I read about the desecration of a Boston synagogue during a light snowfall over Rhode Island on my way home from New York. Violent words had been spray-painted on the outer walls and the Torah in its sacred altar slashed and scattered in the street. Prominent citizens went on record with their shock and indignation, and this was comforting to me, but still I felt the tremors of a fear at once familiar and entirely strange, a vestigial and nearly physical foreboding.