What
Have We Learned Since 9/11?
September 12, 2003
A yahrzeit date commemorates
the anniversary of one’s death
according to the Jewish calendar. For America, 9/11 will never
be said as the emergency number nine - one - one. It will always
be a yahrzeit date. Time will only tell how it
will be observed in years to come.
Will it recede into the background until a generation yet to
be born will push it beyond the pale of observance?
Or will events yet to unfold
make it an ever-present memory?
In Judaism, Tisha B'Av is the archetype yahrzeit date. While
the Tanach records it as the date of the destruction of the First,
Solomon's Temple in 586 B.C.E., later events were associated and
attached to it. Thus it came to observe the destruction of the
Second Temple in 70 C.E. and the Expulsion from Spain in1492. The
Rabbis and great Jewish thinkers mulled over the events observed
on Tisha B'Av in order to learn deeper lessons from those events.
Though our perspective is shaped, maybe even distorted, by being
only two years removed from that September day, it is reasonable,
perhaps even necessary to ask the following question: What
have we learned since 9/11?
- In the most definitive way, we have learned that we
are not impregnable. This is not fortress
America. We have wide-open borders. We might not have thought
about it when sitting at Virginia Beach and watching the boats
sail by, or when you drive up 95 by the Baltimore Harbour Tunnel
and see the port. As is our greatness, our size, so
is our vulnerability. For those who remember the Cuban
missile crisis and air raid drills in public school, perhaps
we thought that with the end of the Cold War and the reduction
in ABM's we were less vulnerable. We have
learned that we are more.
- In the most indelible way, we have learned about the
vast numbers of different people who make up America. The
words on the Statue of Liberty from the good Jewish poetess
Emma Lazarus, "give me your teeming masses," have
come true, allowing nearly anyone into this country: real
refugees, true immigrants, perpetrators of the Holocaust
and the terrorists of the planes alike. In the days following
9/11 we had to look at the complexion of America. In the
service that we held here were such different people in color, race,
creed, ethnicity, and faith. We had to look ourselves in the
collective face and ask each other, individually and collectively: who
are we? We learned a new set of questions:
Who is an American?
Can we stick together despite our very significant differences?
Or will we fall apart and on one another when we are under attack?
We learned a lot about ourselves and the fabric of this country
in those days.
- In the most troubling way, we have also learned to
be suspicious about our neighbor, if they don't look
like us or sound like us. We are upset because liberty
has a price, which we never thought about. On
the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is inscribed a verse from
Leviticus: "Proclaim
liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants
thereof."
Are people supposed to be at liberty to destroy our liberty and
this land of freedom?
What amount of privacy are we entitled to?
Can we sit behind constitutionally protected closed doors,
Using constitutionally protected private telephones,
Communicating by constitutionally protected private computers
To blow us up?
Or for the sake of our personal security, can agencies open up
the protected private domains so as to protect our right to have
any privacy at all, to have any life at all? We have learned a
new question: What does it matter to have liberty, if we
don't have life in order to pursue its happiness?
- I am of the generation that burned the American flag is the
highest symbol of protest against our nation's policies. After
Viet Nam, I don't think that anybody could have imagined two gulf
wars and Afghanistan. That same generation, along with others has
learned a new measure of patriotism. While not as many
flags wave from homes nor are magnetically attached to our cars
or on the labels of our suits and blouses, there is a higher
sense of love of country, devotion to it, and respect of its
symbols, as sacred icons. We have also learned that patriotism
wanes. I found it odd that the planners of the two new malls
in Richmond bracketed their openings around 9/11. Somehow I am
ill at ease with the overwhelming display of free market capitalism
around the time that calls for national introspection and reflection. Perhaps
we have learned that we are also fickle, that we blow in the
breeze, and our gaze is not aimed as high as it should be. Did
or did not the pictures on the TV yesterday reawaken our latent
patriotism?
- In the aftermath of 9/11 church and synagogue attendance increased
dramatically and then tapered off. At least in those days, and
perhaps with a longer impression, Americans seemed to understand
that there was a greater power in the cosmos. In the trauma of
those days we collectively turned to God beseeching Him for strength,
safety, and protection. While for some 9/11 broke their faith,
for many, after 9/11 they discovered faith. While
for some it was transient, what is called "fox-hole faith" for
many, in the turning towards God in the aftermath of the
tragedies, many
found a lasting faith. In this we learned both
how great and how little we are. We learned that there
are many faiths, which have certain common ideas. We learned
that most faiths teach respect of other faiths. We learned that no faith
community has all the answers. Specifically we have learned
a lot about Islam, that it is not monolithic,
just like Judaism and Christianity. Some of its adherents most
certainly did and do desire our complete and utter destruction.
Many, particularly our fellow Moslem Americans, renounce that
and reinterpret their holy scriptures to encourage a life and
world of peace.
- With profound introspection we learned how heroic
and courageous people can be. All the stories of the
firefighters, the emergency medical technicians, the police,
the nurses and doctors and the average citizen on the street
will never all be told and recorded. They are as uncountable
as the stars in the sky. In a wide sense we learned how
courageous we all can be. We had to continue living
meaningfully after an unspeakable trauma. We had to explain
it to our children. We had to bring new babies into a broken
and shattered world. We had to make simchas and dance when
we wanted to cry and mourn. We learned how to be brave
in ordinary places, of which we never dreamt or imagined.
- With terror and dread we learned what it
means to live in downtown Jerusalem or in its section
of Emek Refaim and sit in a café sipping coffee. I
am profoundly saddened that that realization is not as strong,
that the events of this week did not elicit a visceral reaction
from Americans, even those who aren’t Jewish as well as
from ourselves. Before 9/11 we did not think twice about getting
on a plane, and if we did, it was about “the danger of
flying.” We certainly never could conceive of the
fear of the ordinary. Now newspapers agitate us with
a staccato beat about the safety of our water supply, our electrical
supply, even without a blackout, our trains, buses and our nuclear
reactors. The citizens of Israel worry about getting a slice
of pizza, yet they go get it. We, for the first time, had a real
taste of living under the threat cannot be easily defended
against, cannot be predicted, for which it is so hard to be prepared. We
all learned what it means to live in Israel, in Jerusalem, and
that, we dare not forget.
In these two years since 9/11 we have learned many things about
ourselves, our country and our souls. We have learned many more
things that those I have enumerated. To borrow the biblical phrase,
we have had enough inner faith and strength to “gird
up our loins” to face an enemy within and an enemy
without. We have learned that America is more resilient than we
thought. Perhaps we learned that America is now more
like Israel because of its common terrible experiences. And
we have learned that amidst tragedy and terror we can laugh, sing,
dance and celebrate, like Kevin’s Bar Mitzvah.
Not knowing what the future may
hold, I pray:
that our simchas will far outnumber
our sorrows.
that we will always remember the lessons that we have learned.
that God will always be near
the brokenhearted, especially of 9/11 to bind up their wounds.
that evil and evildoers, terror and terrorists will be purged
from the earth.
From the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 30 with slight adaptation,
I pray:
May You, O God, transform our mourning into dancing,
Our sackcloth into robes of joy –
That we may sing Your praise unceasingly,
That we will thank You, Adonai, our God, forever.
Amen.
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