What makes me angriest about the murder of eleven Jews at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, my hometown, is the temptation it offers towards nihilism.

We’re not even afraid of these kinds of mass killings anymore. They have become the background noise of our society, an intolerable human catastrophe that we now register with grim forbearance and weary, paralyzed grief. And it galls and infuriates me especially that, because we are so insanely inured to them, these eruptions of violence due to the sickening provocations of the American right have become utterly pointless. How can you be an effective terrorist when your terrorism has become so routine that no one is afraid?

People in the sanctuaries in Tree of Life synagogue were certainly afraid in the moment. Terrified. Only once in my life have I ever thought, very briefly, that I might die — in an accident in which no one was shooting, but I have never, before or since, been so afraid. So I can imagine, if only in an abstract, distant way, the hopeless terror of having a man burst into my place of worship and opening fire.