over at Tacitus yesterday, but I think I'll post it again here after reading kos'
on the main page about Robert Zangas.
The prayer below was delivered by Rabbi Marc Gellman at the memorial held at Yankee Stadium on September 23rd, 2001.
RABBI MARC GELLMAN: On that day, on that day, six thousand people did not die. On that day one person died, six thousand times. We must understand this and all catastrophes in such a way for big numbers only numb us to the true measure of mass murder. We say six thousand died or we say six million died, and the saying and the numbers explain nothing except how much death came and how short a time. Such numbers sound more like scores or ledger entries than death of human beings.
The real horror of that day lies not in its bigness but in its smallness, in the small searing death of one person six thousand times, and that one person was not a number. That person was our father or our mother or our son or our daughter or our grandpa or grandma or brother or sister or cousin or uncle or aunt or friend or lover, our neighbor, our co-worker, the woman who delivered our mail or the guy who put out our fires and arrested the bad guys in our town. And the death of each and every one of them alone would be worthy of such a gathering and such a grief.
Our sages taught that when one kills a single person, it is like killing the whole world altogether. And when one saves a single person, it is like saving the whole world altogether. Last week over six thousand worlds were killed, and thank the Lord a few, far too few worlds, were saved by heroes, most of whom will never be known. The dimensions of last week's horror only become fully drawn when we enter each murdered world one world at a time.
The Talmud and the African tribe, the Massai tribe, both teach a wisdom for our wounded world. They both taught sticks alone can be broken by a child, but sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. The fears and sorrows of this moment are so heavy, they can break us if we try to bear them alone. But if we are bundled together, if we stick together, we are unbreakable.
And we shall do far more than merely survive. We shall overcome, we shall overcome the forces of hatred without allowing hatred to unbundle us. We shall overcome the forces of terror without using fear to unbundle us. So in all our comings and our goings from this time forth let us remember that the person next to you, in front of you, behind you is not merely an obstacle to your free and unfettered life. They are a part of this bundle that keeps you and each of us from breaking.
Let us never again view our fellow New Yorkers, our fellow Americans, our fellow citizens of the world as limitations on our life or freedom but rather as the moral twine that binds us and saves us and delivers us from evil. For some of us the source of that strength, the twine that binds us and bundles us is not just community but community under God. And above all that, religious belief shared by all the Arabic faiths that each and every human being is made in the image of God.
And also we people of faith share the belief that a good God will not allow evil to win forever over goodness, hate to win over hope or death to win over life. History proves this, but for religious people of all faiths the proof comes from the way we know that we are bundled up in God's love and the way we know that our dear ones who have died are now wrapped up in the bundle of eternal life in the world to come in heaven.
And there they wait for us, waiting to fulfill the promise that we will not be separated forever from those we love. But I want to say for those who cannot find hope through faith, I say to you that you are also a part of our bundle too for the important task in our spiritual journey now is not for all of us to agree that the name for hope is God, the main task now is to agree that hope was not one of the worlds destroyed on that day, the day when six thousand people did not die, but the day when one person died six thousand times. Amen
