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Sep. 10th, 2011 10:16 pm-Um... I have lots of feelings about 9/11. I've cried more than a few times in the past few days. I'm praying for everyone to make it through the day tomorrow with what emotional strength they can muster intact.
You know, when I got home from school that day and learned, after spending the whole day running to the school's payphone between class periods trying to get in touch with my father whose office was 9 blocks from the World Trade Center, that he was fine and holed up with my uncle and cousin at my grandmother's apartment just above the evacuation zone on 14th Street... I grabbed a prayerbook and went over into a corner of our dining room by myself and recited Mincha, the afternooon prayer, by myself.
I was sixteen, insecure, in the middle of the uneasy process of negotiating a transition from the Conservative Judaism I'd grown up with to something closer to Modern Orthodoxy, and I didn't always feel like I was a 'real Jew'. I wondered if I'd been tainted by secular life, if my instincts weren't really pulling me toward God. A lot of those doubts were erased on 9/11. I sought out in God the answers to impossible questions and God didn't give me the answers, but God instead offered me comfort, a promise that I had a place I could put my trust and my faith.
The Rabbi spoke about 9/11 today in his sermon. He said that the answer the Talmud offers to our questions about how we should move past an event like 9/11 is to rebuild, with a little piece missing. He said Judaism is about living a paradoxical existence, a life inhabited simultaneously in joy and sadness. At Jewish weddings, right beneath the chuppah, we break a glass to remember the destruction of the Temple. That doesn't diminish our joy. It's a part of our joy. If you can understand that, you've penetrated to one of the innermost mysteries of Jewish life.
So my prayer for everyone is that tomorrow, we just live the contradictions, but don't let them overwhelm us.
You know, when I got home from school that day and learned, after spending the whole day running to the school's payphone between class periods trying to get in touch with my father whose office was 9 blocks from the World Trade Center, that he was fine and holed up with my uncle and cousin at my grandmother's apartment just above the evacuation zone on 14th Street... I grabbed a prayerbook and went over into a corner of our dining room by myself and recited Mincha, the afternooon prayer, by myself.
I was sixteen, insecure, in the middle of the uneasy process of negotiating a transition from the Conservative Judaism I'd grown up with to something closer to Modern Orthodoxy, and I didn't always feel like I was a 'real Jew'. I wondered if I'd been tainted by secular life, if my instincts weren't really pulling me toward God. A lot of those doubts were erased on 9/11. I sought out in God the answers to impossible questions and God didn't give me the answers, but God instead offered me comfort, a promise that I had a place I could put my trust and my faith.
The Rabbi spoke about 9/11 today in his sermon. He said that the answer the Talmud offers to our questions about how we should move past an event like 9/11 is to rebuild, with a little piece missing. He said Judaism is about living a paradoxical existence, a life inhabited simultaneously in joy and sadness. At Jewish weddings, right beneath the chuppah, we break a glass to remember the destruction of the Temple. That doesn't diminish our joy. It's a part of our joy. If you can understand that, you've penetrated to one of the innermost mysteries of Jewish life.
So my prayer for everyone is that tomorrow, we just live the contradictions, but don't let them overwhelm us.