A house of worship is a place where you come to find God. It is also, according to the federal law of the United States, a place where you have the right to do so without being murdered for it. On October 27, 2018, that right was breached in the building that three Pittsburgh congregations — Dor Hadash, New Light, and Tree of Life — shared on Wilkins Avenue. Eleven worshippers were killed.
Rabbi Jeffrey Myers is retiring from Tree of Life Congregation, almost exactly eight years later.
The breach was not allowed to stand as mere fact. A federal hate crimes prosecution — the tool the United States built to answer precisely this kind of violation — carried the case. The shooter was charged on 63 federal counts: hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of the free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death, use of a firearm in a crime of violence, and related charges. The statutes were not invented for this occasion; they are the federal code’s explicit answer to the targeting of people in houses of worship, built from the Church Arson Prevention Act and the federal hate crimes framework that followed decades of attacks on Black churches, synagogues, and mosques. The jury convicted on every count in June 2023. The trial court imposed a death sentence in August 2024 — a penalty the jury was asked to spare and declined. The shooter had targeted the congregations specifically because of their connection to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, whose work resettling refugees had become the object of a conspiracy theory he had absorbed and weaponised into an AR-15 and a Saturday morning.
That is what the federal system demanded: accountability at the level of the law. The man who murdered eleven people in a house of worship was tried, convicted, and sentenced to die for it.
Rabbi Myers was a year into his tenure when the shooting happened. He presided over funerals for congregants he had still been learning to know. He shouldered the long-delayed trial — years of procedural delay before the case reached a courtroom, then graphic testimony about what happened in that building that Saturday morning. He endured the disruptions of the pandemic and watched them break ground on a new building for the congregation that still cannot walk into the old one without remembering what happened there.
But what the law proved and what faith needs are not the same thing. Myers said he struggled to pray after the attack. He turned to the Book of Psalms, reading all 150 chapters in order. When he reached Psalm 121, he found words that did not flee from him: “My help comes from God, maker of the heavens and the Earth.”
That is not sentiment. It is a man who went silent before God after a massacre of his congregants and spent months turning pages until something could hold. It is easier to stop believing altogether than to keep reading through a hundred and twenty psalms in the wake of that kind of violence. Myers had known these people. He had led their services. He was still learning the names. Someone who had absorbed a conspiracy theory about refugees walked into the building where they worshipped and killed eleven of them with a legally obtained AR-15.
Now at 70, Myers says his mission has reached its conclusion. He says it was time for the congregation to begin its next chapter. The new building rising from the ground is the answer to the question every house of worship asked itself after a synagogue ambush heightened fear for houses of worship worldwide: whether to collapse inward or to rebuild. Tree of Life chose rebuild. The same congregation that a Mississippi synagogue rebuilding from arson looked to for solidarity now stands as a precedent.
But accountability and faith do not close the same gap. The federal prosecution answered the legal question — the shooter was convicted and sentenced to die for murdering eleven people while they worshipped. The institutional conditions that made it possible — the social-media ecosystem that amplified his hatred into a targeting ideology, the weapons system that delivered the instrument of killing into his hands — are not addressed by a death sentence. They are the accountability question the trial left behind.
Psalm 121 says our help comes from the Lord. The federal law says eleven people had the right to worship on a Saturday morning without being murdered for it, and when that right was violated the system did what it was built to do. The gap between what the law proved and what faith needs is the space Myers leaves behind. Closing it is the work.