-by Dr. Wombat

Judaism, as many Grumble readers no doubt know, is chock-full of ancestor worship. Well, not "worship" technically -- the Second Commandment does have that wee injunction against putting other gods before The One God, after all -- but there is an awful lot of ancestor praising throughout the services. It's everywhere. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob get mentioned a lot in the liturgy (and in the more inclusive synagogues their wives Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah get equal billing). Honoring your father and mother is the Fifth Commandment, and it's one of only two Commandments that give an explicit punishment for disobedience. I tried counting the number of instances in the Torah -- known to gentiles as the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy - in which people got treated differently, for better or worse, because of who their parents or grandparents or great-great-great-granduncle happened to be. It took so long that Grumble's editor-in-chief Fish finally made me stop because it delayed the next issue too long. I like to describe my attitude toward religions as "semi-cynical." For all their shortcomings, the world's great religions did after all earn the descriptive "great" by possessing the ability to transform people's lives for the better. They provide moral codes that teach people to be respectful, peaceful and productive -- when they aren't teaching them to be hateful, destructive and xenophobic. They inspire people to meaningful introspection -- when they don't teach people blind obedience. They imbue the faithful with a deep sense of personal power and worth -- when they aren't oppressing them with a deep sense of powerlessness and worthlessness. This is the contex into which I put Judaism's ancestor reverence. "Of course the people who wrote the liturgy wanted Jews to feel bound spiritually to previous generations," I would say to myself. "Maybe it provides some people with a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves, but more importantly it keeps people coming through the doors on the High Holidays and it keeps people writing those checks." That was the beginning and end of my thinking on the matter for as long as I can remember. On the evening of September 15th Ms. Wombat and I attended Shabbat services at Kolot Chaiyenu, the neighborhood synagogue at which we feel most welcome. (We live in Brooklyn, so we get to choose from about five distinctly different neighborhood synagogues.) We, like many other people, were feeling the need to get back in touch with a sense of Larger Good, after being confronted with such large Evil. Our home looks directly out on Lower Manhattan, you see. Ms. Wombat saw the World Trade Center come tumbling down live and in person. The plume of smoke and ash went directly over our house until the winds shifted on the second day. When I emerged from the subway and smelled it, my first unbidden thought was that someone was throwing a barbecue. I don't know about you, but thoughts like that sure as hell put some spiritual needs into me. In form, this service was no different than many others performed all over the country every week of every year. And it contained a phrase that I'd seen many times before and always thought of as more ancestor reverence, just another piece of reinforcement to keep Jews coming through the temple doors. Sure, it used a gruesome metaphor, but I was smart and insightful, a true liberal arts-trained skeptic, a Gen-Xer through and through who can deconstruct The Man's message and see the naked institutional self-service behind it. I'd just mentally skip over that bit and bide my time until we get to the parts that are actually spiritually meaningful. But not that day. It's a prayer. In with a bunch of other things that one is entreating Adonai to give you a hand with is this little piece of "ancestor worship:" Help me keep faith with those who lie in dust. And on September 15th, 2001, there wasn't a damned bit of metaphor in it. Five thousand souls were not two miles away, literally entombed in a five-story high mound of ashes, twisted steel, and concrete pounded into dust. And I knew damned well that despite the authorities' insisting that people might still be alive that we'd seen the last survivor get pulled out. The two planes hit while I was en route to work. By the time I made it up to my lobby, everyone was clustered around a giant TV screen watching the towers burn. But that wasn't how I found out about it. I was sitting on the C train heading uptown, reading a magazine, when a homeless guy wandered on at the Canal Street station -- a dozen or so blocks away from what would soon be called "Ground Zero." I didn't look up until he started going on and on about how two planes had hit the World Trades. "Uh-huh," I said to myself. "On a clear morning, a couple of planes hit some buildings. Suuuuure they did. And yesterday you were talking to three invisible friends in between telling me your usual story, repeated every day for eight months now, about how you needed money because you were just laid off last week and your house burned down and you just need to get back on your feet and feed your babies and will you please shut up because I'm trying to read!!" Meanwhile, two trucks were screaming out of the firehouse of Squad One, on Union Street just a few bocks from my house. They were among the first to reach the scene. Thirty men worked in Squad One. Of those thirty, twelve were killed. Two blocks south of my work sits the home of Engine 54, Ladder 4 and the headquarters for Battalion 9. Twelve men from Engine 54 and Ladder 4 raced down Eighth Avenue as my subway raced up. I passed right under them. They never came back. Battalion 9 lost one hundred men that day. Of course, I would have had no business leaving the train and heading to the World Trade Center. Even if I had believed the homeless guy, without training or equipment I would have just been in the way. I would have delayed somebody assisting the evacuation, and a few more people would have died, myself included. I know all that. But the fact remains that upon hearing the news, my first reaction was to want peace and quiet to read a magazine. Twelve men from where I'd just been and twelve men from where I was going got the news, too. Their first reaction was to jump into a truck and race up the building, risking all their lives on the chance that they could save just one. For that heroism, they were crushed by a million tons of steel, concrete and burning jet fuel.   How in the hell can someone like me possibly keep their faith?   And what faith is there to keep, anyway? We thought America was somehow different from the rest of the world, that even though we had our problems the mind-boggling evils of suicide bombers and religious hatred would always shrink on our shores to gang members and Pat Robertson. Now it's clear that any of our lives can be snuffed out anywhere, at any time -- by knife or by bomb, by gun or by germ. How do you pull some sense of grand meaning out of that? How can one person, no matter who they are, ever hope to keep alive a spark of goodness in a world of such random evil? When those who take on a duty are decimated, when a chaplain is killed because he took off his helmet to administer last rites, what's the point of morality? Isn't it more realistic to give in to the fact that the world and life itself are essentially meaningless? Especially since along with the hundreds who were killed for answering the alarm bell, who knew their lives could end in any fire, lie thousands of those who were killed for answering the lesser calling of simply showing up for work on time. That's really the horror we're facing now -- people who show up for work are in harm's way just as much as a soldier or a firefighter. And looking across the ocean to Israel shows it goes even further. We're not safe in pizza parlors, nor in dance clubs nor even in our own beds. We can't hide. Each one of us might be killed at any time, just because we showed up for our own life. In the moment of uttering that prayer, help me keep faith with those who lie in dust, all that existential despair stood up in its full overpowering height. And in the next moment, it crumbled away to nothing. Because there is a way to keep the faith. We've spent so much energy, culturally speaking, on preserving life -- with warning labels and safety recalls, with wonder drugs and air bags -- that we've come to see the act of staying alive as the highest virtue. Now that fallacy is laid bare, and we are left only with the choice of how we live for however long we have until we die. To create meaning in the face of this awful meaninglessness we must live our lives in such a way that we'd be proud to die for them. It won't always be easy, because it isn't a carpe diem-style hedonism. It is rather a commitment we each must make to find out what we value most in life and to do the hard work and make the hard choices required to make it a reality. Do I want my life to include a happy marriage? Then I can't accept any other life. It will mean happily doing the drudgeries of domestic life, it will mean swallowing my pride in fights, it will mean always being ready to give my wife support -- even when she wakes me up at three in the morning or calls me from the train station in the middle of a driving rainstorm. And it means pursuing my life's other ambitions equally hard, without letting any of them interfere with each other. I'm an actor. That dream takes me away from home for 16 hours a day, and that's when I'm in town. How will I make that work and have a happy marriage? I don't know. But five thousand dead bodies are telling me that if that's my dream then I should die before I give it up. Because only when I live my life in such a way that I would rather die than be kept from it will I be able to think of the twelve brave souls that my subway train passed under and say that their sacrifice had meaning. This duty placed upon us, to live a life we'd die for, has a social aspect too. And here it's a little trickier. Just as September 11th taught us that we will be called upon to die for the simple fact of living, it teaches that we will from time to time be called upon to choose whether to keep our society alive by killing those who would destroy it. That's a very serious thing. When you choose to abandon your own life you hurt only yourself. And so the moral code for how to live one's life is guided only by your hopes and dreams. (Unless you happen to create another life, a child -- then you take on responsibility for that life too, for a time. But you still need to embrace that task in such a manner that you'd rather die than give it up.) But when you choose to kill, you are taking away forever another person's hopes and dreams. The moral code for when it's acceptable to do that is very strict indeed. Strict and dangerous. Because just as every person has different dreams, every person also has a different image of what the ideal society should be. If we all go around killing for our personal Utopias, the world will be thrown into chaos. So how do we create a society that we can kill to protect? We have to address that question, too -- because we're killing right now. As I type these words, our bombs are falling and our commandos are hunting. Some of those who die will be those who planned the killings at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That's an easy matter of justice. But war is messy, and many will die who had no part in that. Arguing the morality of war would take another, very different column. Suffice it for here to say that we have at least a shared responsibility for those deaths. The burden of forcing the war fell on the Taliban -- for denying us the ability to walk up to al-Qa'eda and arrest them. The burden of creating a society whose moral goodness is larger than war's evil is our responsibility. If we fail in that, then any innocent Afghan's death will cross the line from tragic to reprehensible. And what sort of society could possibly pass that test? I'm not sure. But certainly it should permit every individual to create for themselves a life worth dying for. That is, after all, the moral calling placed on each of us, and society is nothing more than a bunch of us sitting around together, living our lives. If each of us carries the same moral responsibility to determine our own course in life, society must therefore be structured to permit each of us to do that. We may have drifted away from that ideal from time to time. Indeed, we may not have achieved it yet. But we must never stop trying. Fortunately, quibbles about gender-neutral language aside, we have a pretty good starting point already prepared for us: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." We are called upon by five thousand dead to live lives worth dying for. We are called upon by every man, woman and child who has ever died in an unjust war, or been slaughtered by tyrants in gas chambers, pogroms or killing fields, or laid down their lives willingly for justice to build a society worthy of their vanished hopes and crushed dreams. We are all called upon, every last one of us. The men who raced up the stairs of the World Trade Center heeded that call. Their work is done. It's time for us to keep their faith.