September 11 and October 7 - The Jewish Standard

I was summoned for jury duty last week.

I live in Manhattan, so I went all the way downtown, to where the Twin Towers once stood.

It was the week before September 11.

It was a beautiful day, all green and blue and gold and cool and breezy, the teasing beginning of fall. The neighborhood was full of people — apparently tourists, happy tourists, mainly without children, probably because the school year already had started just about everywhere across the country.

It felt odd being there then. The towers fell 23 years ago. Babies born that year have graduated from college, into the brave new world of security lines and bag checks at airports and other places, like the courthouse to which I’d been summoned.

Those of us who were adults then, particularly those of us who lived in the metropolitan area, remember that day, and the weeks and months that followed, as a surreal time. September 11 itself was a day when the sky was so blue that it seemed almost impossible, as if a painter had somehow managed to climb a ladder up to heaven in order to apply a cerulean tint to every visible inch of it. We remember that.

We remember the black smoke and foul smell that drifted uptown every night for weeks after. We remember the constant sound of helicopters. We remember the posters seeking the missing.

Those posters were not entirely unlike the ones that now bring us the smiling faces of hostages in Gaza, represented by photos taken at a time when they had absolutely no idea of the horrors that were coming for them.

So last week, at lunchtime, released from the courthouse, I decided to explore Ground Zero.

The mood in the neighborhood seemed generally festive, although there was a line to get into the Ground Zero museum, and the people who waited on the line seemed more heavy-hearted than the other visitors. I didn’t have enough time for the museum, so I went into the Oculus, the huge Port Authority of New York and New Jersey-owned subway station and Westfield-operated shopping mall that stands near Ground Zero. It’s imposing and starkly white, inside and out; it’s supposed to be a massive architectural sculpture whose “white metal-clad steel ribs reach up and out in a monumental move symbolic of a hand releasing a dove,” according to its website. I felt instead like I was imprisoned inside the bleached skeleton of a long-dead whale, a place I’ve never wanted to be. (Maybe I’ve just been reading too many stories about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

The Oculus looks like a suburban mall. It has many of the same stores. It’s just much, much bigger. And whiter.

On the other hand, no tragedy adheres to it.

Then I went to the graveyard at Saint Paul’s Chapel. The church is a gorgeous old building, completed in 1766, and the graves outside it are so old that almost nothing inscribed on them is legible. Some of the tombstones have been worn away into odd twists of stone. It is a comforting space; it is old, but — and — it still stands. It withstood the September 11 attacks.

September 11 and October 7 have much in common. Hatred leading to death, evil leading to monstrous brutality, pain leading to more and more and more pain.

But we keep going. We are still standing. We will continue to stand, and we will move forward, with love, and someday again with joy.

—JP

Opinion

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