\”My mind\’s going to be closed all day.\”\n\n * Mort Sahl, Comedian\n\n\”I think my girlfriend and I are going to be in town. My brother will come in from school. It\’s a great time of the year, and it\’s always nice to reflect on yourself and to spend it with family. We fast, we get cranky, but it\’s nothing a little pickled herring can\’t cure.\”\n\n * Fred Savage, Actor
September 11, 2001.
This morning, America woke up to the same nightmare that my parents did on February 6, 1985. On that morning, my parents in Los Angeles heard the news that a suicide bomber had attacked an Israel Defense Forces convoy in Southern Lebanon. Reports of casualties varied from 50 injured to 100 killed. My parent\’s ultimate nightmare was that their son, who had enlisted in the IDF seven months earlier, was a part of the convoy that had been attacked.
Israel\’s civilian and military authorities swung into full alert after the magnitude of the terror attacks against the United States became apparent.
Watching the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble into dust on Tuesday, I was able to imagine the horror of the survivors of the Titanic as they witnessed their vessel sink into the Atlantic Ocean. A symbol of human progress and ingenuity, a monument to economic strength and power, the Titanic was regarded as indestructible. So too the World Trade Center represented, more than any other edifice in the United States, America\’s sense of its own power and invulnerability. Rising more than 100 stories high, these towers once so effectively dominated the New York skyline that in the air they could be seen from 150 miles away. When a 1993 car bomb failed to destroy them, the sense of invulnerability may have also given way to a sense of complacency.
Even for North American Jews used to thinking about security issues at home — and confronting terrorist acts in Israel — the series of horrific acts that struck Tuesday came as a devastating, unimaginable blow.
Terrorism, a part of everyday life in Israel for decades, exploded in the face of a complacent America with the twin terror attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11 and left a gaping, charred hole in the Pentagon in Washington.
Sometimes life seems overwhelming. For some, it\’s the stress of coping with raising their children in an apparently amoral world. For others, it is learning how to live each day in spite of enormous challenges to our bodies and our health.
Craig Taubman remembers a time not too long ago when he and other popular Jewish musicians were branded as destroyers of Jewish culture.
When Binyamin Glickman looks around Los Angeles today, he sees his students. And, he is glad to say, they are doing well.
From 1962 to 1982 Glickman was cantor at Beth Jacob Congregation, a large Orthodox synagogue in Beverly Hills, and the music instructor at Hillel Hebrew Academy down the block.
As cantor, he trained countless students in his choir to lead services, and many of his students continue to do so today.
I was tired, I was bored and I hated wearing pantyhose. I stood up and sat down at the right times, and even hummed along to the some of the prayers, but in my head, I was replaying scenes from my favorite movies and wishing I was home playing video games.
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