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9-26-01
A Still, Small Voice
By Janet R. Kirchheimer
“Listen
to the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the Torah of your mother" (Proverbs 1:8).
I tried to keep this in mind during the events and aftermath of the bombing
of the World Trade Center on September 11th.
When I got to work that morning, I turned on my radio and heard that a plane had crashed
into the World Trade Center. A short time
later, the second tower was hit. I called my
friend Stephanie who works nearby to make sure she was okay and she told me that she had
not heard from her husband, Elia, who was working there.
About a half an hour later, she called to say he was okay and that she told
him to come to the CLAL office. When I saw
Elia coming down the hall, I took his face in my hands, gave him a big hug and brought him
to my office. He was in shock, and I did my
best to comfort him, as did other people. We
provided him with a refuge. We let him talk;
he told us what happened, what he saw, what he was feeling.
He and his wife couldn’t get back home that night and stayed at my apartment in
Manhattan. We all talked about what had
happened that day, of what might happen in the coming days, and tried to help him cope as
best we could. The next morning his wife was
required to go to work, and Elia and I stayed in my apartment and talked.
He told me he was grateful to God to be alive, but was struggling with the trauma of the
event. I told him that I knew that recovering
from this experience would not be easy, but I promised him that he would come through it. He would have good days, and he would have bad
days. The painful memories would eventually
begin to fade, and the trauma would be integrated into the person he would become. He would no longer be who he was before the
attack.
A little while later, I called another friend whose brother works at the World Trade
Center. She told me that he was injured from falling debris as he escaped from his
building and was staying with her. I told Elia what had happened, and shared
"the Torah of my mother" with him. Three
years ago my father suffered a ruptured aneurysm. When
the doctor told us that my father would not only survive but recover, my mother said that
we needed to do a mitzvah. We left the intensive care unit and went to visit
a dear friend of hers who was dying of cancer on another ward. Elia and I went out to the grocery store to buy
food and toiletry items and brought them to my friend’s apartment.
That afternoon Elia and his wife were able to get back to their home, and I began to speak
to my other friends about their experiences. One
friend said she could not understand how someone could blow up the Trade Center, how
people could do something like that to other people.
I told her I wasn’t shocked or surprised. My parents are Holocaust
survivors, and I’ve known that the world contains evil people since I was very young. Like everyone else, I am trying to make some sense
of this, but I know that there are people who are capable of great hatred and evil, of
hatred so deep that human life becomes inconsequential.
A week to the day after the attack on the World Trade Center, it was Rosh HaShanah, and I
was sitting in my parents’ shul in
Connecticut. I was finding it difficult to
concentrate and to feel hopeful for the New Year. But
as I recited the U’netanah Tokef prayer,
I began to feel some hope. The author of this
prayer speaks of what takes place on Rosh HaShanah: each person’s record is brought
before God by an angel, each individual is judged for the New Year and this judgment is
sealed on Yom Kippur. A great shofar is said to sound and then a still, small
voice is heard. The prayer then lists what
could happen – who shall live and who shall die, who by fire, who by water, who by
sword and who by beast, who by hunger and who by thirst, who shall have rest and who shall
have no rest, etc. And as I came to the
phrase that ends this prayer – the phrase declaring that teshuvah (repentance), tefillah (prayer), and
tzedakah (acts of charity) "ma’avi’rin"
the evil of the decree -- I began to hear that still, small voice.
The
word “ma’avi’rin” is usually
translated as annul or mitigate. It also
means to pass over or through, to traverse, to go beyond.
I do not believe that if you repent, pray, and give charity that the evil
decree will magically be taken away. Rather,
I think this prayer is trying to give us a way to cope.
Though we cannot evade life’s tragedies, teshuvah, tefillah,
and tzedakah can help us to pass over, to
traverse (and surmount) the trauma that we suffer as a result.
Traumas
get mingled and mixed into our lives. There
are times when my father’s illness and difficult recovery seem so far away, and times
when the pain returns so fresh that it leaves me in tears and afraid. And I’ve come to accept that these feelings
of pain will never go away. They have become
part of me, and I have been changed.
In that moment, I saw that I would be able work through the trauma of the past week as well and make it through the difficult times to come, and be changed in the process. Perhaps this is why we Jews are called "Ivrim" or "those who cross over." Our tradition has given us a wonderful gift -- teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah -- tools that can help us to cross over and through, tools that give us the ability to keep going.
As the words of the U’netanah Tokef reverberated in me, I began to feel more confident about returning to New York and reclaiming my life, and about my ability to help my friends who were more directly affected by the attack on the World Trade Center. That still, small voice that had crept its way into my head and then into the rest of me was telling me that there was hope, that life would be sweet again, even at an hour when such hope seemed rather naïve. And as my parents brought me to the train station the morning after Rosh HaShanah, I listened attentively to the words of my father. He passed on to me what his father had passed on to him: "Keep your head high, even though it is difficult."
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