9/11
The catastrophe of 9/11 in 2001 was the most significant historical event in my lifetime. COVID came close, but COVID feels over, echoed only in the occasional facemask in an airport or vestigial rage against Anthony Fauci. Like the “Spanish” Flu at the end of WW I, it killed millions of people and then disappeared. Biological disasters seem to be a thing apart. They just don’t register in the way of other cataclysms.
But 9/11 is still very much with us. It happened just days before the High Holidays that year and I remember the sweaty panic of that period. We had just delivered our son to college in Boston and I was deep in an episode of empty nester-ism. Suddenly, I was scrambling to catch up, trying to think my way through emergency sermons, working to discern the likely trajectory of events.
No one, of course, knew anything at all, but I said what you would expect me to say: that it would be rough for a while, but then we would know more. I thought aloud about previous catastrophes, about European cities leveled by war, and how humanity was resilient and we would get through this together. Like many others, I cautioned against demonization, especially when it came to practitioners of Islam, and that American Moslems deserved our loyalty and trust. I believed then and now that being an Islamist was different from what we knew and that radical Islam might be a danger, but that normative Islam was not weird or murderous. All of those things deserve to be underscored. Especially when it comes to the question of Islam, non-Muslims have not quite resolved their conflicted feelings.
But one thing I said still troubles me deeply. I speculated that the events of 9/11 would lead to calls for suffocating security, that they would bring us to the edge of a surveillance state. I asked our congregation to be alert and wary, that we needed to resist the call for state control. I said that my worry was a national ID card that would allow the government to police our citizenry in ways that went beyond accepted norms, that we would end of in databases that stripped us of our privacy.
All of that has actually happened. I carry a driver’s license with new-fangled opportunities for the government to track my activities and whereabouts. I live most of my life within the reach of a camera lens, from FLOCK technology on the roads to portrait cameras at airports. The Administration has asked states for verified voter rolls in a clear attempt to mess with elections. Big Brother grows larger and more imperious by the day, while everyday citizens slip under the heel of the State.
What has happened on our watch is dangerous and wrong. I understand the need for necessary security. You could not be part of a Jewish institution and fail to understand the importance of watchfulness. This is 2026 and for a variety of reasons we are smack in the middle of peak anti-Semitism.
But that must be set against the dangers of totalitarianism, and the impulse of the State to crush its citizenry. This Administration cannot control its impulses, and we need to push back now with force and determination.