Rodef Shalom will host a community interfaith service commemorating the tenth anniverary of 9/11 on Sunday, September 11 at 5:00 p.m in the Sancutary.
It is difficult to believe it has already been ten years since the events of September 11, 2001. It is hard to imagine that it has been fully ten years since that fateful Monday on which, even as terrorists attacked sites in Washington D.C., Western Pennsylvania, and downtown Manhattan, our own twin spires of innocence and safety were felled. And for our suffering the loss of these calm harbors, each one of us–and every citizen of our country–has had to recalibrate what we imagined once to be true against the new truth that we do not live in serene isolation. Our lives are intimately connected with those of every other person on the face of our planet; and we have more in common with one another than we may have allowed ourselves to believe just ten short years ago. But no more.
As I wrote in the days immediately following the morning of September 11, 2001, “Regardless of how we once saw ourselves, as a result of the events of [9/11], suffice to say our view and understanding of our world has changed. Where once we felt sure of things, today we likely feel uncertain. Our trust in order has been shaken. The world feels an insecure place. Our faith has become undone.”
And ten years on? How are things different for us? We have adapted to what it means to live with the knowledge that the world is a truly dangerous place. We have adjusted to the inconveniences of an omnipresent threat of terror. We have each come to learn more than we might ever have imagined we’d know about stateless international terror syndicates, criminal masterminds, and the challenge of living and holding fast to belief in a modern age even as medieval religious belief systems threaten our most basic assumptions about daily life.
As we look back over the last decade, we note that much of our experience is surreal. Consider: for nine and a half of the last ten years, Osama bin Laden (who among us had heard of him before 9/ll?!) “lived in our imagination, in our fears and, as it turns out, in a quiet suburb of Islamabad.” So wrote Time Magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel. And he’s right. Truth, it seems, is stranger than fiction because, as one wag has put it, fiction has to make sense!
Permit me to share a story I first delivered ten years ago only days after the attacks of 9/11. Its timeless message bears retelling as this is a story for and about each of us.
A young student discovers a large map of the world in the paper. Curious, the student took the map to a teacher. Sensing an opportunity to challenge the student, the teacher took the reproduction of the globe and tore it into many pieces. Fragments of paper wafted to the floor at the student’s feet. Then, handing over a roll of tape, the teacher suggested the map be reassembled and, thereupon, left the student to work.
The student promptly dropped to the floor and, in short order, completed taping the whole of the world back together. Where only minutes before the world had appeared torn asunder and lay in tatters strewn across the floor, the paper image of the large blue marble on which we all live was now offered up as an intact whole.
When the teacher asked how it had been possible for the student to reassemble the fragmented world so quickly, the student’s innocent yet wise response was short and to the point: ‘There was a picture of a person on the back side of the world. I repaired one person and the world got fixed too.”
Ten years later, the wisdom of this story is more important than ever. Though we live, ostensibly, on top of the world, ours is a topsy-turvy place, and we understand all too keenly that our fate is tied up with that of every other person on every side of the earth.
Perhaps as we enter the New Year, and as we mark the onset of our second decade beyond 9/11, as did the student in our story, we too might choose to see our world as it is: broken and in need of repair, to be sure, but in each of its pieces a human being waiting for a hand, a little help, a bit of human kindness. And like our student, perhaps, we too will choose to begin reassembling our world one person at a time.
As Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to enter into the possibilities of so many new beginnings, for what are we waiting? Perhaps for someone else to make sense of the world’s truths? Perhaps another someone for answers to the world’s fictions? Or perhaps we are waiting for, God help us, anyone to come along and fix our world?
In these final days of one year and the first days of the next, may I suggest that we are waiting for no more and no less than ourselves! Let’s be the change we would hope to see in the world!
In the New Year, may God bless us, keep us… and grant us peace.
Shanah Tovah. Amen.
