From Grief to Renewal: A Patriotism of the Here and Now

It is sweet and tender coming home to this place; to returning to the warmth and joy of connection. Whether it is your first time here or you have been part of our Agudas Achim Congregation for many years (or decades), there is a loveliness to the return. It is no coincidence that the High Holiday prayer book on your lap is called a ‘machzor’, which doesn’t mean ‘prayer book’ in Hebrew, but ‘cycle’. The High Holidays are our sacred cycle that remind, prompt, and exhort us to come back home.

I want to start this year’s sermon cycle with a personal story of turning and returning to place. Judaism encourages us to tell sacred stories that can help us, heal us and make us whole. The global and national moment we are living through is so riven with tension and difficulty; we feel it in our tense limbs and the pits of our stomachs. We deserve to breathe and exhale.

Savor this space, among loved ones, friends and the kindness of strangers. Breathe and exhale.

Our tradition knows from its inception how powerful stories are. Today, we need a story that helps us repair our relationships to ourselves, each other and our world, which is why this year’s theme of the High Holidays at Agudas Achim is ‘Refu’at Nefesh’, ‘healing the soul in unsettled times’.

The following story, I offer in tribute to the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

 

Once upon a time, I was a college student, walking through the halls of my cultural anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam. When I glanced up at the television set suspended over my head in the corner of the hallway, I noticed foot traffic was slowing down and a shocked silence settled around us. That’s when I saw the second airplane crash into the gleaming tower.

Surely, this can’t be real, this must be some kind of disaster movie. But the chiron scrolling at the bottom of the image of New York’s Twin Towers confirmed what my amygdala struggled to acknowledge. My prefrontal cortex was forced to accept what my eyes saw. Anchored to the floor, I knew, deep in my own bones, that nothing would ever be the same again.

At that time, I had a complicated relationship with the United States. I knew the USA as our liberator from the Nazis. I knew the USA as both the admired and unwanted gravitywell of Europe’s culture and politics.

American food, American jeans, American pop culture, American guns and space shuttles and fighter planes.

I knew the USA as the policeman of the world, starting geopolitical fires that we anthropology students desperately tried to analyze. Like an industrial-sized magnet with opposite poles, the USA was what we Europeans at once wanted to be and wanted to reject; a shadow and mirror to our own selves.

What I also witnessed in that moment, and the many moments to follow, was the banality of evil, an enormous scale of human suffering and tragedy; snuffing out the lives of 3000 human beings and marring the lives of countless more. We witnessed cruelty, inflicted on innocents. On that fateful day of the 9th of September 2001, we were all Americans.

***

If you had told that younger version of me that twenty-five years later, I would be standing at 12,000 feet on a Colorado Rocky Mountain peak staring out at endless horizons, I would not have believed you.

***

A quarter of a century ago, the world did shift on its axis. Certainly, the Netherlands did. The consensus-driven society of my early childhood polarized quicker than some other Western nations. Anti-immigrant sentiments and islamophobia simmering under the surface burst to the fore. Having spent most of my life outside the country of my birth, the ugliness of the islamophobic, anti-immigrant backlash made me feel there was no place for me either.

I wanted to write a different story. I embarked on a search for…

a story of healing, a story of humanity, a story of kindness, a story of curiosity, a story of innovation, a story of hope, a story of endless horizons.

This search compelled me to board a plane for New York City three years later. It was a quest for self and home, my own complex ‘lech lecha’, which would lead me to lands I did not yet know.

***

Twenty five years later, my son and I are aboard the Amtrak California Zephyr. From the viewing cart, we see the Midwest slip into the Mountain West.

Familiar green fields of corn give way to scratchy yellow patches of desert shrub, the snaking of the Colorado River, the sharp edges of the Rocky Mountains and the burnished copper of the Utah desert. Most of all, we become part of the unfolding of the American story through the place we call home, through track meeting sky. I found myself saying, awestruck, ‘what a beautiful country this is, from sea to shining sea.’

Woody Guthrie’s words tumbled through my head as we decamped to tiny, scrappy Colorado mountain villages and Boulder’s picturesque cafes and tea houses, saw the soaring turrets of the Salt Lake City Temple and Denver’s historic Union Station. On our trip, we were cared for by kindly train porters, struck up conversations with mild-mannered Latter Day Saints and friendly travelers of all sorts in the dining car. We met earthy Amish folk to bucket list retirees to California tech bro’s (of all genders). We witnessed the full unfolding of both the American landscape and its people, and I felt something…

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.

I felt like I had come home; but it was more than that. It was a stirring that could be called a burgeoning ‘patriotism’ but that could also be called by the Yiddish word ‘doykait’, ‘hereness’. After 25 years, I felt a patriotism of hereness – a deep love of place and care for its peoples; a singular sense of belonging and the radical civic responsibility that accompanies it.

I wrapped my arm around my boy as the train buoyed us on its rhythm. Heaviness slipped off my shoulders. I realized that… yes even for this quixotic and outspoken immigrant, yes, even in this time of reactionary xenophobia, even when things feel so broken and wrong and hard: …I was made for this land.

***

Each story has an arc because each story is a journey. I invite you to cast your mind back to where you were twenty five years ago. Some of you were not yet born, some of you were children. Most of us were in our adult years, in one form or another. In many ways, the story this country started writing for the new millennium started in 9/11. Seeds were sown from which we now reap discontent, worry, hardship, authoritarianism, xenophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, the continued suffering in the Middle East.

We inhabit the world of the Poly-Crisis; worsening climate disaster, insufficiently-regulated artificial intelligence, economic malaise, a cost-of-living crisis, tech billionaire influence and the dark turn to more war. The moral concern I felt as a bright-eyed and idealistic university student burns deeper in me now, as a parent to three children. The question is not whether the story we are living through is a dark one–it most certainly is. The question, rather, is how the touch of the High Holidays can help us write a brighter chapter, and weave hope into our words.

Of course, this story is not the only story. Centuries of African slavery and Native dispossession; the backbreaking and anonymous labor that laid those tracks and built those buildings are just as much part of America’s story. Still, what I found on my Amtrak journey made a space for me; this American story healed something in me.

The story of the last twenty five years is a story that deserves honest reckoning. It is one of quick folly and slow defeat, of great change and sometimes even greater stagnation. But it is also a story that is not yet done.

Abraham and Sarah, our spiritual ancestors, also went on a decades-long arc. In the exaggerated timelines of the Torah, their arc extended much longer, since their calling from Ur. Their story contained some of the loftiest words of blessing in our tradition: to be both blessed by and a blessing to the families of the earth. It also contained a heart of darkness. Witnessing death and destruction in Sodom and Gomorrah, senseless battles between kings and, most horrifically, the banishing of one son and the near-sacrifice of another son. Our tradition gives us tools to do two things at once: look at these events unflinchingly and interpret them softly. This is what it means to heal: to face the darkness and gently steer us to the light.

Twenty five years ago, by instinct, I felt American. Today, I feel American by conviction. The healing that this country has given me is the inalienable permission, nay, invitation to believe in myself. To embrace my uniqueness. To encourage rather than mock my own dreams. To stand a little taller and breathe a little freer; whether that’s in an Iowa cornfield or a Colorado mountain top. America has healed me by giving me myself.

I invite us to think of moments of healing in our own lives where each of us discovered or rediscovered the power of standing a little taller and breathing a little freer; the invitation to embrace our truest selves.

 

The sharp edges of our unsettling times have not yet softened, but we can see the cracks and force the light through them. This season, we will explore what healing in the American Jewish community might look like; what needs healing in our world and how we can heal ourselves, our souls and our collective through the compassion of Judaism. Healing is active, not passive, and naming the brokenness first is a prerequisite, for growth and for t’shuvah.

This High Holiday season is about the brokenness and the repair. It’s about weaving new stories of hope and resilience – I promise you, they are there! It’s about rediscovering glimpses of endless horizons in our own lives, through the wisdom of the past and visions for the future. I will leave train metaphors aside for now, but it is my sincere hope that we as a community will embark on this holy journey.

L’shanah tovah u’metukah, a sweet and healing 5787 for all of us.