To the Editor:
I attended the presentation last week at the Wilton Library by Mark Oppenheimer, on his book, Squirrel Hill: the Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.
Having now had a chance to read his book, I have to say that I was moved to tears from the very start of it. Oppenheimer is as powerful a writer as he is eloquent a speaker, and even in speaking about these saddest of experiences, he is able to lift his presentation with wry wit and self-deprecating humor.
The murder of 11 congregants in their synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a demented white supremacist shooter is such a tragedy that even a book-length accounting is insufficient to describe its horror. So I won’t attempt to do that in a letter.
We here in Wilton have not faced that kind of horror and hopefully never will. But the fact is that people here in Wilton are facing forms of hate speech and action. That hate includes anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti-Hindu, racist, and anti-LGBTQ+ targeting.
In Squirrel Hill, Oppenheimer recounts many heartwarming examples (a number of which he described in his presentation) of reaching out to help and offer support and comfort by the whole Pittsburgh community and beyond: Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and those of other faiths or no faith at all. As but one example, a principal fundraising effort for families of the victims was, in fact, begun immediately by an Iranian Muslim graduate student, Shay Khatiri, living in Washington, D.C. who deeply lamented the suffering; he established a GoFundMe for families of the victims that raised over $1 million.
This broad-based support is exemplary and sets a model for all communities, not only as to how they should reach out in the face of horrible tragedies but also to show how we all need to respond when hostile and demeaning acts coming from any form of hate take place in daily life. Schools Superintendent Kevin Smith is calling on us all to address those kinds of incidents right now as he points to students of color who “don’t feel welcome here and in the worst cases feel unsafe here…. [T]here’s a pattern of behavior here that is really intolerable.” Being an upstander is crucial in these situations for the victim, for sure, but also for the health of our whole community and for us individually.
In that regard, the newly published book by Samuel Wilkinson M.D., an academic psychiatrist on the faculty of the Yale Medical School, offers many insights. His book is entitled Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Existence.
Drawing on a wide range of scientific research in numerous fields, Wilkinson concludes that evolution has a definite directionality and that it has come to include within our human make-up two distinct qualities (termed “traits”) that have been important to human survival under different circumstances throughout the ages. One of those traits is characterized by selfishness (looking out exclusively for one’s self), while the other is characterized by altruism, generosity and cooperation.
Wilkinson is a firm believer that we humans have free will (and cites much scientific research to support that conclusion). The combination of free will with the choice between selfishness and altruism creates a test for each of us that we take continually as we live out our lives and make our many individual choices that are guided by these traits.
His conclusion, again based on much scientific research, is that the altruistic choice overwhelmingly wins out. It builds community, and we rely on a strong sense of community not only for our happiness and satisfaction in life but also for our survival.
In fact, what humans have done to encourage community has been evolutionarily important to our survival as a species from prehistoric times to today, and it is also important to what we find as meaningful in existence. In short, altruism and its corollary community-building are primary sources for giving meaning to our lives.
Wilkinson’s powerful book underscores that conclusion, and Oppenheimer’s deeply moving account gives that conclusion profound substance in actual application and offers hope even in the most difficult, horrible and challenging of circumstances.
Steve Hudspeth