(Jewish Group) The Scene of the Crime
On Tuesday, the day that President Trump visited Tree of Life, Daniel Leger was in the hospital for the fourth day in a row. He was lying in bed, a breathing tube down his throat. He was with his wife, Ellen; his two grown sons, Noah, who was forty-five, and Jake, forty-two, as well as Noah’s wife, Chris. His ex-wife, Jo, had been in and out and may have been there this day—he couldn’t remember for sure. His congregation, Dor Hadash, was praying for him. He had been through multiple surgeries and was in stable condition. It was time, his doctors thought, to remove the tube. After the slow process of extubation was completed, Leger immediately tried to speak. “His voice is all craggly and scraggly,” said Ellen, “and I hear him say argh argh argh. And I can’t understand. And then I understand—he’s saying the Sh’ma”—the central prayer of Judaism, attesting to the singularity of God. Leger gasped for more air and then, looking at his family around him, said, “I love you all so much.” And then he said something that showed that he knew exactly what had happened to him. He said, “May God forgive him.” “Then I knew,” Ellen said, “that he was completely intact, because that is completely his thinking. That is who he is.”
Leger was released from the hospital on November 26, 2018, almost a month to the day after he had been shot in the abdomen and pelvis and nearly bled to death, sprawled on a staircase at Tree of Life. Leger felt ready to get back to his reading, his cello, his dogs and cats, and, in good time, his job as a nurse and hospital chaplain. His doctors agreed that he was ready to resume life at home.
The weeks ahead were not easy. Before the shooting, Leger had been a seventy-year-old who didn’t feel seventy, but now, for the first time in his life, he really felt his age, and his fund of energy, always limitless, was now frustratingly finite. He was napping all the time. It would be a while, he realized, before he could return to work. In his first couple of months at home, it was all he could do to walk the dogs or get to the supermarket.
And when he went to the supermarket, he faced an unexpected challenge: his newfound celebrity. Squirrel Hill, already a small village where an old-timer couldn’t take a promenade or shop for provisions without getting waylaid for gossip or a hug, was now a fishbowl, with eyes widening at the sight of someone whose ability to walk upright again seemed like proof of God himself. “For those people who are seeing you for the first time, it’s like they want to relive it all over again, and it’s like a miracle to see you and to hug you,” Ellen said to Dan five months after the shooting, when I was sitting with both of them at their home. “And you can’t squelch that, because that’s a person’s real feelings. They’re really genuinely so touched.”
more...