9/11 Twenty Years On

There are days that come to serve as historical pivot-points to the extent that it feels reasonable to refer to divide the history of the nation with respect to them into time-before and time-after. April 15, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln died, feels that way to me. So does December 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so too does November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Others, I’m sure, will have their own dates to add. (What is true on the national level is also true on the personal, of course: which of us would not add in his or her wedding date as one of those pivot-point dates or the date on which any of us became parents for the first time? But I speak here of the nation, not of its individual citizens.) And I think most Americans would agree that September 11, 2001, is in that category as well—and not just because something horrific occurred on that date, but because it has transcended its own news cycle and become part of our national culture. There are no college students (except maybe older, “returning” students) who remember 9/11 personally: the freshman and sophomores were born after that awful day and the juniors and seniors were babies or toddlers in 2001. And yet there is no newspaper or website in the nation that feels obliged to explain what it means when it references 9/11 without mentioning the year or the events of that day. Everybody just knows. That is, I suppose, what it means for a day to serve as a pivot-point in history: everybody, including people born after the fact, know precisely what is being referenced without any further explanation needed.

This Shabbat marks the twentieth anniversary of that horrific day. Like all of you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the North Tower. (It was a quarter to six in the morning in California, but I’m an early riser and always check a few news websites before I get down to my day’s work.) And I remember too that stomach-turning moment just twenty minutes later when the second airplane crashed into the South Tower and it suddenly became obvious that we were dealing not with a single tragic aviation accident that had just happened, but rather with a fully intentional act of violent barbarism intended to kill as many random Americans as possible at once as a way of making some sort of perverse political statement. By the time most Californians were waking up, the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and no one knew what might not happen next. In retrospect, it seems odd that we took our kids to school that morning as though it were a normal school day—but we did and then we went right back home to watch CNN and try to understand what was going on.

So much has been written about that day and its aftermath that I won’t attempt to say something new or to share some insight that no one but myself has had over these last two decades. Instead, and with the full understanding that this Saturday is the yahrtzeit of almost three thousand innocents whose lives were cut short by an act of insane savagery, I would like to offer an image from the past that has comforted me over these years…and particularly once we moved from California to New York just a year after 9/11 and settled into our new home not twenty-five miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan.

The image derives from one of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems. The poet, originally from Huntington but by 1883 a veteran Brooklynite, is looking out at Lower Manhattan from his perch in Brooklyn Heights. He takes note of the ongoing effort to build the Brooklyn Bridge (which was completed later that same year, the year of my maternal grandmother’s birth), then shifts his gaze and focuses instead on the ferry boats that in his day brought commuters back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn all day long for all the years before any bridge linked Long Island to Manhattan. (And there were a lot of them, too: the first grant for a commercial ferry linking Brooklyn and Manhattan was issued by the New Amsterdam authorities to one Cornelis Dircksen in 1642, a cool 241 years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. For more details, click here.) But this is a nineteenth-century image I’m trying to conjure up, not a seventeenth-century one. And by Whitman’s day the ferry is a real thing, a regular part of New York life, something ordinary and banal. Yet, as the poet looks out at the harbor, he is struck by the timelessness of the scene before his eyes, by the simultaneous in-history and outside-of-history aspects to the scene before his eyes, by the ability of the city to transcend the life of its own citizens. The poem is wistful and sober; for me, it as if the poet had some sort of preternatural ability to see the Towers absent, then present, then absent again as he somehow understood something of what would one day happen to the vista stretched out before his eyes as he gazed across New York Harbor on a sunny day in the 1880s.

The poem is called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and is about the strange way people live within time and outside it, each of us living a life bounded by the dates of fortunate birth and inexorable death but also living in a world in which life transcends the lives of the living, thus making each living soul part of a grand scheme of history that exists independently of the details of their own lives. And then the poet looks (at least in my mind’s eye) directly at the patch of ground on which the World Trade Center will one day rise and somehow sees growth and loss, tragedy and rebirth, a city that both is its inhabitants but which also exists independently of them:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

And in that idea—that the city, and by extension the nation, somehow both exist anchored in time but also fully capable of transcending time, and thus capable also of surviving even the most horrific disasters and tragedies because those events are by definition time-bound whereas the nation is specifically not—within that single idea lies, at least for me, some comfort as I think back to that September two decades ago and seek some kind of context for thinking about our terrible losses on that terrible day.

Sitting in the warm sunlight, Whitman saw darkness in Lower Manhattan across the bay and felt a prophetic frisson of looming disaster:

            It is not you alone the dark patches fall,

            The dark threw its dark patches down upon me also,

            The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious.

            My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

            Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.

The man was a poet, not a prophet. He certainly couldn’t have imagined the World Trade Center buildings. (The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the nation’s first “skyscraper,” opened just three years before Whitman wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and was all of ten stories tall.) Yet the evil that would befall so many in that spot was somehow palpable to the poet as he sat in the warm light of a Brooklyn afternoon and gazed out at the site on which one day the WTC would stand, developing his sense that cities and nations truly do exist outside of time and can therefore flourish and grow even despite the evil that befalls them. In that thought, lie the seeds of comfort for a stricken city and a stricken nation. 

There’s also something deeply Jewish about this line of thinking. The eternal people isn’t eternal, after all, because individual men and women live forever, but because they live their lives as individuals but also as part of a collective whole that transcends the details of their lives: that is what the prophet meant when he used the phrase am olam to describe the Jewish people and it’s what we mean today when we talk about the weird paradox that, despite everything, the most powerful of our enemies (the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Soviets) have vanished from the stage of world history and the Jewish people has somehow remained. And the same is true of our American nation, that it exists independent of its citizens and that it endures regardless of what happens to any of us. The thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly in that category, but so are the dead of 9/11: individuals whose lives were cruelly cut short, but who live on in the idea of a nation that transcends the life stories of its citizens and exists in its own right. May their memory be a blessing for us all! And may they all—the dead in the airplanes and on the ground in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—may they all rest in peace.