As I sit here at my dining room table I’m asking myself, not for the first time, how do you write about the unthinkable? Then I pause—if I’m going to write about this I need to be honest with myself. It’s not “unthinkable”—it’s unbearable.

When I was young, maybe 11 or 12, I was sitting in the sanctuary of Temple Emanuel in Oak Park. I didn’t grow up going to synagogue, but I’d told my parents that I wanted to learn more about Judaism and be bar mitzvah. As I sat listening to prayers sung in tunes that somehow just resonated, I looked for the exits. If you’re not Jewish you may (correctly) assume I was bored and restless, but it was much more than that. I was imagining stained glass erupting inward, flames licking the Ark, people screaming. Because, at least in my generation, the Holocaust was still very real, very present. My parents were very much alive during World War II, and one of their closest friends had survived Auschwitz. The Holocaust wasn’t a history lesson, its detritus was all around us.

So nothing is really “unthinkable”. Ask any Jewish friends, especially of my generation and older, and they will tell you about nightmares of Nazis, fear of going to temple, things that go far beyond playground taunts.

When you’re a parent things change. When we dropped off our kids for Hebrew school or preschool we felt embraced by our community but we all shared the fear that we may not see our children alive again. We didn’t need to say it out loud—all we needed to do was wave to the security guard, or give a nod to the cops outside the door. We didn’t need to speak our fears aloud to each other—it was easier to leave them unsaid. But we all knew.

So when I left work around lunchtime on March 12th, and saw police cars screaming past me from every direction, I knew. Deep in my heart, despite thinking up other reasons they could all be converging on Walnut Lake Road, I knew where they were headed. We all did.

I called my wife and when I got home we started checking social media and texting people in the community. Then the phrase “Active shooter incident Temple Israel” came out and we both wailed—not cried, not shook, but wailed. My wife screamed, “The babies!” because that’s who’s there that time of day—our babies.

At services on Friday night, hosted by our generous Chaldean neighbors across the road, one or our rabbis reminded us, “a great miracle happened.” His fear was having to conduct dozens of funerals over tiny caskets, and we had come so close to that.

The only reason today isn’t filled with funerals is that none of this was unthinkable. We thought about it, we always do. And our Temple was prepared. Our security team and our teachers, all trained for this moment, stopped a mass slaughter of our babies.

Our synagogue, the center of our community, is unusable; for how long, it’s too early to say. Our prayer books, our prayer shawls, our classrooms, our library—all a crime scene heavily damaged by smoke and water—but not by blood. And once we are sure that we as a community are more or less OK, we and many other families will begin to figure out where to gather, where to have our b’nai mizvot, our weddings, our “simchas”. And because it was not “unthinkable”, we won’t need to figure out where to conduct memorials for our babies.

We know who did this, but the speculation as to why is almost irrelevant. His personal motivations, which have been the subject of newspaper headlines, are beside the point. Just as all of us breathe in a smog of racism and misogyny every day, my people exist, and have existed for centuries, in an atmosphere of hate and distrust. It is part of us, part of our experience, but one that does not define us.

Because what defines a Jewish community is joy, life, learning, and togetherness. Our everyday practice and identity is who we are, not the hate that surrounds us. So the reasons this man attacked us, while perhaps useful to law enforcement, are irrelevant to us. We know that if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. It could be an Islamic terrorist, a neo-nazi, a lone crazy person, or even a government that suddenly sees us as the enemy within.

Protecting ourselves isn’t about buying guns or hiding in our basements. It’s about living our Jewish lives authentically, and planning for that which is not at all unthinkable but inevitable.

While a more prudent person, one not steeped in Jewish existence, may have stayed home Friday night out of caution or fear, that’s not an option for us. Some of us may need to do that as part of our recovery, but deep down, we know the danger is there and that while this week was worse, it was not unique.

When non-Jewish friends reach out to us—and it is greatly appreciated—how do we respond? How do we explain feelings that are part of our very existence? How do we explain a particular experience that nearly tore each of us apart? I go with a genuine, “thank you.” And then later I cry some more, as I am right now.

And I know that I will cry some more, probably at very inconvenient times. But I also know that I will listen to my daughter practice for her bat mitzvah and smile. I’ll see a mezzuzah on a door and feel a warmth deep in my soul. I’ll sing “Oseh Shalom” and “Hinei Ma Tov” with my community, just as I did years ago to get my baby to sleep at night. I will listen to Jewish comedians online, to rabbis who dispense little snippets of knowledge and wisdom I hadn’t known. I’ll laugh and smile.

Today I’ll cry, but tomorrow I’ll laugh. Because that’s what we do.