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September 11, 2021
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Vayeilech—Shabbat Shuvah
September 11, 2021 — 5 Tishrei 5782
The Nobility of Our High Ideals That We Fail to Fulfill
by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
How are we to think about this day, the 20-year anniversary of 9/11? This is a day of double memory, double mourning, double pathos.
We remember the lives that were lost on that terrible day, and what that meant to the families who lost them, the spouses who lost spouses, the parents who lost children, the children who lost parents, the brothers and sisters who lost brothers and sisters. In his elegy You’re Missing, Bruce Springsteen gives voice to this pathos.
Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting
For you to walk in, for you to walk in
But you’re missing, you’re missing
You’re missing, when I shut out the lights
You’re missing, when I close my eyes
You’re missing, when I see the sun rise
You’re missing
That trauma, that loss, never goes away.
But the original trauma of 9/11 is now interwoven with a second trauma, that we are only beginning to think about. What happened on 9/11 launched the 20-year war in Afghanistan that was concluded at the end of last month. The only honest assessment is that we lost the war. Before 9/11, the Taliban ruled in Afghanistan and provided a safe haven for jihadists like al-keida to attack our homeland. After 20 years of war, after 2 trillion dollars, after 775,000 American soldiers served, after more than 20,000 of our soldiers were wounded, after more than 2,400 of our soldiers died, the Taliban are back in power.
So today is not heavy, it is doubly heavy. 9/11 happened, and we lost the war. How do we process all of that?
There are many conversations that our nation needs to have.
Questions like: Was the war legitimate at the outset, a valid attempt at self-defense and self-preservation, to make Afghanistan no longer a safe haven for terrorists? Or was the war an expression of American hubris, the fallacy that we could rebuild another nation in our image? Did we fail to learn the lesson of humility that we should have learned from Vietnam, stay out of other nations’ civil wars.
Should we have stayed, keeping a small force in place, as we have done in South Korea since the 1950s, as an insurance policy that the Taliban would not be in power and the land again used as a safe haven for terrorists? Or should we have gone, leaving a forever war that we could never win, and bringing our soldiers home?
And there are legitimate questions about execution. Even if we should properly have gotten out of Afghanistan, how it was done, how it was executed, leaves us with so many questions. Why didn’t the State Department expedite the paperwork for Afghan translators and their families so that they would not be left for slaughter in Afghanistan once our forces left? Why didn’t we do a better job of getting them out, starting sooner, since we knew we were leaving? Why did we make our exit in the summer, which is combat season, not in the winter, when Taliban forces tend to be in hibernation?
And most importantly, what do we learn from losing this war? As Ezra Klein of the Times has pointed out, focusing on the lousy execution at the end obscures the larger point about whether the whole 20-year project was built on the failed premise that we can go to other lands and rebuild them in our image.
All of these are important national questions. They are above a rabbi’s pay grade. Clergy have no special competence in this area, but they are questions that belong to all of us as American citizens. It behooves us on this day to articulate them as a conversation our nation needs to have.
And there is a spiritual dimension to all of this. Our nation invested a lot of blood and treasure in this war, and yet, we lost. How do we process failure?
How we process failure is the question of our Torah reading this morning, parshat vayeilech. Moses is 120. He is about to die, and he knows it. Right before he dies, God tells him: Moses, let me tell you what is going to happen when you have passed on. You know how you have been giving all those sermons about not going astray after idols? They are going to go astray after idols. You know how you have been telling them to follow the laws of the Torah, to serve only Me? They are not going to do that. You know how you have been teaching and role modeling the imperative to choose life? They are not going to do that. They are going to break the covenant so egregiously that they will be exiled, and I will look away. In other words, Moses, all of your efforts have been for naught.
God’s giving Moses a sneak peak at what happens after his death is doubly heavy.
It means that Moses has failed. His entire life was about pleading with the people to follow the covenant. He sacrifices his marriage for that goal. He is an absent father because of that goal. By word and by deed, he role models faithfulness to the covenant, for 40 years, in the hopes that his personal example will inspire the people to follow. Yet, right before he dies, God tells him: wrong! Not going to happen.
But it is doubly heavy, because it is not only Moses who has failed, it means that even
God has failed. God has a simple goal: You shall be my people, and I shall be your God. And yet, even God cannot get this ideal realized. The people are constantly cheating on God. Abraham Joshua Heschel coined the term divine pathos to convey the pathos that the creator of the world cannot get satisfaction. All God wants is a loving covenantal relationship with Israel, and yet, instead God gets a broken covenant, anger, and frustration.
What does all this mean to our moment now?
It means that failure is inherent in the human condition. America failed here, like the people of Israel, like Moses, like God all failed at the end of the Torah.
It also means that we are judged in life not only by what we accomplished, but by the nobility of what we failed to accomplish. We are judged not only by our results, but by the nobility of our dreams, the loveliness of our ideals. Yes, Moses failed, but because he dreamed, because he worked, because he strived, because he tried to bring out the best in others, the Torah’s verdict on Moses after he dies is: lo kam navi od byisrael kmoshe, there will never ever again be a prophet in Israel like Moses.
Today is not only the 20-year anniversary of 9/11. Today is also Shabbat Shuva, days before Yom Kippur. What high ideals are we working on that, when our life is over, we will be proud that we gave our energy, passion, resources to, even if we did not accomplish all those ideals. We too are judged by the nobility of what we fail to accomplish.
The Yiddish writer I.L Peretz wrote a story called Bontsha the Silent. Bontsha is the epitome of the ghettoized Jew who has lost his spark due to the challenges of living in the Pale of Settlement. He goes through life with no impact. Peretz summarizes his life with one sentence: “In silence he was born, in silence he lived, in silence he died—and in an even vaster silence he was put into the ground.” When he gets to heaven, God feels bad for the hard, no impact, silent life Bontsha just lived, and God says: I want to make this up to you. I will give you anything you want. What do you want? And Bontsha says: A hot roll with fresh butter.
Now a hot roll with fresh butter is not bad. A hot roll with fresh butter has something to commend it. It is achievable. It feels good in the moment. But it’s small. It’s about me. It has no redemptive impact.
Bontsha the Silent is a cautionary note about what happens when we do not have high ideals, when we do not have moral imagination, when we do not have dreams and goals so hard and so high that we cannot achieve them all.
Failing to fulfill all our highest dreams is inevitable. Dreaming high is a choice. The other choice is a hot roll with fresh butter.
You know who did not order up a hot roll with fresh butter? Our 775,000 soldiers who fought in Afghanistan for 20 years. They yearned to fulfill a higher mission. They left their home, they left their family, they left their creature comforts, they left safety, they went to a distant land not their own, to a dangerous land of live fire, snipers, and mines, to pursue high ideals. On 9/11, we thank them for their high ideals, and for their service to those ideals.
And a few days from now, on Yom Kippur, we will ask ourselves: what high ideals will motivate us this new year, and what will we do to advance them? Shabbat shalom.