “Three could hide here,” I told Eva, “without the Torahs.”

  Eva looked at me.

  “What?” she asked.

  “They would grab the Torahs, toss them on the floor, climb in, and shut the ark,” I said.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she asked. “You can’t throw the Torahs on the floor. What if the shooter stepped on them? I could see that happening. He might stomp on them on purpose. Or what if he shot them? What about that?”

  There was something a little different about her posture, a little more resolute than I’d seen before, her shoulders set as though she was anticipating an invisible hand would reach across the room and shove her. This was her opinion. The Torahs could not be lying, unscrolled, on the bima while congregants huddled inside the ark.

  “Eva, imagine people running for their lives. The ones who live can pick up the Torahs after. But there’s more room for people if you toss them out—”

  I put my arm inside the ark, measuring: two feet. The Torahs sat inside, quietly. Now I perceived each Torah as a torso. The Torahs took up the room of three people. I thought about who might fit in the ark—Tracy Sadler, Harry Witt, a couple ten-year-olds from the Hebrew school; they were small enough, but how long could they crouch in here? I imagined that they would get scared in the dark.

  Eva leaned inside and examined it.

  “No,” she said. “They can squeeze in between them. We need to make a statement in support of the Torahs. To throw them on the floor is not what we stand for as a people. The Torahs are sacred. People will find a way to squish in.”

  I could not believe she was saying this. Perhaps she did not understand what was going on.

  “Eva. Obviously, I understand the holiness of the Torahs. I do. But the Torahs are not people. They are scrolls,” I said. “Do you hear what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying we have to follow certain rules,” she said. “I’m surprised you don’t see that. I’m agreeing with you—people can climb into the ark if necessary. Beside the Torahs.”

  My heart began to march.

  “You don’t even listen when the rabbi reads from the Torah,” I said. “I’ve seen you check your phone.”

  “I only did that once,” she said.

  “Come on,” I said. “We can set out a policy. If there is an attack, congregants are permitted to remove the Torahs from the ark and climb in for safety purposes.” I paused. “We can add, ‘Congregants removing Torahs are responsible for getting them back into the ark after the shooter has left.’” I thought to add if they are alive, but I thought I’d leave that out.

  “No, I will not support this,” she said. “A bad precedent. I can’t bear the idea of the Torahs on the floor. Others will agree.”

  I regarded Eva. She resembled herself, oddly cheerful and determined to finish this task. I blinked but there she was, her lips bright with the burgundy lipstick she always wore, the person I had known for many years. I was used to knowing her as a generous person. I remember when she helped me with those cupcakes, when she carried them to the bridal shower the next day. I was shocked that she was siding with the Torahs.

  But then I remembered another time. I remembered the morning in July 2001 when she called me, excited to tell me how her son had finally, after a long search, found a job as a publicist in a marketing firm in the World Trade Center. And I remember, too, that morning in September, when she called to tell me she hadn’t yet heard from him. Al was out of town. I went to her house to wait with her as she tried his number every minute, as though she could save Jacob with the speed of her dialing; she would hear the dial tone and punch in the number again. “Eva,” I said, finally, “wait. He might be trying to get through.” She stood up and stepped toward the sink and stumbled a little. I grabbed her arm so she wouldn’t fall, and she looked at me, and her expression held a terrible, shocking heat; her fear was about to incinerate her.

  Then the phone rang. And when she picked it up, her hand was trembling so severely, she had to pass the phone to me. I whispered hello into the receiver and waited and then I heard her son’s voice. “Jacob, hello!” I said, and her eyes were bright with tears.

  They talked for a few moments and Eva instructed him to stay in his apartment. Don’t go anywhere, she told him, unless someone told him to leave, and then don’t use the airports—call her and they would devise some other way. There was something firm in her voice I
had never heard before. When she got off the phone, her face was set with a mysterious and absolute certainty. “It was my dialing, over and over, that saved him.”

  This was, of course, absurd.

  “Eva,” I said, carefully, “how was it the dialing?”

  “I don’t know. Trust me. It was.”

  I couldn’t tell her she was wrong; I had no right to decide that. Though I knew that there was no real reason why he had been spared. But I noticed how she became very organized and deliberate after that moment. I thought, from time to time, about her expression, and how something changed in her that day. I remembered the fear in her eyes before she picked up the call, and then, when she learned her son was safe, the cool sharpness in her face—not calm but etched with a type of understanding. This same sharpness shaped her expression now. She decided then how the world worked; this was what she thought.

  I tried to speak in a more careful way, telling her, “No, the congregation will want to protect the people, not the scrolls of parchment—others will agree,” leaning on the word “will” because it just seemed so obvious to me.

  She laughed.

  This was the one part of Eva I did not understand: the way she believed one idea, fiercely, and not another. And that was when I started having the bad feeling. I knew that, as members of this committee, we had to discuss these issues. But she was not interested in discussion. The Torahs, she said, had to remain in the ark, in their appointed spots. But the spaces between the Torahs, yes, they were certainly available to any congregants who could shove their way inside.

  She nodded as though we had come up with a useful suggestion. I loved Eva; but now I had a sour, unhappy feeling inside myself. Perhaps we could return to this later.

  We surveyed the back rows of the synagogue, which gave me a particular chilled feeling, for it was where my children, when they came to town, liked to sit, because my grandchildren, who were seven and five, often had to be taken outside when they became restless. But that was probably where the gunman would run in first, so it was likely that if my grandchildren (I was just thinking of this now) sat in the back, they might be among the first victims.

  This idea made me stop for a second, and I set my clipboard down on a seat. I could not think anymore. I wanted to run out of the synagogue. I wanted to run out of this country (but to where?), I wanted to just keep running. But Eva was still on task.

  “Could we set up rubber dolls toward the back?” Eva suggested.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You know, a few life-sized decoys so the shooter gets them first, uses up some bullets. It gives people time to run and duck—what do you think? Shouldn’t we look into this?”

  I made a note. I was having some trouble thinking this through. I had heard of companies that produced blow-up dolls, but not for this purpose. Perhaps this could be a long-term investment; life-sized rubber dolls to distract any shooters who rushed in. Though this would then present the need to build more seating in other parts of the synagogue, perhaps with carefully constructed wooden or steel sculptures to block bullets or shield congregants in vulnerable seating positions.

  I was suddenly exhausted. My god! Aside from these problems, the temple needed a new roof. The refrigerator in the kitchen of the Social Hall was about to break. Attendance at services had been light of late; we were losing members. There was no budget for any of this.

  “I think we’ve covered how to hide from a shooter,” I said. “But that’s just the first thing. Now we have to prepare for a bomb.”

  If someone threw a bomb into the synagogue, then there were other considerations. In one scenario, the attacker could hurl a bomb through a window, which made seats by the stained-glass windows risky. Or he could burst into the room through the back doors and throw a bomb into the center of the room. In this case, sitting near the back was actually a safer choice, as the bomb would explode toward the middle or front of the synagogue, and maybe if Janet or Abe Rosen, who got here early to claim these seats with coats and purses, survived the force of the blast, and the fire, they might be able to run out the blown-out back doors. But what of Elena and Harry Blum, who liked sitting by the aisle and were terrified, paralyzed really, by loud noises, or Dawn Bloch, who had claimed the same seat in the center, the precise place a bomb might land, for forty-three years—what would happen to them?

  My head was full of seating arrangements and blood and bodies and screaming people. I was starting to get a headache. I had to sit down.

  “I know about bombs,” said Eva.

  “What do you mean, you know about bombs?”

  “I do,” she said. “I dream about them a lot.” She told me about a recurring dream that began six months ago. In the dream, she was running toward a tall, brightly lit office building. It was located in a downtown part of a city, and stood amid a cluster of other office buildings, in a haze of streetlights and mist. She was running toward it, heading for a restaurant, to a dinner engagement for which she was late. As she approached the building, a bomb went off. She said she could feel the explosion inside her, a shock in her bones, as though the end of the world occurred far away and in the center of herself, and she watched the building collapse, like a sandcastle, releasing a cloud of dust, and then she turned and ran the other way, and she said she could feel the heat of the bomb behind her, along the backs of her arms, but it didn’t harm her; she was never subsumed by it. In her dreams, she always lived, which I admired, as I thought it revealed some confidence within her. Sometimes she said she was a little closer when the bomb went off, sometimes charred cars would hurtle toward her, sometimes she would see bodies fly out of the building, but she would only watch this from a distance. Sometimes the heat was so fierce she thought she was dissolving, and then she woke up. She said she had this dream quite frequently since her husband’s death. She believed that she knew quite a bit about bombs, though in real life, she did not.

  From her dream, Eva came up with a strategy to deal with a bomb, which was this: jump out the window. The stained glass would, she felt, be shattered by a bomb, and so, in preparation, the temple should provide stepladders, with three steps each, beside the windows so that congregants could run up the stepladders and then jump out. The strategy for a bomb was not hiding, Eva believed, but running, and leaping out the window, and though she had a hip replacement several months ago she still felt confident she could, if necessary, jump out the window, because she had been able to jump successfully, from freeway overpasses and ledges of buildings, in her dreams. She remembered how good she felt, leaping to safety. Others could feel that way, too.

  “Eva,” I said, firmly, “jumping is not an option for many temple members.”

  She shook her head. “They can do it,” she said. “We can have step stools available. We can have designated helpers.” It was important to her that she could picture herself, and the others, carefully jumping out of the windows to the lawn below.

  She must have noticed my skepticism, as she patted my arm. “We’re going to have a decent list of suggestions for the board,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  I heard a hope in her voice that I understood. I watched her walk down the aisle, surveying the pews, the flower arrangement, the bima, and I was struck by the tentative nature of her walk. It was the walk of an old person, and I knew that now I also moved with the same care. How strange to be this person, in my late sixties. The shifts in our bodies, in this country, had all happened so quickly; our lives were long enough now to have arcs, rising and ending. Thirty years ago I sat with my husband, Tom, she sat with Al, the four of us, at a restaurant. Now it was just Eva and me left in this room. I wanted to return to the time when we were just ordering in a restaurant, when we were organizing the Purim carnival or deciding which dessert to split, before the end of love, before death, before we were assigned to write this report on how to stay alive in our own synagogue. I could not tell her how much I wanted to offer suggestions that would prote
ct the congregants, how I wanted, too, to be able to run out the door.

  Finally, we reached the front of the sanctuary. I had my final recommendation.

  It was the easiest and most obvious: the use of armed security at the temple. I had found, with some research, that other synagogues around the country were using private security companies. They were hiring guards to stand in front of their synagogues during Shabbat services. Some congregations screened anyone coming into the synagogue, with guards searching purses; I had even heard of a temple that had an airport security gate, checking everyone who walked inside.

  I had several questions regarding armed guards in front of the synagogue. “Eva,” I said, “these are the points we need to figure out. Would this guard be in attendance at all services? Friday night and Saturday morning? During Hebrew school? Ladies Concordia Society meetings? The Men’s Club? For what activities would we provide security for the congregants and which activities would we not? How would this guard be armed? Should we have more than one? How many?”

  A guard was, in my opinion, essential for all Shabbat services, at the minimum, which would be paying someone (two people?) for a twenty-four-hour shift once a week.

  I thought she would agree to hire a guard for both services and Hebrew school, but she said, “No. I don’t think so. We do not need a guard.”

  I was shocked by the way she said this, her certainty.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “How are we going to do this?” she said. “Place an ad? Interview people? How do we know they’ll be good guards? How do we know they’re not, well, Nazis themselves?”

  It was one thing, in her opinion, to discuss not wearing heels or hiding under a pew or jumping out of a window. It was one thing to create an imaginary escape plan. But it was another to hire a guard. “And when are they going to stand there? Just during services? We can’t afford to have one around the clock. Plus, a guard present at all times may scare people. Or they may think there is illegal activity going on—”