Every few years, I run into someone who works in Lower Manhattan. It’s usually someone who works at the OU offices but it may be someone who works on Wall St. Either we’re on the subway or the PATH train in the neighborhood. If I happen to know them well, I ask them their story from that bright Tuesday morning 19 years ago. They always have something to tell. How they jumped off the train for whatever reason a few blocks early and were walking southbound when they heard the explosions above them or right in front of them. Or how they watched from a nearby building as the first plane flew right by their window toward the North tower.
It was a few days into Selichot that year and the Parasha that week was Netzavim. I (and about 1000 other rabbis) began the Derasha that Shabbat by pointing to Rashi’s words toward the beginning of the Parasha. Rashi asks, why is this the Parasha after Ki Tavo? And he answers that after the Jewish people heard the 98 curses of Ki Tavo (on top of the 49 at the end of Vayikra), they despaired. “Who can withstand this,” they asked. Moshe calmed them: “No matter what’s happened, you’re still standing here today.”
When I listen to the stories of the people who were there in Lower Manhattan, I think to myself, these are the people still standing from that day. They saw the planes, they saw the fires and the firemen, they saw the jumpers, they saw the white ash blow out in every direction. Some of them only felt safe when they either got to the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge or when they were ferried across the Hudson River by the heroic flotilla that formed spontaneously and moved more people than the evacuation of Dunkirk in a fraction of the time. These are the people who were still standing.
As the sun disappeared this week, and the orange darkness fell, we went through another of the plagues of Egypt. But we, like those in Lower Manhattan, have to know that the net result will always be that we are still standing. It’s been like that before, and it will always be like that. The word is Nitzav, which is more than upright. It means solid; it means unbowed. That is what we should strive for, even if we are back to Davening at home, or worried about our breathing. We must stand solid.
Congregation Emek Beracha 4102 El Camino Real Palo Alto, CA 94306
