Unity and the Lessons of 9/11

Sermon Shabbat Shoftim 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon

This coming week we will commemorate the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, a somber and terrible day in American history and one that had and has profound implications for the entire world.  It’s hard to grasp that it has been well over twenty years since that tragic terrorist attack, and it’s astonishing to realize that with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 we only ended our last American involvement in wars that originated with 9/11 after 20 years of killing, dying, torture and maiming—and that, as last October 7th demonstrated so horribly, we are very far from eliminating terrorism, even Islamist terrorism, from our world. 

It has been a complicated twenty three years, hasn’t it?

As a rabbi I chaired the commemorations of 9/11 for the Multi-Faith Alliance for many years, including through a complex 10th Anniversary series of events.  I watched as the initial energy waned over the years, as new tragedies and historical events replaced our memories of that horrible day.  Eventually, it became clear that annual commemorations that didn’t take place in New York were of less and less interest to people.  Life moves on, and shocking tragedies continue to occur that obscure our memories of past disasters. 

9/11 reemerges as a kind of historical curiosity, a footnote or comparison to October 7th for Jews.  Do you remember where you were when it happened?  I certainly do.  Questions like that can bring 9/11 back home emotionally.  But I wonder: what have we really learned over these nearly two and a half decades?  What do those shockingly collapsed towers, that failed attack on the Capitol, the damage and death in the Pentagon, the heroism on that plane in Pennsylvania, what do they mean to us now? 

We lost more people on 9/11 than died at Pearl Harbor; and while that pales proportionally to what was lost on October 7th in the much smaller nation of Israel, it was devastating.  The well over 20-year-long war against terrorism has, at the least, kept another such event from occurring here in America—but it certainly didn’t stop the creation of the Islamic State terror regime of ISIS, or the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, or the Charlie Hedbo attack, or October 7th, or many other terrible things from happening.

I think of my own children, whom I schlepped to annual 9/11 memorials every year of their childhood; only my oldest can remember that day in his own memory, and he was just 6 years old at the time.  What will my kids take as the lesson to learn from 9/11?  How will Ayelet think of it, born more than twenty years after it occurred?

You know, we Americans aren’t very good at serious introspection as a nation. But if I were to pray for anythingas we approach the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, and I will, it would be for us to seriously look back and consider what we might have done differently in response.  And to try to grasp the lessons of 9/11 for this changing world in a more serious and profound way.

This is Shabbat Shoftim, when are commanded to pursue justice.  When we examine our own nation, and our world, we have a few things to figure out and some important lessons to learn.  What can we come to understand about justice in the aftermath of that terrible time? 

While I am fascinated by history and the choices that historical figures make, I am not a military or political analyst. Still, one thing that has always puzzled me about the American response to 9/11 is the choices we made about whom we were going to attack.  Of the 19 men who were 9/11 murderers, the hijacking terrorists who killed so many of our citizens and the citizens of other nations, 15 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia.  Two came from the United Arab Emirates, and one each came from Egypt and Lebanon.  Of the 19 terrorists, four were pilots, the most highly trained and trusted of the mass murderers, and these came respectively from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. 

Yet we chose to direct our American military first against Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda had rented space from the Taliban, and then against Iraq, which had no connection to Al-Qaeda at all and actually opposed it in every way.  At no point did we consider punishing Saudi Arabia for its citizens’ direct involvement and leadership in 9/11, although some of the 9/11 terrorists were the children of prominent figures in the Saudi political and economic leadership.

While those Afghanistan and Iraq wars initially were widely supported by the American public, these were strange military and political choices, to say the least.  The four pilot hijackers actually trained in the United States, and were part of a terror cell that originated in Hamburg, Germany.  When the vicious mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was eventually tracked and killed, he was in Pakistan; the Afghanistan war effort never caught up with him.

Three years ago we finally concluded the long, expensive effort to build Western-style democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I do not think it will surprise anyone if I say that the United States was unsuccessful in those efforts.

So just what did we learn from 9/11 that we can take with us these 23 years later? 

To me, the greatest of those lessons was the way that all Americans in the year 2001, within a very short time, came together in a unique and powerful display of solidarity.  We understood that we are, in fact, one nation, with common goals and fears and dreams.  It may have taken a tangible enemy, a truly evil attack to bring us together, to shock us out of our complacency and break down our silos and separations.  But for a while, in shared tragedy and shock, 9/11 did bring us together.  It reminded us of our common needs and hopes, of our lost innocence and security.

At a multi-faith service that I chaired on October 11, 2001, a prominent Evangelical minister standing on the bimah of my synagogue said, “We all came to this country in different boats, but we are all in the same boat now.” For a while, at least, 9/11 changed us.  Jews, Christians and Muslims spoke to one another, and so did Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs and, well, every one of the varied religions and groups in America.  We realized we were part of a shared, diverse nation, that we had been attacked, all of us, because of that very diversity and openness.

I remember visiting New York City a year or so after 9/11 and being astonished at how nice everyone was.  That had never been my experience in New York before, although I always enjoyed the city.  But now there was a completely different approach to how New Yorkers greeted people and treated people.  It was as though something profound had changed, and we all came to realize that we needed each other.  It stayed true for a while; when I visited 5 years later with three young children in tow, everyone went out of their way to be gracious and kind.  Manhattan had been transformed into Indianapolis or something, where everybody is supposed to be nice.

But really, everywhere in the US for a while people treated each other differently, better, with more kindness.  We were, in quite interesting ways, brought together by 9/11, and made one.

Well, it has been 23 years since that time.  And in so many ways we have lost that concept completely.  We have retreated into our own silos again, perhaps to a greater degree than ever before.  In the time since 9/11 we have developed nearly separate media systems, information sources that seemingly bear no resemblance to each other or, often, the factual truth.  And we have come to fetishize our differences at the expense of our commonalities.  People casually talk of seceding from the nation, habitually claim those on the other side of the political aisle are evil, believe conspiracy theories of the most ludicrous sort, threaten revolution, demonize those who believe differently.

It seems we have forgotten the central lesson of 9/11: we are stronger together.  We are better unified than divided.  We have far more in common than we have differences. 

As we approach this anniversary of 9/11, on this Shabbat Shoftim, we need to rediscover that connectedness, that unity that bound us together twenty three years ago.  And it shouldn’t take a great, sudden, shocking tragedy to do that. 

It might be enough for us to simply look back, look around, and do a bit of Tshuvah.

One of the things I love best about Congregation Beit Simcha is that we aren’t joined together by a political ideologies.  We are here for the purpose of creating a great congregation, a synagogue where we can pray and study and celebrate and mourn together as Jews and as a community.  And perhaps it is because of this that we may be the best kind of example of the kind of response to 9/11 that we ought to be able to all make today.  To seek to bring together, in respect, all the diversities of our community across the boundary lines of race, religion, orientation, and even ideology. 

If we can do that in our own shul, then perhaps we can do that in this great nation, too.

And then the memories of those who died on 9/11 will have helped us to grow into the country that we should truly be.