The God Squad: 9/11 now
On 9/11 I was the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, and because of my position I was asked to deliver one of the speeches at the 9/11 memorial service at Yankee Stadium on Sept. 24, 2001. I offer it up this year once again as a memorial to the dead and remembered ones but mostly as a memorial to the dead and forgotten ones. May God receive their souls and may God comfort us one and all:
“On that day 3,000 people did not die. On that day one person died 3,000 times.
We say 3,000 died or we say 6 million died, and the saying and the numbers explain nothing except how much death came in how short a time.
The real horror of that day lies not in its bigness but in its smallness, in the small, searing death of one person 3,000 times. And that one person was not a number but our father or our mother, our grandpa or grandma, our brother or sister, or cousin or uncle or aunt, our friend or our lover, our neighbor or our coworker, the gal who delivered our mail or the guy who put out our fires or arrested the bad guys in our town. And the death of each and every one of them alone would be worthy of such a gathering and such a grief.
Our sages taught that when one kills a single person it is like killing the whole world altogether and when one saves a single person it is like saving the whole world altogether. Last week, over 3,000 worlds were killed and, thank the Lord, a few – way too few – worlds were saved by heroes most of whom will never be known. The dimensions of last week’s horror only becomes fully felt when we mourn each murdered world one world at a time.
The Talmud, and the African Masai tribe both teach the same wisdom, “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. Sticks alone can be broken by a child.” The fears and sorrows of this moment are so heavy they can break us if we try to bear them alone. But if we are bundled together we are unbreakable and we shall do more than merely survive, we shall overcome. We shall overcome the forces of hatred without allowing hatred to unbundle us. We shall overcome the forces of terror without allowing fear to unbundle us.
So, in all our comings and our goings, from this time forth let us remember that the person next to you, in front of you, behind you is not merely an obstacle to your free and unfettered life. They are a part of this bundle called America that keeps you from breaking. Let us never again view our fellow New Yorkers, our fellow Americans, our fellow members of the human community of the world, as limitations on our life, but rather as the moral twine that binds us and saves us and delivers us from evil.
For some of us, the source of that strength is not just community but community under God, and that religious belief shared by all the Abrahamic faiths that every human being is made in the image of God.
We people of faith also share the belief that a good God will not allow evil to win out over goodness, hate over hope, and death over life. History proves this, but for religious people of all faiths the proof comes from the way we know that we are bundled up in God’s love, and the way we know that our dear ones who have died are now wrapped up in the bundle of eternal life in the World to Come, in Heaven and there they wait for us, waiting to fulfill the promise that we will not be separated forever from those we love.
And for those who cannot find hope through faith, I say to you that you are also a part of our bundle too. For our mission now is not for all of us to agree that the name for hope is God. Our main task now is to agree that hope was not one of the worlds destroyed on that day.
In his suffering Job still found hope in a cut down tree,
For there is hope of a tree, even if it be cut down, it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. If its roots are old in the earth…at first scent of water it will bud and bring forth boughs like a plant. (Job 14:7)
Dear God, we have been cut down, but our roots are deep in you. And today, yes today, we can smell the scent of water, because today we are sticks in a bundle and today, we are unbreakable.”
AMEN
(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)
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