Nearly ten years ago I sat in a classroom studying Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary when a student poked his head in the room and said, "The Twin Towers are gone." My friends and I walked up to one of our apartments and turned on the TV. We watched as the Towers burned just a few miles away. I went into another room to call home. I spoke to my father who was at work, and he was almost unable to speak. At the time, he was still working for the department of defense and had occasional meetings at the Pentagon. Days later we began to smell the gray and bitter aftermath of the attacks wafting up north. Still later, I looked out from a high window in the Seminary tower to see two beams of light rising up into the sky from Ground Zero.
The question of "Where was I" was the first thing that came to mind as I begin to reflect on the recent news that United States personnel entered Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan and killed him in the course of a firefight. However, the question, as I look backwards in time, is less about geography and more about perspective and worldview. In 2001, I was still a young seminarian who was still at the beginning of advanced Jewish and theological studies. I was still a student and mostly focused on my studies. There was shelter within the walls of my school. Now I ask, "Where am I", and as I process the news that the mastermind of 9/11 is gone, I want to feel good about the fact that a dangerous person is gone, but I also recognize that the threat of terror has not gone away. Religious fanaticism is like a disease. It spreads through individuals and societies. We can cure individual cases of the "sickness", but we cannot cure fanaticism and terror only by rooting out terrorists.
A friend of mine who wrote about the Bin Laden story quoted the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 24, "If your enemy falls, do not exult..." For me, the more compelling piece of wisdom comes from the prayer "Alenu" that originated as a High Holiday prayer and came to be a concluding prayer for every service, "Al ken nekaveh lecha Ado--nai Elo--henu...letaken olam bemalchut Shadai...lehafnot Elecha kol rishay aretz..." "And so we hope in You, Ado--nai, Our God...to repair the world through your Sovereignty...and to turn toward You all the wicked of the world..." This prayer expresses a hope that one day there could be a constant striving toward unity instead of division and conflict, that those who have dedicated themselves to evil might wake up from the nightmare of pain, suffering, and death to a dream of building, hoping, dreaming, and restoration, that we might be better able to distribute the resources and riches of the world so that more people can benefit from its bounty.
At the same time as we express these prayers for the present and future, it is important that we thank our men and women in uniform, as well as the support staff that guides them from home, for their courage and sacrifice in the pursuit of justice and in the pursuit of those who seek to do evil to the peoples of the world. May God grant continuing strength, perseverance, and courage to all the men and women in uniform who serve our country and protect us across the globe and here at home.
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