Sabbath Messages | Sabbath Message: Sept. 11, 2004

Good Sabbath

September 11, 2004

As summer autumns into Fall, we remember the trauma and tragedy of another 9/11, while waiting for the next one. Fear is always a bad motivator but it does focus ones attention, doesn't it? Helplessness has a power that transcends moment.

"Fear is the mother of foresight." (H.Taylor)

"It is only the fear of God that can deliver us from the fear of man." (Witherspoon) - hmm, how true. Are we certain that God created man, or was it the first of His greatest mistakes, having faith that man might meet His expectations. The weakness of humans is that fear propels them into hatred and destruction, while love builds up the sale of chocolate. Now that's real choice!

"It is a terrible, an inexorable law, that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own; in the face of one's victim, one sees himself." (James Baldwin)

I remember that first 9/11 when TV captured all my senses, including fear and bewilderment. As I asked God "why" I tried to make sense of it all. What I was seeing was the camera's view, as dramatic as I've ever witnessed it.

God, what is life's purpose?
A moment of intense fear that erases mortality"
Is that what You planned
or do we upset Your plans
with hate that is white hot -
too often in Your name?

TV exaggerates our fears by making them come to life; the digital makes fiction into experience as we destroy the fine line between fantasy and reality. There is no such thing as fiction as hatred crosses the boundary each generation. Then, to what can we look forward, or does even God know the answer? Yet I've been taught that He has always given us free choice - not always free from cost - but at least free for us to discern right from wrong, the Golden Rule instead of the bent one that erases ethics and mistakes passion for love.

My mind pauses as it focuses on that second plane running into the 2nd tower. As a constant flyer I could only be struck by the thought of being on that plane - of the crash - and was this real or had reality crossed into science fiction as it often does.

God, what have You wrought?
(or was it we)?

When Fran and I actually visited ground zero a couple of weeks later, and heard the ex-NYC homicide detective narrate each moment of that terrible morning, as we looked over the zero-point - our imagination captured the moments as if we had been there, the leaping bodies hurtling past his saddened, frightened eyes..."I've seen everything in my 26 years of homicide" he shared, "but this was the worst!," he uttered to no one in particular, sickened by the memory of what his eyes had witnessed, as his mind tried to give it perspective, which was yet impossible.

Perspective allows one to make sense of some order to events; there was no such sense here, no perspective, just the processing of images which mixed human terror with erasure of physical things; what once was the beauty of tall buildings was now a collapsed instruction on the prevention of a next time..your mind processes, trying desperately to make sense of it, to give the brain breathing room as TV reached for instant judgments.

We walked the walls around zero, reading the pitiful letters scrawled to the dead, seeing photos of loved ones - now gone forever - men and women at desks, at coffee break, "protected" by their innocence no more. This week's NY Times article tries to analyze why people leaped out of office windows, and there was no sense to it, just knowing that it had happened. Was it the incredible heat, flames, fear or all of the above..like people joining hands and whispering goodbyes to each other, leaping directly into God's hands - that's the way I like to believe it and so it must be, for there is no pain that cannot be erased by God's bosom and presence.

I shall always remember that day and the days beyond, each anniversary like JFK's death, like Pearl Harbor, or the foggy day, in WWII, when that bomber had crashed into the Empire State building, when I was so young. Memories flood out of captivity still asking "why" and never receiving answers, only memories and amplified "whys" over which Madam Fate still puzzles.

"God created man to strive against the evil in his soul."
(Hasidic)

I leave you with your memories of that terrible day, Take this Sabbath to thank God that no more have occurred, to petition God to cause His countenance to shine upon the 1000 brave dead soldiers and thousands more of the innocent who passed into eternity that awful day. Dedicate this Sabbath to their memory and with the companionship of one you love and need.

sandy