There are moments in our lives we can remember in vivid details. We can remember where we were, what we were doing and how we felt at that moment. These moments are etched into our souls and tend to be transformational to us. 24 years ago, I was in my apartment in Los Angeles about to wake up to drive up to school, Rabbinical School. My phone rang and it was my mom screaming. I didn’t understand why she still hadn’t learned that LA was three hours earlier and she needed to wait to call… or why was she screaming. As I was getting ready, I was listening to NPR and I was hearing craziness but didn’t understand it. My mom called again and now I was alert and awake and I was able to understand that she was screaming because we were under attack. I turned on my TV and within moments I watched live on TV as the tower fell.
Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001? How about November 4, 1995? It was a שבת/Shabbat, and I was hanging out with friends. When I got back home, my dad looked at me and told me the Prime Minister of Israel, יצחק רבין/Yitzhak Rabin, had been assassinated. I remember the shock and bewilderment. I remember the anger and hurt. Do you remember where you were on October 7, 2023? It was שמיני עצרת / Shemini Atzeret and we were having services here at OVS when someone walked in and told us what had happened in Israel. All morning, we held services in a daze as we didn’t have a full understanding of what had happened. I remember coming back to the synagogue that night for שמחת תורה/Simchat Torah and not being able to celebrate or rejoice. We sat on the ground for services that night.
Tragic times tend to grab us and confront our world, our sense of security and our mortality. We all remember these, and other major events, in our lives. Today is September 11 and it’s a day that has been forever perverted by hatred. While I know where I was at that moment, and I know what I was thinking, I’ve often thought about the people I wasn’t with at that moment. I’ve thought about the people on the planes, in the towers, the Pentagon, and the first responders who were going into a death trap to try and save lives. What were they thinking? These people likely knew their lives were coming to an end. They were aware they weren’t going to have a tomorrow. It’s unfair to ask, but what would I be thinking in a moment like that? What would I do, say, feel and think if I knew these would be my last moments on earth?
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a local AIPAC event and hear a speaker, Nimrod Palmach, and this gave me some insight into what one might feel and experience at such a moment. Nimrod was awoken by an emergency call for help on October 7, 2023, and as a member of an elite unit in the IDF, he raced to get to the Gaza Envelope to do all he could to save lives. He told us he had a moment alone that morning before he began to confront the terrorists and he took out his phone and recorded a message to his kids. It was 20 seconds in length, and it was his intention that when he died in the act of defending the innocent, his family would get his phone and see his message.
Nimrod is a hero. The number of people he saved that day cannot be calculated… it’s too large a number. He’s permanently scarred by all he saw and did that day, and he’s trying to help people heal and to spread the word about all he experienced. But his message to his kids has stuck with me. Had I been in one of the towers, on one of the planes, a kibbutz safe room, a shelter on the side of the road or any other place in harm’s way… I would want to say to the people who’ve made my life all it is that I love them and wish I could’ve had one more day. I don’t know if I would have had the ability to do so, but I’d like to believe this is what I would have spent those few moments on.
We have less than two weeks left of the year 5785 and we’re all watching as time is moving forward and disappearing. What will be, becomes what is now and what is now, becomes what was. All in the blink of an eye. We cannot stop time, and we cannot slow it down. We don’t have the ability to rewind and replay. We all need to remain active and engaged and part of our world.
One thing I hope is that the poor souls in those towers, the planes and in the Gaza Envelope, were not experiencing regret. We spend too many moments of our lives filled with regret. We spend too much time wishing something had been this way or that, and all of that fills us with an inability to be in the here and now. Let us all recognize the people around us are the most important thing in the world to us. Let us all recognize that if we had to give everything up tomorrow, we would know we were blessed to have lives touched by such incredible and precious people.
This week’s פרשה: כי תבוא is about משה/Moshe/Moses and his approaching the end of his life. He has been very aware for some time that he had little time left, and he had been spending all of this time imparting his wisdom to us. This week he introduced the ritual of the ביכורים/bikurim/first fruits. We were commanded to bring the first of our fruits we grew in the land to the Temple, and offer them to God with a declaration that told our history (this is the source material for the part of the הגדה/Hagada “my father was a wandering Aramean…”).
In a new חומש/Chumash attributed to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ז”ל, there’s a commentary that’s interesting about the first fruit ritual that preceded the curses which make up a large portion of the פרשה. Rabbi Sacks explained “Judaism is a religion of rejoicing; of remembering where we came from, and not taking our blessings for granted; of recalling the source of good, and therefore not forgetting the larger truth that it comes to us from the hand of God”. When we are confronted with our own mortality, may it be that we remember all the blessings we had in our lives, and our wish for those blessings to outlive us.