What Is a Catastrophe? Remembering September 11, 25 Years Later
On the night of September 10, 2001, I was working at the Columbia Spectator. As happened on many nights, I was the last person out of the office after sending the finalized edition to the printer.
Nothing about that night suggested how different the world would be by the following morning.
My first class on September 11 was Talmud. At that point, there was still more confusion than reliable information. We were hearing all kinds of different stories, and most of us went to class because we did not yet understand the scale of what was happening.
I was supposed to read Gemara for the first time, and I had badly misunderstood the passage. I was very new to Gemara study. Under ordinary circumstances, getting it that wrong probably would have occupied most of my attention.
Instead, I was worried about my grandparents.
They were supposed to have landed in New York that morning, and I had not heard from them. We had been trying to finalize our plans for that evening. Now I did not know where they were.
By the time Talmud class ended, ash was falling from the sky. It continued for several days. Phone service was badly disrupted, making it even harder to locate people. My grandparents’ flight had been diverted, first toward Washington and then to Richmond, where my uncle eventually drove for hours to retrieve them.
We did not yet know how many people had died or what would happen next. We certainly did not understand how the attacks would change New York, the country, air travel, national security or the decades that followed. We knew only what we could see and the small pieces of information we could gather.
That evening, I was supposed to attend the first meeting of a graduate-level literature course at the Jewish Theological Seminary called Jews in Catastrophe. The course included undergraduate, graduate and rabbinical students.
The subject of that first class was: What is a catastrophe?
It probably sounded like a reasonable academic question when the syllabus was written. The class would not meet for another two weeks.
September 11 was one of the most significant catastrophes I have experienced. It was not the first, and it would not be the last.
When the Wind Chimes Woke Me
The Northridge earthquake happened shortly after my parents divorced and after I had moved into a new place.
I had finally gotten everything arranged. My belongings had places. My room looked like my room. When so much else in my life had recently changed, having that space settled mattered.
Then my wind chimes started clanging together and woke me up.
By the time the shaking stopped, the room I had worked so hard to put together looked as though a tornado had gone through it. The sense of order I had finally created was gone in a matter of seconds.
That morning, my father did not stop to think through what was happening. He rushed to get to us. A section of freeway collapsed behind him.
When I think about the Northridge earthquake, I know the scale of the damage across Los Angeles. But what I remember most clearly is my bedroom. I remember the sound of the wind chimes and the room I had finally put together becoming unrecognizable.
I remember my father trying to reach us and how lucky he was not to have been a couple of minutes later, when the freeway collapsed completely.
That is often how I remember catastrophes. The scale of the larger event matters, but the memories that remain are very specific.
What Changed After September 11
Rosh Hashanah began only six days after September 11.
I was in my first year working with kindergarteners and first graders in a new community for the High Holidays. Suddenly, the adults were trying to make decisions about locked doors, access and security while also deciding what, if anything, to say to young children.
Synagogues did not know how to react. None of us really did.
We did not know which precautions were appropriate, how long they would be necessary or how to make families feel safe when the adults did not feel particularly safe themselves.
We were all on heightened alert in a way that, unfortunately, has become normal in synagogue life today.
Twenty-five years later, our children assume security is part of entering a Jewish institution. They have grown up with locked doors, security plans and constant attention to who is entering the building. What felt new and reactive after September 11 gradually became part of how our synagogues function.
That was one of the changes we could not yet see while we were standing in classrooms trying to understand what had happened. September 11 changed airports, government policy and national security. It also changed the places where we prayed, taught children and gathered as a community.
When our Jews in Catastrophe class finally met two weeks later, the question on the syllabus was no longer theoretical.
We now knew what catastrophe felt like.
I have continued to think about that question ever since.
When the Power Lines Came Down
In the summer of 2012, a derecho came through the Baltimore area shortly before we were preparing to move away.
The power lines came off our house.
We lost power for a week. Shabbat during that outage was one of the most uncomfortable Shabboses I can remember. It was hot, dark and miserable. There was no technological workaround and no way to reorganize the schedule enough to make the problem disappear.
We were already preparing to move, and now the basic infrastructure of the house was not functioning. Whatever we had planned for that week had to be adjusted around the circumstances we actually had.
The derecho was not September 11. They were entirely different events in every meaningful way. But once again, something I had assumed would continue working simply stopped.
All we could do was figure out what still worked and move from there.
Cooking Down the Freezers
Hurricane Sandy arrived only a few months later, after we had moved into a new community.
We were still new enough that many of our relationships were new too. Then the power went out, food began thawing and everyone had to figure out what to do with what was in their freezers.
So we cooked.
There is something strangely clarifying about a freezer full of food that will not remain frozen. You stop thinking about what you had intended to make. The immediate questions are what needs to be used first, what can be cooked and who can eat it.
One family we had recently befriended somehow kept electricity throughout the aftermath of the storm. Their home became a place where people could cook, gather and use food before it spoiled.
I have always thought God was blessing them for the extraordinary amount of kindness they showed, and continue to show, to everyone in the community. They did not become generous because they happened to have electricity. They had electricity, and their instinct was to use what they had to help everyone else.
We made lifelong friends that week.
I would not describe the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy as a gift. But our experience of that week showed me how quickly new relationships could become a real community. We had not known one another very long. Suddenly, we were cooking through our freezers together and helping one another manage without power.
Learning How to Respond
I do not think one catastrophe prepares us neatly for another. An earthquake did not prepare me for a terrorist attack. September 11 did not tell me what to do when power lines came off our house. A week without electricity did not make another major storm easy.
But the experiences did accumulate.
Over time, I became better at recognizing when the original plan no longer mattered. I learned to start by figuring out what had actually happened, what was still functioning and what needed immediate attention. Sometimes we were in a position to help. Sometimes we needed to let other people help us.
I also learned to notice who showed up.
My father rushed toward us as the freeway collapsed behind him. My uncle drove to Richmond to retrieve my grandparents. New friends used the electricity they still had to help people cook through freezers full of food.
Knowing how to respond did not make any of these experiences less frightening or disruptive. It simply gave me somewhere to begin.
Twenty-Five Years Later
Last year, I visited the September 11 Memorial Museum for the first time. It had taken me that long to feel able to go. One of the ways I was able to think about 9/11 in the aftermath was reading all of the amazing stories of people who had missed arriving on time that morning to work and were saved. Or the people who had moved on to other things just beforehand and were no longer working in the towers.
There was something surreal about entering a museum devoted to an event I remembered so vividly. September 11 is now history taught to people who were not alive when it happened. For me, it was still the ash, the failed phones, my grandparents’ diverted plane, the Spectator the night before and the days afterward, and a Gemara passage I had badly misunderstood.
This year, the 25th anniversary fell on a Friday and led directly into Rosh Hashanah.
Rosh Hashanah asks us to look backward and forward at the same time. We reflect on the year that ended while entering a new one with no real idea what it will contain.
The liturgy does not pretend that the structures around us will always hold. Unetaneh Tokef names ways life can be upended, including fire, water and earthquake. It is difficult to hear those words without bringing our own memories to them.
We still make plans because life requires us to make plans. We arrange our homes, schedules and relationships into some kind of order. Most days, we assume the systems around us will continue to function.
Sometimes they do not.
Twenty-five years later, I still do not have one answer to the question my literature course posed. Catastrophe can be measured in lives lost, homes destroyed, infrastructure disabled and history redirected. But when I think about the catastrophes I have experienced, I remember them through smaller details.
I remember wind chimes clanging in the dark and a room that had finally been put in order. I remember a phone call that would not go through and not knowing where my grandparents’ plane had landed. I remember power lines pulled from our house and a freezer beginning to thaw.
Eventually, after the first shock and confusion, the question changes from “What is happening?” to “What do we do now?”
I am not sure any of us is ever fully prepared for the next catastrophe. Experience has taught me how to begin responding, but I would rather have a year that asks less of that particular skill.
As we enter this new year, I hope for good health, safety, and many more ordinary days than extraordinary ones. I hope we find meaning in the lives we are building, not in the catastrophes themselves. And when life does not go according to plan, I hope we have the ability to adjust, the willingness to help and people around us who will show up.
Shana tovah. May it be a good, sweet year, and healthy year. May you find the meaning you are looking for in this new year..
