Opinion: 7 Years Later, the Unseen Gravity of Memory

Steve Rosenberg

Seven years ago, in the calm of a Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, the world convulsed. The Oct. 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha, when 11 Jewish worshippers were killed, did not merely shatter bones and hopes; it bent the axis of everyday life in my hometown neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. In this seventh year, the hard work is no longer remembering what happened or responding with declarations of unity; it is to reckon with how memory demands us to live differently.

We often think of memory as a vault, something protective. But memory is not archival; it is combustible. It asks of us radical attention: to linger in the margins, to name the silences, to feel the echo. For those of us raised in or living in Squirrel Hill, memory is not a ceremony we leave be