(RNS) — If you were wondering what “globalize the intifada” means, it happened at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on Thursday (March 12).

An armed man drove an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest Reform temples in the country, carrying weapons and prepared to create lethal mayhem. Security confronted him. Shots were fired. The attacker died at the scene. A security guard was injured, but miraculously, there were no casualties among congregants or children in the synagogue preschool.

The suspect, Ayman Ghazali, was a Lebanese immigrant. Though a motive has not been determined yet, officials said four of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon in recent days, multiple news outlets reported. The Federal Bureau of Investigation described the synagogue attack as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.

The suspect could just as easily have been a right-wing antisemite — a devotee of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens. The hateful rhetoric and violence are interchangeable and indistinguishable. The irrational hatred makes Jews targets everywhere. Anti-Zionism — or what I sometimes prefer to call Israel-phobia — and antisemitism are one and the same, as anti-Zionism gives permission to antisemitic acts.

I refuse to understand why Israel’s military actions translate into terror attacks on Jews, just as I would refuse to understand how a Ukrainian-American might attack, say, a Russian nightclub in Brooklyn because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The places where American Jewish vulnerability has been demonstrated are like pins in a map of the United States: Pittsburgh; Poway, California; Colleyville, Texas; Jackson, Mississippi. In the last few weeks, synagogues in Toronto have been attacked. Now, we add a Detroit suburb to the list.

Thousands of families pass through Temple Israel’s doors every year. Toddlers learn their first Hebrew songs there. Teenagers wrestle with Torah and identity. Adults gather to learn, worship, sing, celebrate, argue and mourn. I have friends and colleagues who serve as its clergy, and who grew up there. It is, in many ways, a model of what synagogue communities can be.

The attack was not just on a synagogue. It was not just an attack on Jews. It was an attack on the Jews.

This Shabbat, Jews will finish reading the Book of Exodus. In that portion, Moses gathers the Israelites together and begins the work of building the Mishkan — the portable sanctuary that would accompany the Israelites through the wilderness. They needed the Mishkan because chapters before, Israelites had made themselves another god, the infamous golden calf.

How does the Torah respond to the idolatry of the Calf? By telling the Israelites to build a Mishkan. It would bring the Divine Presence into the midst of the people and into the world. The Calf was to be a tangible god, but the Mishkan would make God tangible.

We don’t have the Mishkan anymore. Today, it is the synagogue that accomplishes that holy task. Our sacred places bring Jews together, and they bring God into our midst.

Our enemies know that. Jewish sacred places are not God, but they represent God. 

Go back to Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in Germany and Austria, November 1938. On that night, Nazi thugs attacked and destroyed synagogues. They took special delight in desecrating those synagogues and their sacred objects, such as Torah scrolls.

When you visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you will see a holy ark from the synagogue in Essen, Germany. It had been torn from the sanctuary wall and thrown into the street. The words “Know before Whom you stand” have been scratched out. In the midst of that melee, someone actually took the time to deliberately obliterate those words as if to say, there is no One Before Whom you stand.

When a synagogue is attacked, it is not just attacking a Jewish space but sneering at the holy. The perpetrators are laughing gleefully at our celebrations, our prayers, our texts — and mostly, our values. They are attacking God. 

What did Moses do when he saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf? He shattered the tablets of the Law.

How do Jews respond to breaking? By building and affirming.

Jewish history is the story of that stubborn impulse. When the Romans destroyed the Temple, Jews reinvented Jewish life around prayer and study. When the Spanish crown expelled Jews from their land, those Jews built new communities across the Mediterranean and invented Jewish mysticism. When the Cossacks destroyed Jewish communities in Ukraine, the response was Chasidism — a recapturing of Jewish joy. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, we built Israel and American Jewish life. 

When the tablets are shattered, we put them back together again. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Rebuilding is always how our light gets in.

This Shabbat and coming weekend, Temple Israel congregants, like Jews around the country, will worship. Rabbis will teach ancient and modern texts. Cantors will sing ancient and modern melodies. People will learn. Children will come to religious school. Next week’s bar or bat mitzvah kid will have their final rehearsal. 

That quiet courage rarely appears in headlines. It is the courage of ordinary Jewish life. It is how the light gets in.

People will laugh together, cry together and thank God for life itself, and pray for the healing of the security guard who was injured doing his job keeping that synagogue safe. 

(Which means, friends: If you attend synagogue, thank your security guards. They make communal Jewish life possible.)

The last words of the Book of Exodus describe the cloud that descended upon the ancient sanctuary. Often, a cloud symbolizes the premonition of sadness, or that ethereal place where we store all our cyber stuff. But the Torah understands this cloud as the wandering presence of God. 

God still wanders with this people. He still has a home in which to hang out with us, if just for a while.

This Shabbat, the haters lose. God wins. And so do we.