A reflection on the Heaton Park attack

A week ago, I had the privilege of being invited to share Jewish New Year festivities with some friends.  We broke challah bread together around a table, dipping it into honey as a prayerful reminder of the sweetness of life.  Over the meal, we laughed a lot, shared tender stories about the meaningful moment in our lives, opening our hearts to each other with compassion, care and courage.  It was a special shabbat meal full of hope, honesty, and love shared across communities, ideologies, and perspectives.

Just last week, though, I also walked through the professional security-patrolled gates of a synagogue with my friends.  I paid little attention to the line of volunteer security team members in high-vis jackets lining the street beneath barbed wire-topped walls.  I didn’t think it odd that we had to walk in individually through an airlock style entrance way; the doors not opening in front until the gate had clunked closed behind me.  As I signed my name in the guest book, it never crossed my mind that this was a formal register of who was inside the building.

I’ve realised that I don’t think I was paying enough attention to what I was being shown; taking for granted what has become normalised by the Jewish community.

Over the last 24 hours, as I’ve reached out to my Jewish friends and colleagues, I’ve begun to hear again their shock, pain, trauma – and in some cases resignation over the sheer inevitability of the antisemitic attack at the Heaton Park Congregation Synagogue.

Tonight, Jews will sit around Shabbat tables, break challah bread and pass around the kiddush cup, just as been done for generations.  Yet tonight the story is marked with another scar, another wound, in the soul-full wisdom offered and shared in this world.

In Crumpsall, and across the Manchester Methodist Circuit, we will wait alongside our bemused community.  We will hold vigil with others across the city, and we will be patient - waiting for the moment when the military, media, and medical helicopters finally land, and the headlines move on from our horror. Which they will.

But we will choose not to move on so quickly, knowing that it’s then that the deeper work of authentic community listening and rebuilding will begin.

It will begin, as the holiest day of Yom Kippur (the festival of repentance) reminds me – with my own confession - that I too have been complicit through my ignorance and apathy.  I cannot now escape from the knowledge that I haven’t been paying enough attention, or listening deeply enough to what I have been shown and told.

It will begin by naming antisemitism within communities, learning how to see it, challenge it, and to speaking it out.

It will begin with rebuilding friendships with Jewish neighbours; intentionally reaching out to ensure they and their families are safe.  In time we will find brave spaces to continue to hear the lived experiences of the Jewish communities in Crumpsall, Manchester, Britain, and beyond.

And it will begin around tables with broken bread and shared wine, retelling sacred stories of God’s faithfulness to God’s people within the broken and corrupt systems of the world.

Because with terrorism on our doorstep once again, we have no choice but to pay closer attention.

The Revd Dr. Joanne Cox-Darling, Superintendent of the Manchester Circuit