Sept. 11 by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone

First days of September. First days of Elul. It is so good to be together as we turn toward the new season.

         Have you noticed the chilly air filtering in each morning, and the first signs of the trees and grasses changing color? Some of us are harvesting our tomatoes and kale, and pulling out our cardigans or pullover for the first time. All of these are the outward signs that it is time to start looking back on the year and inward at ourselves. Looking back and looking in.

         Looking back is like standing on a mountainside and finding at the winding trail you just climbed, to see how far you’ve come, to marvel at the switch backs you’ve come through and the occluded terrain which may have felt like we weren’t getting anywhere: We look back to get perspective; we look back to see the patterns we are weaving in our lives, what has changed, what has stayed the same, what we have done, and what is the fruit of all our work and worry?

         Equally important is looking inside to see our interior landscape. We look inside to discern how we have come through all of the trials and the work of the past year.  We take our pulse, to check on the climate of our inner being, and the condition of our heart. We check for signs of resignation, signs of cynicism, signs of depression. While we are all growing physically older, we look inside to check whether we may be turning old in our attitudes, as in:  As in: set in our ways and unyielding, as opposed to opening to the life-giving currents around us?

         All of this is in service to the path of Teshuvah, the transformative urge that we all have planted within us, to grow and change, to evolve ourselves. The Mishnah states that Teshuvah is one of the 6 things created before creation. In other words, The rabbis are teaching us how primal is our need to change, grow, get better, evolve.

         This particular year, 2011, the month building up to the New Year/Rosh Hashana will have a particular flavor because it will be filled with a collective looking back and looking inside as we commemorate 9/11. In looking back and within to that terrifying, life changing day ten years ago, much will be in the news and in the media, and we will likely be bombarded with stories and remembrances.

         But I’d like to put it into a Jewish context, and in the service of our teshuvah work, the anniversary of 9-11 gives us an important opportunity to look back and look inside and use the tragedy to grow, get better and evolve.

         (But first I am going to tell you what I am not going to speak about tonight, due to time and conserving your sanity. I will reserve it for another time: There is some very interesting dream research that was done surrounding the 9-11 catastrophe. As early as one year in advance, dream matrixes both in the West and in the Middle East were showing studies of people dreaming about erupting buildings, plane crashes and falling towers.

            It seems that people both here and in the Middle East had been registering material unavailable in waking thought, what has been called in the field of depth psychology as “the unthought known.” This gives rise to the thinking that everything that happens is already present right here and now…and that we are seeding it with our thoughts and dreams, the power of our minds.

            Here’s another thing I am not going to go into tonight: the choices we have made as a nation that came out of 9-11, the lost opportunity of unity and solidarity, and the turn instead toward fear and castigation, scapegoating and torture; we allowed our leaders to make the choice to pursue a path of war that has resulted in untold loss of life, resources, and dignity.

All of these are deep strains of teshuvah.)

         When we commemorate the innocent lives that were lost on and around 9-11, we come upon numerous stories of people who transcended the fear and panic of the day and took surprising action for the sake of others.

         Remember in the days following 9-11 as the stories began to fill the news, I think most of the nation was in tears most of the time. Our hearts were breaking from the pain of children who lost their parents and parents searching for their children, but alongside the pain was a swelling with pride and awe at the same time, at our countrymen and women:

         The first responders who walked through corridors roaring with fire and tore up flight after flight to find people trapped in the rubble; and then, the people who continued to put themselves in harms way for weeks and months afterwards looking for survivors; The business people who delayed their own safety to pull others out, carried others down flights of stairs, stopped to pray with the dying.

         Why are we so intrigued by these stories? I think it because  something inside of us is nourished by altruism because in our hearts we all have the capacity for this greatness inside of us.

         What is it about heroic acts? The Rabbis teach that a hero –a Gibor- is defined by her ability to master her instincts. Kovesh et Yitzro. Because we are all physically programmed with the instinct to survive, one of the strongest forces in the human animal. So our bodies make us hungry to get us to eat; They signal us that we are too hot or too cold to alert us to managing our bodies’ temperature. They give us pain to warn us of possible malfunction in our organs, and fatigue to get us to go to sleep to recharge ourselves.

         When we ignore these and other calls for self care (which we do all the time) we are running counter to our survival demands. Some of us might be able to testify about the neurotic reasons we have for overriding our instincts, going without food, sleep, and putting ourselves through pain. But right now I am speaking about the ability to override nature’s programming for a higher purpose. When your body yells at you to get out of a burning building, the ability to put your own fear and pain aside, to deliberately disregard that call, to overrule your own self needs for the sake of another soul, that is what I call heroism. HaKovesh et Yitzro. Mastering our nature.

         Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher, put it this way: "Man must satisfy his bodily needs in order to survive…to ensure the survival of the individual and the species." In other words, we are programmed to guard against personal harm. We are programmed to fight for our own existence. When we go against that programming, when we contradict our nature, when we push aside our own comfort and safety for  the sake of someone else. That is a small miracle.

         We are asked by Torah to do this as much as possible. To transcend our selves for the good of others. Now this is clearly counter to the comfort culture in which we live. The one whose magazines are entitled ME, SELF and MORE. In which self care and investing in our own enlightenment, if not our own portfolios, is the highest value. But being Jewish my friends is the Hero’s Journey. That means: We are here to know ourselves, care for ourselves, and yet, transcend ourselves when we hear the call.

         I have often thought about what really happened on flight 93, the third flight that was hijacked. Nobody knows for sure, but it is widely speculated that it was bound for the White House or the Capitol Building… but instead mysteriously crashed in flames in a Pennsylvania field.

         We do know from the four calls made by a man named Ted Burnett on that flight to his wife Deena that the hijackers had seized control of the plane. She had told him about the attack on the World Trade Center so he understood that he and everyone on the plane were in the hands of the same kind of madness horror. But instead of submitting to the fear and panic of the moment, instead of simply accepting his fate, he and a small group of others decided to act. And in fighting back, whatever Mr. Burnett and his new friends did to distract or sabotage the hijackers’ plans, the plane was averted. Did he know that no one would survive anyway? Did that help him fight, like the Jews who were responsible for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

         I have often imagined those terrifying moments and have asked myself, like many of you, I am sure: What would I have done in the same situation? Would I have slunk down in my seat, frozen in fear, awaiting my destiny? Or would I have rallied myself to rise up, to go against my instinct to confront my fear, to stand up in the face of evil, extending beyond my own terror and instinct to survive to think of the people outside that plane who were slated to suffer?

          When we think about such people as TED and put ourselves in his shoes, our thoughts might be called hirhurei teshuvah: the promptings of teshuvah because they challenge us, they challenge our instinctual nature, these inspirational acts call us to rise up and be more.

         We will never know all the stories or the extent of the self-sacrifice that occurred ten years ago on 9-11. But I trust that God does.

         The world turned into a fiery volcano that day. You might say that our thoughts and images, our Hollywood movies and our video games, our dreams and our fantasies all foretold it, and even seeded it. One study that came out recently of dreams watched during the year before 9-11 was filled with planes crashing, exploding towers, fiery mass destruction.

         One of the lessons that  911 teaches is that nothing is completely out of our control.  Life continuously and daily gives us opportunity after opportunity to choose to go beyond ourselves, to overcome our instinctual nature, to add to life. And I believe that how we act in the big precipitous moments is determined by how we act each day in the small acts of going beyond ourselves.  Heroism takes practice.

 For just as primal as our need to survive; just as deeply programmed as our need for self-preservation is another deeply rooted archetypal need: the need to change, to grow, to do better, to evolve beyond our Yetzer, to master ourselves. This is what the rabbis teach and this other primal need  is called teshuvah.

         And so as we feel the brisk night air entering the windows and hear the call of the new month, to look back and see the patterns we are weaving in our lives, to look inside to grow, let’s remember that the heroism that prevailed at 9-11 is inside each one of us. Like seeds just waiting to sprout. The urge to teshuvah goads us to our own greatness, through the practice of going beyond ourselves. Every time we surpass ourselves, it is an act of heroism. Because each choice we make adds up into acts that change the world.

Shabbat Shalom.

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