What Have We Learned Since 9/11?

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

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.