Message for a Post-9/11 World

For the past 10 years, I've included a message in our Passover seders about 9/11, and I figured that today is a good day to post a version of it on my blog, so here it is:

September 11th.  The image of large planes crashing into giant buildings leaps into our collective visual memory.

That a few lost lunatics could have such a dour impact on the world is almost unfathomable.  It sickens us, it scares us, and it makes us wonder what kind of hold a belief can have on people’s minds to cause them to have so little regard for the lives of themselves and others.

We have no answers.  We don’t even know what question to ask.  Because by asking the question, we admit that it’s possi­ble for humankind to be so wrong.  Maybe we thought it ended with the Ice Age or the Dark Ages.  Perhaps we assumed it had been killed with Hitler in the bunker.  But the dominant feature is its resiliency.  Evil waits for its moment.

That’s why it's important to remember where we came from and understand each other.  The true message of any religion is the impor­tance of spirituality in our lives.  Without it, we are little more than soulless mammals on the cool wet surface of a massive ball of molten lava.  With it, we can all be angels, basking in the glow of tolerance and peace.