My father took me for a ride once. I’m not sure why. Maybe he wanted to share his own memories with me, or wanted me to see a world that once was his world. But it was a good 40-minute ride until we arrived. It was a real ride, in an old Buick, not new, not fancy. It was not the sort of car that would stick out in the neighborhood he was about to show me. But he did not leave it parked. It might have gotten stolen. He drove me to the ’hood. His old neighborhood. It was called East New York.

It was, once, the home of a yeshiva he taught in, which later merged with the yeshiva he himself founded. The original building stood on a street called Belmont Avenue. He parked across from it. It was no longer majestic. Broken windows. Litter piled against a door that mispallelim once pushed open before Shacharis. “That,” he said, “was Yeshiva Toras Chaim.” The neighborhood was home to dozens of shuls, large and small, and some shtieblach as well.

Then he drove me around the block, narrating a neighborhood like a seasoned historian who gave the tour dozens of times. It was as if they had never vanished. That was the New Lots Talmud Torah. That was Magen Avos. That was Ahavas Achim, Ahavath Israel, a half dozen shtieblach whose names I don’t remember, tucked into streets called Vermont, Pitkin, Belmont, Levonia. Crosses had replaced Mogen Dovids on some buildings. On others, the Mogen Dovid was still there, half chiseled, as if someone had started the job and lost interest, or lost his nerve. Stained glass with unmistakably Jewish motifs sat above aluminum signs bearing Spanish words for a different kind of house of worship. Synagogues became service stations. Botei medrash became storefronts. It happened, apparently, without any official declaration.

It was not like tonight we change our clock, and we turn a shul into a church. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “Today the community ends.” The grocery closes. The butcher moves. The cheder merges the classes into one. The shul cannot get a weekday minyan. The old men still come, but the young couples do not. The elders go to a nursing home. The younger ones go to suburbia. The few that remained held a meeting. They will hold on as long as they can. Then there is another meeting, then a sale, then a padlock.

Years later, I returned with my own children, on the way to my grandfather’s kever in Mount Judah. The symbols are fainter still, chiseled by weather now instead of by hand. There’s nobody left for the inhabitants to harass; there are no more shul windows at which to throw stones. Not because the streets got safer. Because the Yidden left, for other corners of Brooklyn, for Lakewood, for the Five Towns, for wherever felt, at the time, like it would last.

I’ve stood, too, in the demolished Jewish cities of Lita and Poland. But that was different. There was a clear and definitive timeline of events; it was not an evolution. I understand why the Telz building sits empty. I understand why Slobodka Yeshiva is a warehouse. That story has a clarity and a definitive enemy to it. Armies. Soldiers. Lithuanian Nazis. Polish antisemites. Collaborators. It was a war of aggression with a beginning and, eventually, an end.

But East New York was not emptied by the Wehrmacht. Brownsville was not abandoned because Cossacks rode through Pitkin Avenue. Newark, Detroit, and other once-flourishing Jewish neighborhoods did not lose their shuls because a foreign army bombed them. Something else happened. It was not one day. It was not one decree. It was not one announcement nailed to a pole.

It was a feeling.

A little fear. A little crime. A little more discomfort. A little sense that maybe this street was not what it had been. A little concern that maybe Jewish children should not walk alone. A little worry that the next neighborhood was calmer. A little sense that the old place was slipping. And then, one day, the Jewish world had moved.

I remember the camp plays at Torah Vodaas. Nearly every summer, the same plot rotated with minor variations: thugs storm a yeshiva, boys scatter, someone hides a sefer Torah under a floorboard. Twenty years after the liberation of the camps, and we were still being scared half to death by teenagers in mock World War II Stormtrooper costumes. It worked, because it wasn’t so far-fetched. As we felt more at home, as yeshivos multiplied and Jewish visibility became a settled fact of American life rather than a daily risk, those plays quietly disappeared from the night activity and color war marquee. They would have felt like science fiction. Nobody wanted to be scared by something that couldn’t happen here.

Hemingway has a line, when asked how a man goes bankrupt: “Slowly, slowly, then suddenly.” I keep circling back to it, because I think it describes more than money.

Look at what happened this past election cycle in parts of Manhattan and beyond. Popular, entrenched candidates, not exactly conservative, not exactly out of step with their party’s own platform, lost races they were supposed to win easily. Not because they stopped being progressive enough for their district. Because they were Jewish, or because they hadn’t sufficiently distanced themselves from a Jewish state. Even in neighborhoods with real Jewish populations, candidates who were friendly to us had to work overtime to get elected. That’s the leftist antagonism. I wonder, will the people we’ve comfortably assumed are on our side, on the right, decide we’re no longer worth the friendship either? I don’t ask that to be dramatic. I ask it the way you’d ask about a foundation crack you’ve been telling yourself is just cosmetic.

We’re in the Three Weeks now, which has a way of making these questions feel less abstract. We say we’re waiting for Moshiach the way you wait in an airport lounge in a distant city. You are comfortable. There are complimentary snacks, and a screen is telling you your gate hasn’t changed. And your flight will leave soon. Golus, at its most tolerable, feels like that lounge. But then, something happens. The flight gets delayed. It gets delayed long enough that they close the lounge and send you out to the terminal floor. Maybe they tell you, “I’m sorry, your pass is no longer valid here.” You leave the lounge and spend the night on a hard chair, still waiting for the same plane, except now there are no snacks, and there is no couch, and the riff-raff who are also frustrated choose you upon whom to vent their frustrations. You are stuck with the hard chair, maybe the floor, and hour upon hour, when you realize the plane keeps getting delayed for one reason or another.

I’m not writing this to frighten anyone, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve fully worked out what to do with the unease myself. I’m not a Novi, and I distrust anyone who claims to be. But I think there’s a difference between worrying and paying attention, and I think we’ve gotten very good at telling ourselves that noticing a slow shift is the same as panicking about it. It isn’t. My father just wanted me to see it while it was still visible enough to learn from.

Toras Chaim didn’t die in East New York. It moved on to Long Island. But it packed up and moved, the way so much of what we are has packed up and moved before, generation after generation, always finding another Belmont Avenue to plant itself on. Stone Avenue becoming Coney Island Avenue.

But I keep thinking about those half-chiseled Mogen Dovids. Nobody smashed them in a single night. Someone came with a chisel, made a few strokes, and then, for reasons of his own, put the tool down and walked away, satisfied that the job was started. I wonder, some nights, whether the comfort we’ve built here, this Belmont Avenue we currently call home, has already had its first few strokes taken out of it, quietly, while we were busy being comfortable. I wonder if somewhere, someone is waiting, patiently, the way those aluminum signs waited above the doors, for the day the building is finally, formally, no longer ours to daven in.

The alternative is something we often forget about. And its no where here in these United States. It’s across the ocean. And it comes with Moshiach. And let us not forget it. Even if we do not have politicians subtly reminding us.

Just Saying.