I will never forget that fateful Tuesday morning. I was walking down B-wing at Nicolet High School in Milwaukee between 1st and 2nd periods during my senior year. I noticed that there were televisions outside classrooms-very odd as I had never seen that before-and there were people standing outside the classrooms watching. I started watching just as the 2nd tower was hit, recoiling at seeing the fire and smoke. Since then I have lived in New York City and have visited the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
September 11th impacts people differently. When I lived on Long Island, a young man was memorialized every year, the son of congregants who worked at Cantor-Fitzgerald law firm. Many New Yorkers were struggling with survivors’ guilt, as they were a few minutes late to work that day. Others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember the valiant first responders, the firefighters and EMTs, who ran into the inferno to try to save people’s lives. I remember the hospital workers who worked tirelessly to save lives. We must honor our heroes, including those who perished on that infamous day.
Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to strive to find a balance between remembering the past while concurrently being in the here-and-now. That is what we are asked to do every year, especially so when our very freedom as proud Americans came under attack. Each year before this one I have told a story on Erev Rosh Hashanah. The story I was planning to tell this year is my mentor’s magnum opus, I will save it for his first Yahrzeit, Shabbat Bereshit. Tonight, I want to leave us with how we should move forward in a world that reminds us that people hate us and want to take away many of the freedoms that we cherish.
The poem “Walking a Narrow Bridge,” by Rabbi Joy Levitt, was written 1 year after the attack on the Twin Towers. I have chosen to conclude tonight’s remarks with it because in a world full of uncertainty, the most important thing is, as Rabbi Levitt asserts, “to find the very best within all of us” rather than giving into fear or despair.
Walking a Narrow Bridge
Rabbi Joy Levitt
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od
The whole world is a narrow bridge.
Today we walk that narrow bridge,
ever aware of the chasms on either side of us.
We know what is below us, around us.
It is violence, hopelessness, the death of the future.
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od
The whole world is a narrow bridge.
We know how narrow is the pathway on which we walk,
how rickety the bridge feels under our step.
How little room there seems to be to maneuver; to change direction.
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od
The whole world is a narrow bridge.
And we are all on it. The whole world.
Our friends and our enemies and all of our children.
All of our Children.
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od.
V’ha-ikar lo lifachayd klal
The whole world is a narrow bridge.
And the ikar — and the essential thing — is not to be afraid at all.
Because a greater danger than everything that lies around us and beneath us is the fear that paralyzes us, that causes us to stop in our tracks, unable to go back, afraid to go forward.
At this moment when we are most afraid,
when everything we see and hear is so very frightening,
when we are on the narrowest of narrow bridges,
it is at this moment that we hold onto the ikar,
the essential truth that fear robs us of hope.
Fear stops us from moving forward.
Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od.
V’ha-ikar lo lifachayd klal.
The whole world is a narrow bridge.
And the essential thing is not to be afraid at all.
To find the very best within us.
To find the very best within all of us.
However hard it is. However long it takes.
Meet Rabbi Herman 