Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
I had another sermon I was going to give this morning. It was a good sermon too, but you'll have to wait till next year to hear it because of the events of last Tuesday. Last Tuesday, just a week ago, September 11th, a date whose numerical value ironically is 9-1-1, when enemies of America inflicted on this nation the worst act of terrorism we have ever experienced. Before last week, it would have been hard for us to imagine anything more cruel than the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City with 168 dead. The casualty numbers out of New York City and Washington will probably be thirty or forty times as great, the equivalent of an Oklahoma City bombing every day for a month.
Last Shabbat in synagogue, we read the opening words of the Torah portion Nitzavim. Moses addresses the Israelites for the last time and tells them his words are meant "for those who are here today and for those who are not here today." And as we read those words, I found myself wondering in how many synagogues and churches, thoughts will be turning to "those who are here today and those who are not here today."
So we have to talk about it this morning because it is on everyone's mind and lies so heavily on everyone's soul, because it has been hard to think or talk about anything else for the past week. We have to talk about it thought it's hard to find anything to say except how much it hurts and how angry we are.
I remember when I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, that every year our beloved old rabbi (who was probably younger then than I am today) would begin the Rosh HaShannah service with a prayer whose opening words were:
TICHLEH SHANAH UK'LALOTEHA, TAHEL SHANAH UVIRCHOTEHA,
May the old year end with all of its calamities, and may the New Year begin with all of its blessings.
And I remember that that prayer always made me uncomfortable. I would say to myself "That prayer belongs back in Europe where life was hard and every year brought more trouble. But here the years are good." Yet yesterday and today, I found myself praying that all the killing, all the hatred, all the tears and bloodshed of these past twelve months vanish along with the old year, and that the coming year be free of all that.
But what is there to say? How does one make sense of a senseless tragedy? How does one come to terms with the knowledge that some people hate other people so much that they would kill themselves in order to kill thousands of strangers?
After the terrible events of last Tuesday, a number of colleagues I spoke to had all independently come up with the same insight: We are all Israelis now. Now all Americans know the feeling of vulnerability, of uncertainty, that Israelis feel when they go shopping, when they send their children off to school in the morning, when their sons and husbands leave for military reserve duty. And if we are all Israelis now, maybe we can learn something from Israel's fifty-three years of hard-won experience dealing with the threat of terrorism.
How do Israelis handle the danger? They go on living. They continue to shop, they continue to ride the buses, they continue to send their children to school. There is always an element of concern, which is why they compulsively listen to the news every hour on the hour. But they understand that if they ever stopped going on with their normal lives, they would be conceding the field to the bad guys, and they are not prepared to do that.
You know the story we read from the Torah on Rosh HaShannah, the story of how God commands Abraham to offer up his son as a sacrifice and then intervenes to save the boy at the last moment. In the Torah, though we don't read this far on Rosh HaShannah, the very next thing that happens is that we read of the death of Sarah, Abraham's wife and Isaac's mother. Though the Torah never makes the time frame explicit (it could have happened years later and probably did), Jewish commentators have always suspected a link between the two events. They imagine Sarah dying immediately after and as a result of Isaac's near death experience. One midrash has Satan telling Sarah that Isaac has been killed, and Sarah dying of grief. Another pictures Satan telling Sarah what really happened, that Isaac was almost killed but was spared, and Sarah dies anyway. Why? The midrash doesn't try to explain it, but Aviva Zornberg, a brilliant Israeli Bible scholar, understands it in this way: Sarah dies of despair because she can't stand living in a world that random and unreliable, a world where life hangs by a thread every day. How can you live in a world where you say goodbye to your loved ones in the morning and you can't be certain you will ever see each other again? All that uncertainty is too much for her.
This week I suspect a lot of people are feeling like Sarah. They are saying to themselves, "How do you live in a world like this?" They are asking "Where can I move to, how can I change my way of living so that I don't have to be in danger?"
To those questions, Israelis, I think, have given us the answer. For the most part, they have rejected Sarah's reaction to the threat of terror. They have squared their shoulders, summoned up their courage and gone on with their lives. And I would hope that all Americans, now that we know the vulnerability that Israelis have been living with, will do the same.
I intend to get back on airplanes when airports re-open and my schedule calls for me to fly somewhere. I was on a plane at Logan last Tuesday, planning to travel to Toronto, when we got word that all flights had been cancelled everywhere, and I will be back flying again after the holidays. I will not let the terrorists tell me how I can live. I will not let them keep me from doing the things I want to do, not my business travel and not my traveling to visit family. I will act prudently and carefully but I will refuse to let them control my life or shrink the boundaries of what I feel safe doing.
I understand the Torah's admonition "Choose Life" to mean "Don't be afraid of living." Don't be afraid to live, even though living may be painful or precarious. Do you want to get even with the people who did that to us last week? You know how to do that? I would paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald who said "Living well is the best revenge." My adage would read "living normally, living bravely is the best revenge."
In the same way, as I have listened to callers on talk radio and read the letters to the editor, I have heard a great deal of anger and a desire to get even with whoever has done this to us, which is understandable but problematic in its own way. But occasionally I have heard or read people suggesting that maybe we should moderate our support of Israel so that we'll no longer be a target for terrorist hatred. And I want to say to those people that that is so totally wrong. Muslim fanatics don't hate us because we're pro-Israel and they won't stop hating us if we were less pro-Israel. They hate us because we stand for democracy, for gender equality, treating women as full human beings, for freedom of speech and worship, values that they are terrified of. But more than that, to change our foreign policy because of terrorist acts is to reward and encourage more terrorism. It is another form of yielding power to the bad guys. I would urge anyone who thinks that way to read the history of the 1930's, when world powers decided that Czechoslovakia was being selfish and stubborn by not sacrificing itself so that Hitler would no longer threaten the rest of us, and you know what that led to. Appeasing terrorists has been compared to feeding your friends to the tiger in the hope that the tiger will eat you last. It is what weak, powerless countries do, not strong independent ones. And I pray that our government, like the government of Israel, never shrinks to the point where it would do that. Don't let the bad guys win.
A second concern is how we as a nation will respond to what was done to us. Ever since Tuesday, we have felt hurt and angry and most significantly we have felt helpless. There seemed to be so little we could do to help the victims or to hurt the perpetrators. And when a person feels helpless, there is an almost irresistible impulse to do something to reclaim power, to restore a feeling of being in charge. That's why the most sobering comment I heard all week was from a caller to a radio station who quoted the adage "Be careful whom you see as an enemy for you will become like them." Last week the danger to America was from stolen airplanes and falling buildings. Today the danger to America is that, out of our pain and rage, we will forget what we stand for as a people. We will betray precisely those values that our enemies hate us for. The perpetrators of last week's atrocities earned our contempt by killing innocent people in what they believed was a just cause. It's important that we never become contemptible ourselves by becoming like them, by scapegoating innocent Muslims or American Arabs who share our values not theirs, by raining bombs or missiles on somebody, anybody, just to feel powerful again. I would hope that we will identify and punish the people and the governments behind last week's event, and punish them thoroughly. I'm old enough to remember how we did that after Pearl Harbor. A movie about Pearl Harbor puts these words in the mouth of the Japanese admiral: "I fear we awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve." And I expect that the same thing will happen again. But I hope that America never stops being America in the process of bringing people to justice.
We learned another lesson on Tuesday, one that maybe we should have known before but we needed last week's terrible tragedy to make clear to us. After we heard of the horrific events in New York and Washington, we cancelled Religious School classes and sent your children home. We weren't entirely sure why we were doing it. The prospect of a terrorist attack on the Temple was fairly remote. After terrorists had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nobody really believed that Temple Israel of Natick was next on their list. But somehow it seemed like the right thing to do. And when we called you to tell you what we were doing, you thanked us for it.
Only later did I understand why. At a time like that, we want our family around us. We want to know that they are safe, and we want them to know that we are safe. At a time like that, we don't want to be alone. We want to be able to hug somebody, to talk to somebody, even just to watch the news on television with somebody rather than be alone. We learned something about why we need our families.
And then on Wednesday and Thursday, the stories began to come out about some of the people who died in the plane crashes or in the office buildings, and now there were faces and stories to go with the names and numbers. And just as many people can't comprehend the Holocaust when they only hear the number Six Million, they have to read The Diary of Anne Frank, we began to understand just what was lost last week. Many of the people were from the Boston area. Some of them were prominent businessmen, founders of high tech firms, executives of major corporations. But nobody talked about that. People spoke only of what loving husbands and wives, what special fathers and mothers they were, how much they gave to the community. And if we are desperate to find something good and redemptive in this shattering tragedy, that might be it: that is what all of us will be remembered for. Not our accomplishments, not our successes, but the love we shared with the people abound us.
This, after all, is the season for confronting our mortality, for facing up to the unsettling truth that none of us knows how long we have to live. B'ROSH HASHANNAH YIKATEVUN UV'YOM TZOM KIPPUR YEHATEMUN, It is decreed on Rosh HaShannah and confirmed on Yom Kippur, MI YICHYEH UMI YAMUT, who shall live and who shall die, who by sword and who by fire. I don't think the prayer asks us to believe that God decided last September that these thousands of people would not live to see another autumn, and that the terrorists were doing God's will. I think the prayer comes to warn us that, because life is precarious, make sure you start doing the things that really matter, the things that will ultimately win you your immortality.
As many of you know, I have a new book out and that's what it's about: how do we make our lives matter to the world? And the answer is, we do it by loving the people around us. If you have known the feeling of loving someone and being loved by someone, you have changed someone's life and by so doing, you changed the world.
There is another prayer we recite on Rosh HaShannah. We say it several times in the course of the first and second Amidah prayers. We say it individually and then we go back and say it with the congregation. It begins: UV'CHAN TZADDIKIM YIR'U V'YISMACHU VIY'SHARIM YA'ALOZU …V'CHOL HARISHA KULA KE'ASHAN TICHLEH. May this coming year be a year in which good people will have reason to rejoice, a year in which wickedness will be silenced and evil vanish like smoke, for God will remove the dominion of arrogance from the world.
And that, perhaps more than any other single line from the Mahzor, is our prayer today: may this year give good people reason to rejoice for what happens in the world, when we see God's world cleansed of hatred and wickedness. AMEN