 |
December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. My mother was in third grade when the world woke up to Pearl Harbor. I was in third grade the day President Kennedy was assassinated. My son Josh is in third grade now. I know that all his life he will remember the moment we learned that America is not invulnerable and American soil is not inviolate.
Once a generation America wakes up to an event so momentous that it breaks all time into "before" and "after". We are now in the world after September 11, 2001. Josh’s childhood will be lived in a world haunted by the shadow of these horrific terrorist attacks unless we light enough candles of hope for peace, security, and goodness to conquer this shadow of incomprehensible evil in our midst.
We are a spiritual community, a community drawn together to live our commitment to our Jewish identity through the particular set of principles and practices that we call Reconstructionism. We talk a lot about goodness and Godliness. During my 9 years at Adat Shalom, we haven’t talked much about evil. But we all know what it looks like. It looks like United Flight 193 slamming into the World Trade Center. It looks like an attack that forces people to jump a thousand feet to certain death. It looks like the Twin Towers crumbling and the Pentagon burning.
We also know what Godliness in the midst of monumental tragedy looks like. It is the patience and altruism of people standing in line through the night to donate blood. It is courage of the passengers on United flight 93 voting to overpower the hijackers and save untold lives while giving up all hope that they might survive. It is the kindness of strangers carrying a disabled woman down 68 flights of steps to safety. It is the courage of firefighters and police risking their own lives to save others.
Our challenge in the coming weeks, months and years is to overcome the impulse to succumb to evil and to rise instead to exalt what is Godly. Our sense of invulnerability is shattered and we fear that there are more attacks to come. We fear a war most of us never imagined. We can react to these changes in our world by withdrawing into ourselves in selfish depression, we can lash out in destructive anger--or we can use our community to reach out and be God’s hands here on earth.
How best to create peace and security in the face of terror is something on which we may not all agree. But we don’t need to agree on defense policy or international political dynamics or security issues. All we need to do is to disagree respectfully enough that our disagreements do not create a rancor that poisons our connections to one another. If our disagreements drive people apart, we have let a shadow from this attack darken our spiritual community.
As individuals and as a community, we may not be able to create peace or security but we can create goodness. We know what is Godly and we can aspire to live through this time in a way that lights candles of hope for those around us.
On September 11, many of us found out what is really important. No one called home to check on jewelry, stereo equipment, clothes, or furniture. We waited anxiously to confirm that our families and friends were alive and unharmed. Whether our anxiety was resolved in relief or in loss, each of us learned that ultimately only our relationships with other human beings matter.
We as individuals and as a spiritual community need to concretize this moment of self-knowledge in our future actions. If we can focus on this truth, illuminated in a moment of incomprehensible horror, we can turn the legacy of this terrorist attack into a legacy of how we linked hands to raise up goodness.
In the weeks, months and years to come, we will each be faced with opportunities to act selfishly, indifferently, hatefully or with cowardice. We could turn our backs on people’s material and bodily needs. We could ignore the widowed, the orphaned and those now bereft of their children. We could retreat into our established friendships and thus make Adat Shalom unwelcoming to those who now seek a spiritual home. In our anger, we could mistreat individuals in this community who share religion or ethnicity with the perpetrators of these terrorist attacks. We could turn away from opportunities to save others to avoid personal inconvenience or risk. When we face these choices, I hope we can recall what we learned September 11, 2001.
We will also be given opportunities every day to be loving, kind and courageous. But these opportunities won’t always be as appealing as they may have seemed in the stark horror of September 11, 2001. We need to hold on to what we have learned. We need to commit ourselves and our congregation not only to tikkun olam and tzedakah in the ordinary sense but also to courage and kindness in daily life and possibly in extraordinary circumstances.
If all we learned is that we are unbearably vulnerable in a dangerous world, evil has won. If we can go forward remembering that what matters is people--both people who we know and love and those we have never met, then the light of goodness may banish the shadows of this horrific evil.
We are extraordinarily lucky to have a spiritual home that can support our resolve to be courageous and our commitment to be kind. Let us nurture and support one another through evil and towards godliness.
B’tefilat Shalom (With a prayer of peace)
Judy Gelman
|