24 rabbis have contributed essays to a book entitled Terror, Trauma and Tragedy, both acknowledging the pain and anger violence causes, and offering ways forward and hope for the future.
September 8, 2016 11:48
Terror is becoming a daily news item. In the past year we have seen major attacks in Belgium, France, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the USA. There have been many smaller attacks in countless other countries. Whether an attack is huge and headline grabbing, or small and less able to capture the television cameras, every one turns individual lives upside down, so that they are never the same again.
In response to these seemingly endless atrocities, 24 rabbis have contributed essays to a book being published this week entitled Terror, Trauma and Tragedy, both acknowledging the pain and anger such violence causes, and offering ways forward and hope for the future. I contributed an essay because I was a rabbi in downtown New York on 9/11 - which has its 15th anniversary this week - and the day will haunt me forever.
Jewish legend says that Abraham was given 10 trials by God. The famous trial is the final trial, the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. Less well known is the second trial, kivshan ha'aish, the fiery furnace, into which Abraham was thrown.
At 8.45am on Tuesday September 11 2001, I stepped out of my front door in New York's Greenwich Village. A huge plane thundered 100 metres above my head and I was confused. "Where can it possibly be landing?" I thought. A minute later I rounded the corner into 7th Avenue and saw that the north tower of the World Trade Center had a huge jagged hole at its top, like a shark's mouth filled with flames.
Weeks before I had arranged for the conversion of a three-month-old boy, adopted by a member of my congregation, to take place at 9:30am on September 11 at the mikveh, the ritual immersion pool, on the Upper West Side, and that's where I was heading.
The north tower had a huge jagged hole like a shark's mouth
At the mikveh all was chaos. A rabbi whose child was at the kindergarten at the foot of the World Trade Center was beside himself. My congregant was nowhere to be seen and when he finally struggled into the building he described to us how he had been in the subway stop below the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. He had run through falling debris with his new child in his arms.
When I emerged from the mikveh building, I looked down the length of the island and where the towers had stood there was now a huge plume of black smoke reaching up into the sky, like a volcanic eruption. I thought that kivshan ha'aish had come to Manhattan.
After the towers fell a neighbour said to me: "Now do you know there is no God?" God certainly was not present in the acts of murder. God was not in the wind, God was not in the earthquake and God was not in the fire as the towers fell.
But God was in the voices and hands of the millions, of all religions and none, who came together after the attacks, to pray, to help, to heal. God was present when New Yorkers volunteered their time, their strength, their expertise, in order to give aid to the physically and emotionally wounded.
That morning at the mikveh, as the towers burned, we welcomed a child into the Jewish people. He was sweet and smiling - and his new and shining life became for us a bright beacon of hope in a dark day. His immersion into the water was a symbol that the chain of tradition is passed on, no matter what; that the human desire to celebrate goodness will never be submerged by evil.
The shofar was sounded by the Israelites before battle. As we listened to its notes on Rosh Hashanah, one week after 9/11, we feared the reality of war. Tradition tells us that Sarah died of grief thinking that her son Isaac had been sacrificed and that her cries sounded like a shofar. As we listened to its notes, we heard the sounds of grief that filled New York.
We sound the shofar as a call to teshuvah (repentance). We sound the shofar to hasten the messianic time when the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac will stand permanently side by side, in peace, with all the peoples of the world standing with them. Our cries for peace must be as loud as the blasts of the shofar.
If each one of us works, hand in hand with God, to ensure that justice prevails upon the earth for all its people, then perhaps we will finally live in the world envisioned by Micah, where "nation shall not take up sword against nation". A world in which there are no more fiery furnaces.
This article is an extract from Terror, Trauma and Tragedy - Rabbinic Responses, edited by rabbis Jonathan Romain and David Mitchell and published by the Movement for Reform Judaism, £9.99
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