September 11 and October 7

If hours or days or weeks or months move oddly and unpredictably, like cars on a highway — you never know which one will go insanely fast and which one will decide that 25 on the turnpike is just fine, thank you — it’s nothing compared to years.

Next Thursday will be the 24th anniversary of September 11, the collapse of the World Trade Center, the doomed flights of the office workers who decide that jumping to their deaths, and maybe flying before they crashed, was better than waiting for fire and fumes to kill them. Because they knew that they’d die anyway.

We know that people who graduated from college last year probably were born after September 11, and many of their slightly older peers have no memory of it.

People who were teenagers or young adults remember it, though, and those of us who were full-fledged grown-ups have the sort of memories that we usually keep tamped firmly down, but that tend to push their way up, put their imaginary hands on their imaginary hips, and glare at us pugnaciously.

It was unimaginably horrible.

I don’t know when we started calling terrible days by their dates rather than by their names, but thinking about September 11 makes us think of October 7. There are of course many differences. Those of us who live here remember the smell of the burning Twin Towers, which wafted north and west almost every evening. (Who knew about prevailing winds before then?) We remember the police guards around all the bridges and tunnels. We remember the posters searching for the lost, many of whom had been vaporized into bone ash.

One difference between the two days is that the September 11 terrorists conducted wholesale murder. One plane took out many hundreds of people. The terrorism on October 7 was retail. The murderers looked at their victims before they butchered them.

There’s no moral to the difference. It is just a fact. Yet another fact.

The world seems to have changed since September 11. We worried about terrorists — with good reason — for many years. But the politics have changed. The CIA seems to have changed direction. And of course October 7 not only brought terror, pain, and unthinkable brutality to Israel, it — and the response to it — also seems to have begun the unraveling of Israel’s place in the world.

What does all this mean? I have no idea. But I do know that those two anniversaries come close to each other. They happened at one of the world’s most glorious seasons, the color festival that is autumn. September 11 happened just a few days before Rosh Hashanah. October 7 was on Simchat Torah.

I think it means that we have to keep reveling in the colors of fall, feeling leaves crinkle beneath our feet, picking apples, looking at the improbably blue sky, dancing with the Torah, and also paying attention to the world around us. Because all this is part of the real world.

I hope that all of us can continue to feel joy in the face of fear and hate and terror. That’s how we conquer it in the end.

—JP

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