One Death, 3,000 Times: A Remembrance Prayer for 9/11

Ten years ago, I was the president of the New York Board of Rabbis. In that capacity, I was asked to deliver the Jewish prayer during the Prayer for America service at Yankee Stadium Sept. 24, 2001. I present it to you here.

I was broken then, and though I'm stronger at the broken places now, I still remember the power of the collective sense of grief, anger and fear that gripped us all. On that day, we thought 6,000 people had died. Other than that, I still believe every word I spoke. May God bless all the mourners of 9/11, and may God bless America. -- Marc

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On that day, 6,000 people did not die. On that day, one person died, 6,000 times. We must understand this and all catastrophes in such a way, for big numbers only numb us to the true measure of mass murder.

We say 6,000, or we say 6 million died, and the saying and the numbers explain nothing except how much death came in how short a time. Such big numbers sound more like scores or ledger entries than deaths. The real horror of that day lies not in its bigness but in its smallness, in the small, searing death of one person, 6,000 times.

And that one person was not a number but our father or our mother, our grandpa or grandma, our brother or sister, our cousin, or uncle or aunt, our friend or our lover, our neighbor or our co-worker, the gal who delivered our mail, or the guy who put out our fires or arrested the bad guys in our town. And the death of each and every one of them alone would be worthy of such a gathering and such a grief.

Our sages taught that when one kills a single person it is like killing the whole world altogether, and when one saves a single person it is like saving the whole world altogether. Last week, over 6,000 worlds were killed and thank the Lord, a few, too few, worlds were saved by heroes, most of whom will never be known. The dimensions of last week's horror only become fully drawn when we enter each murdered world one world at a time.

The Talmud, and the African Masai tribe both teach a simple wisdom for our wounded world: "Sticks alone can be broken by a child, but sticks in a bundle are unbreakable." The fears and sorrows of this moment are so heavy they can break us if we try to bear them alone. But if we are bundled together, if we stick together, we are unbreakable and we shall do far more than merely survive; we shall overcome.

We shall overcome the forces of hatred without allowing hatred to unbundle us. We shall overcome the forces of terror without allowing fear to unbundle us. So in all our comings and our goings from this time forth, let us remember that the person next to you, in front of you, behind you, is not merely an obstacle to your free and unfettered life. They are a part of our American bundle that keeps each of us from breaking.

Let us never again view our fellow New Yorkers, our fellow Americans, our fellow members of the human community of the world, as limitations on our life, but rather as the moral twine that binds us and saves us and delivers us from evil.

For some of us, the source of that strength, the twine that binds us and bundles us, is not just community but community under God, and above all that religious belief shared by all the Abrahamic faiths that each and every human being is made in the image of God. And also, we people of faith share the belief that a good God will not allow evil to win out over goodness, hate over hope and death over life. History proves this, but for religious people of all faiths, the proof comes from the way we know that we are bundled up in God's love, and the way we know that our dear ones who have died are now wrapped up in the bundle of eternal life in the World to Come, in Heaven, and there they wait for us, waiting to fulfill the promise that we will not be separated forever from those we love.

And for those who cannot find hope through faith, I say to you that you are a part of our bundle, too. For the important task in our spiritual journey now is not for all of us to agree that the name for hope is God. The main task now is to agree that hope was not one of the worlds destroyed on that day. The day when 6,000 people did not die, but one person died, 6,000 times.

Job was innocent and he suffered and he found hope sitting in his own pile of dust and ashes and his hope must be our own: "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant." (Job 14:7)

Dear God, we have surely been cut down, but our roots are deep in you. And today, yes, today, we can smell the scent of water, because today we are sticks in a bundle and today we are unbreakable. Amen.

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