September Eleventh Yahrzeit 

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

September 15, 2002 

I took this anniversary period to look back over some of my journal entries from September of last year. The first entry I looked at was, of course, that for September 11^th. “World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists today,” I wrote. I immediately put down, as well, how I felt like the lead character of Albert Camus’ Existentialist novel of alienation, “The Stranger” as he penned the opening line, “Mother died today.” Neither he nor I were at all prepared to accept the reality that lay behind our words. It felt like the world of September 11, 2001 had been sucked into a strange, parallel universe. Things like we had seen that day just didn’t happen, did they?

In my journal, I went on with a moment-by-moment account of what I’d experienced: watching on all channels as towers that had stood my whole life burned and people jumped to their deaths; making frantic calls to reach my wife, ReBecca, who works near the towers and not getting through; learning of an attack on the Pentagon, of another plane crashing in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where several of my relatives live, and fearing for their safety. Then coming here to be with you, in this place, as many of us joined together for comfort on that terrible day.

Also, this week, I looked at the last entry in my journal before September 11^th: dealing with the hassle of a car in the shop, looking forward to moving to Stamford, enjoying a moonlight jog. Life was what it was then, with its ups and downs, but without this black cloud of terrorism and the war against it hanging over us. I don’t think I’m alone in longing this past year for that unclouded life again, finding it in glimpses, but never quite like it was—remembering who and what was taken from us.

There will be a time for you to share your memories and reflections on that day and on the year since. First, I would like to raise up some things for us to consider.

One of these is the widespread impact of 9/11 and after. Author Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “The main goal of terrorism is ‘intentional psychological trauma.’ Murder and mayhem are only secondary and sometimes even tertiary goals. Terrorism is willful psychological assault; a conscious and planned assault against the minds and hearts and spirits of a large group of persons.”¹

You and I have all been subjected to this assault, whether or not we personally knew any of the lost—and I know that some of us did. I venture with some confidence that the September 11^th attacks were the most diverse instance of mass murder in history. Persons from 86 countries perished that day. The horror and despair unleashed on the world is unimaginable. Terrorists would beat us down and rob us of our humanity. By coming together to remember, mourn, and reaffirm the worth and dignity of each person, we frustrate their aims.

In the Jewish tradition, each anniversary of the death of a loved one is known as their Yahrzeit, or year-time. A candle is lit and prayers are said. A number of people have pointed to this September as a type of Yahrzeit for those lost last year. Whether or not we personally knew someone who died in the attacks, this is a natural time to join together in mutual support and remembrance.

Someone asked me to respond to a question so many have raised this past year: “Why did God allow the attacks on September 11^th to occur?” I’ve asked it myself. That day, I prayed as I watched the towers burn, pleading with God to not let them fall. I was filled with despair when they did.

Let me first say that not all of us here believe in God. Some Unitarian Universalists find God a useful concept and a core part of the way they live their lives. Others prefer to look toward a Goddess, a pantheon of deities, or an unseen order or force in the universe. Still others choose to focus on the laws of science and the part humans play in making our world. Some simply admit to not knowing. I can see truth in all of these positions.

For those of us who believe in God, the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people is a very old and troubling one. One of the more recent treatments of it is by the late Charles Hartshorne, one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers of religion. In his book, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, he asks the question of what it means when theologians claim that God is “omnipotent,” or “all-powerful.” He conjectures that the greatest of all power must be to determine everything that happens in the universe, to always get your way. Hartshorne then criticizes the theologians for unwittingly making God out to be a universal tyrant. If God controls everything that happens, where is our free will? He makes the case that to have a universe full of life is to necessarily also have a universe in which there is free will and the element of chance, not just as human qualities but in one way or another as properties of non-human animals and the entire natural order. A predetermined world would be a dead world, and it would seem God preferred to create a living one—even with the chance and danger that come with it. Everything and everyone in the universe influences what happens, in Hartshorne’s view, and perhaps not even God knows what comes next.

Maybe God would rather give us a world that is real than one that is safe. Real because we have choices. Real because our choices have consequences. Real because those consequences lead us to places we never could have reached in a world of safety.

Hartshorne wonders, then, that if the power to control everything is not the ultimate power of God, what is it? His answer is Love. Love, not sheer force, is what gives life it’s meaning. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead, “God is the fellow sufferer who understands.”² God is not, then, a heavenly potentate controlling the action, but a Spirit in us and among us through good and bad.

This was not empty retoric on Hartshorne’s part. He had served as a medic on the battlefields of World War I. He was well acquainted with what human beings could do to one another in a war with so much pointless force and so little love.

Applying this concept to 9/11, the Rev. Jon M. Walton of First Presbyterian Church in New York quotes the great minister, William Sloane Coffin, “God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” Walton goes on, “And so I think it was again on [that] Tuesday morning, God’s heart, that was the first of all our hearts to break. The first to feel the impact of the glass shattering, the first to know the burning of the fire, the first to feel the collapsing of the steel, the first to receive into those everlasting arms the bodies of the wounded and the dying.”³

John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, has this to say:

The terrorist tragedy becomes an opportunity to step self-consciously beyond the God of yesterday that promised us a protection theism has never been able to deliver. It calls us away from pious delusions. That is a frightening conclusion, but that is where we live.

Spong continues:

The worship of this God, who is life, love, and being, will never be a magic potion that exists to keep us safe. It will, however, call us to move toward universalism, to move beyond the need to find acts of revenge that only expand the cycle of violence. It will build in us the commitment to live our lives in such a way as to create a new world in which everyone has a better chance to experience God by living fully, loving wastefully, and being all that they are capable of being in the infinite variety of the human family.⁴

The Rev. Bruce Southworth of the Community Church of New York prefaces his prayers each Sunday by saying, “Prayer does not change things. Prayer changes people and people change things.” Those of us who prayed for a miracle that day perhaps did not get the one we were looking for, but I know that prayer changed us. Together, we joined with people from around the world in mutual support for the rescue effort and the long journey of healing we are still on today. To me, God is in each of us as that spark of selfless love that impels us to give. Our Universalist ancestors knew this well, as their motto, found on so many pulpits, including this one, was “God Is Love.”

Tonight begins the Jewish High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is the day in which Jews ask forgiveness for wrongs they have done both against God and against other people. Admitting we’re not perfect and saying we’re sorry is a good practice for all of us—Jew and non-Jew alike.

The ancient Babylonians had a similar time of public purification, which they called the rite of kuppuru. Both kuppuru and Yom Kippur included an animal sacrifice to cleanse their people’s respective temples: a ram for the Babylonians and a goat for the Jews. And both ceremonies included placing the people’s sins on a single being. A major difference was that in Babylon this being was a condemned criminal, who was beaten in the streets, whereas in Israel, it was a goat that was sent out to carry the people’s sins into the wilderness—the so-called scapegoat.

Jewish peace activist Arthur Waskow points out, “[T]he fact that the scapegoat is, indeed, a goat—not a human being, even a criminal—underlines the possibility of tshuvah, repentant return, for all human beings. No human being is to be expelled from the community.”⁵

Waskow continues, “The ritual of the goats echoes the stories that we read ten days before on Rosh Hashanah, of the ordeals of Ishmael (sent into the desert) and Isaac (bound for sacrifice). Thus the Yom Kippur ritual gives further emphasis that human beings are precious; offer up goats, not people!”⁶

I am reminded of the way that the word “scapegoat” has entered our language as a term for someone unjustly blamed. This past week, someone told me about a co-worker who told her on Wednesday, amidst all the memorials, that she hated Moslems. That’s scapegoating—to blame an entire class of people for the faults of a few.

I read a subtle meaning into the stories of Ishmael and Isaac that Waskow mentions. Jews traditionally trace their lineage through Isaac, Moslems through his half-brother Ishmael. The Bible relates stories of how God cares for both boys and their descendents, as well as the rest of us children of Eve. We are one human family. We are fallible, yet precious and unique.

Some synagogues will end tonight’s service with a prayer by the Chassidic rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditschev:

Lord of the World, I stand before You and before my neighbors—pardoning, forgiving, struggling to be open to all who have hurt or angered me. Be this hurt of body or soul, of honor or property, whether they were forced to hurt me or did so willingly, whether by accident or intent, whether by word or deed—I forgive them because they are human. May no one feel guilty on my account. I am ready to take upon myself the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

We forgive others not so much for their sakes as for our own. Forgiveness allows us to drop the weight of blame we carry, be it for something large or small. To be real, forgiveness sometimes takes a long time to develop within us.

After 9/11, psychologist Dan Gottlieb gave the world some tough advice:

Love those whom you love, only do it more consciously. This will bring you more joy.

Love those whom you don't know. It will make your sense of community bigger and more trustworthy.

Love those whom you fear. It will make you feel safer and sleep better.

Love those whom you hate. Who knows — it might save the world.⁷

¹ “Personal Healing From Terrorism Sickness” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D (http://www.shalomctr.org/html/peace57.html) [Accessed 9/13/02]

² Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany, New York: State University of New York, 1984), 10-18.

³ Restoring Faith: America’s Religious Leaders Answer Terror with Hope, ed. Forest Church. (New York: Walker & Co., 2001), 76.

⁴ From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America, ed. Beliefnet (Rodale, 2001), 59-60.

⁵ Arthur Waskow, Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 30.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ “On Healing” by Dan Gottlieb, (http://www.shalomctr.org/html/peace62.html) [accessed on 9/13/02].