A decade after 9/11, managing editor Kim Lawton talks again with Rabbi Joseph Potasnik about that day’s lingering spiritual impact. Potasnik leads Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. He is executive vice-president of the New York Board of Rabbis and a chaplain for the Fire Department of New York. He reflects here on celebrating Rosh Hashanah at Ground Zero days after the terrorist attacks, the spirituality of firefighters, the persistent presence of hate, and the importance of overcoming divisions.
Author Archives: Fred Yi
Ten Years Later: Students Remember 9/11
College and university students recall 9/11 and reflect on how growing up in its shadow affected their spiritual lives. Produced and edited by former Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly interns Direna Cousins and Sharon Rogart.
Interfaith Relations Ten Years On
BOB ABERNETHY, host: Ten years after 9/11, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the US remain complicated. In many areas, tensions have been on the rise. There has been sharp controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero, and according to pew, proposed mosques in 36 other locations have also encountered community resistance. There’s also been a growing debate over Islamic religious law or shariah. Measures to restrict or ban the use of shariah have been introduced in nearly two dozen states. Yet in other areas the last 10 years have brought a new spirit of dialogue and cooperation. Kim Lawton has our report.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: As Muslims were observing Ramadan, an unlikely group gathered in Syracuse at the Islamic Society of Central New York mosque. Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Bahai women joined their Muslim friends for the traditional iftar meal that breaks the daytime fast. The event was organized by Women Transcending Boundaries or WTB, a grassroots group that started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. These women didn’t know each other ten years ago, and they admit they probably still wouldn’t. But 9/11 changed everything.
DANYA WELLMON (Cofounder, WTB): WTB took a negative, you know, a really tragic, tragic situation and made something positive from it.
BETSY WIGGINS (Cofounder, WTB): The relationships with these women have enriched my life enormously, have expanded my view of the world in a way that I would never have known before.
LAWTON: Experts say the attacks of 9/11 have had a dramatic impact on interfaith relations in America. But that impact has been felt in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways. On one hand, there has been an unprecedented wave of new interfaith activities, with Muslims playing key roles. At the same time, however, there’s been a growing wave of religious division and public distrust of Muslims.
PROFESSOR SCOTT APPLEBY (University of Notre Dame): The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the repercussions of that trauma put Islam front and center for everyone, everyone in the religious world, and so without 9/11 we would not have had to confront Islam, frankly.
LAWTON: Scott Appleby is director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
APPLEBY: There developed a variety of initiatives around the country, interfaith dialogue groups meeting together in parishes or in synagogues or in mosques.
LAWTON: In Syracuse, Betsy Wiggins says she feels like she was living in a bubble before 9/11. She was raised Presbyterian and attends a United Methodist church. After the 9/11 attacks, she was disturbed by reports of a backlash against local Muslim women. Betsy’s husband, Jim, had been active in interfaith efforts. At his encouragement, she called the imam at the local mosque.
WIGGINS: And I said, “I am ignorant about Islam, far more ignorant than I want to be, and I want to do something, and I’m especially concerned about Muslim women. Can you tell me someone I can talk to?”
LAWTON: The imam put her in touch with Danya Wellmon. Wellmon had grown up Methodist, but after a time of spiritual searching converted to Islam in 1992. She says the days after 9/11 were difficult for members of her mosque.
WELLMON: We did get the phone calls, the harassment. Many Muslim families kept their children home from school, you know, there was the name calling. I know myself, I was run off the road one time and called a terrorist, and it was very scary.
LAWTON: Wellmon says she was surprised but pleased to get Wiggins’s call.
WELLMON: Oh, gosh, we talked for hours on the phone, and then she invited me to her house for coffee to, you know, carry on, to carry on this conversation.
WIGGINS: She parked right outside there, and she sat in the car for a while, and I could see that she was anxious. She had never met me before, so I went outside, and I just extended my hand and I said, “Please come in,” and she took my hand.
LAWTON: The conversation in Wiggins’s breakfast nook also went on for hours.
WIGGINS: We talked about the things that women are concerned about. We talked about our community, we talked about our families, we talked about this pervasive atmosphere of ignorance and violence and how troubling it was to see it surface in our community.
WELLMON: We both decided, gee, this conversation really should go beyond the both of us.
LAWTON: They each invited nine friends to join them at Wiggins’s house two weeks later. Two weeks after that, 40 women came, and they knew they had struck a chord. They decided to formalize the group and called it Women Transcending Boundaries. Today, there are more than 500 women on WTB’s listserve. They learn about one another’s faith traditions through building relationships. The conversations are open and honest. The group uses what it calls a strict “ouch” policy.
WIGGINS: If anyone feels offended or hurt by anything they can just say, “Ouch,” and we stop and we say, “What is it?” And that person can say, “That really hurt my feelings.”
WELLMON: I think we provided that space and that venue for many women to have the opportunity to come together of different traditions and to really get to know one another.
LAWTON: While the past decade may have brought new interfaith understanding, it has also brought expanded interfaith tensions.
APPLEBY: Islam has taken the place of the Soviet Union as the next great enemy of the free world, and partly that’s understandable given Al Qaeda, given the threat of Islamic radicalism, the proliferation of jihadist movements. But, of course, those movements are a tiny minority of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.
LAWTON: Earlier this year, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a series of controversial hearings examining what it called “radicalization” in the American Muslim community.
REP. PETER KING (R-NY): Al Qaeda is actively targeting the American Muslim community for recruitment.
LAWTON: High profile protests against a proposed Islamic center near the site of Ground Zero stoked tensions, as did widely-reported campaigns to burn Qurans. Meanwhile, more than 20 states have debated measures that would bar judges from considering shariah or Islamic law. The polarization has seeped into many local communities. In Nashville, Tennessee, Zainab Elberry is a Muslim activist who has been involved in interfaith work for more than 30 years. She says in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 she was heartened by the flood of support from the community. She received many invitations from religious groups that wanted to know more about her faith.
ZAINAB ELBERRY (Muslim Activist): By that time Islam was known to America with a bang, unfortunately, and at that point I tried my best to educate and to share information with as many people as possible.
LAWTON: She says interfaith relations were largely good. But then things began to change about two years ago. In several US communities, including her own, anti-Islamic groups began spreading a message alleging that Muslim extremists were plotting a stealth campaign to take over America.
ELBERRY: It was really disheartening. I was sad, and I really was a little scared, to be honest with you.
LAWTON: In the town of Mufreesboro, just outside Nashville, there were sustained protests and vandalism surrounding the proposed expansion of the Islamic center. Tennessee legislators debated a measure that would have criminalized the practice of shariah, with some politicians even questioning whether Islam should be considered a religion.
ELBERRY: We are Muslims, but we are also part of the community. It could be me today. It could be another denomination or another tomorrow. We cannot to allow that to continue.
LAWTON: Appleby blames the media for helping to foment a negative atmosphere.
APPLEBY: There’s a general climate that’s sour in our country, and many people have recognized it, and of course interfaith dialogue, constructive relationship between Christians and Muslims—that suffers in a climate like this.
LAWTON: Yet, in some cases, the challenges have generated new interfaith projects. In response to the King hearings, a broad coalition of top religious leaders formed a new initiative called “Shoulder to Shoulder,” which they said would promote tolerance. In Syracuse, Women Transcending Boundaries is trying to put dialogue into action. WTB has gotten involved in a host of service projects, such as a community garden for refugee women. On this day, women from Bhutan were picking fresh vegetables to feed their families.
SARO KUMAR (WTB Member): We don’t speak their language, but from our smiles, our reaching out to them, they feel welcome.
LAWTON: Last year around the anniversary of 9/11, WTB organized a weekend of service projects around the area. They called it “Acts of Kindness” or A-OK! Weekend. This year, they’re working with several community groups for an even bigger A-OK! event.
WELLMON: We have so much more that we can build here, something positive, than to, you know, stay focused on what divides us.
LAWTON: And they believe that should be the ultimate message of 9/11.
I’m Kim Lawton in Syracuse, New York.
Scott Appleby Extended Interview
“Without 9/11, we would not have had to confront Islam,” says Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and director of its Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Watch our interview with him about the impact of 9/11 on interfaith relations and on the American Muslim community.
Sacred Remains
BOB FAW, correspondent: On that terrible day ten years ago, when New York City firefighters began responding to the attacks, firefighter Scott Kopytko found that his spot taken by a new recruit.
RUSSELL MERCER: And he was in his position…
JOYCE MERCER: All right. So Scott bumped him off the truck. He told him to get off the truck, you’re in my spot.
FAW: As Scott climbed the stairs of the South Tower to rescue people, it collapsed. Kopytko, 32, was killed. His remains have never been found. In his Forest Hills, New York, hometown, Kopytko is now honored at a small plot lovingly tended by his stepfather. It is the only memorial the family has, and they say it is not enough.
JOYCE MERCER: We’ve never been able to fully go through the normal process of death where you bury your loved one, you grieve, you remember all the good times. This we’ve been stunted in the middle. We know our son is dead, but we’ve never been able to lay him to rest.
RUSSELL MERCER: It’s like being deprived of something, like a meal or a loved one that you had. You don’t have that final solution. I mean, it’s insane. You don’t have no idea what we have to go through.
DIANE HORNING: I think we live in a country where we assume we will be given proper burials. That’s not—but they weren’t. The 9/11 dead were scooped out of the site very quickly with bulldozers and backhoes and dumped into trucks and barges.
FAW: On 9/11, Diane Horning lost her 26-year-old son, Matthew, who was working on the 95th floor of the North Tower. She and some other families have fought hard to get the remains moved to a common burial site.
HORNING: We just want what every person in this country gets, which is a decent, respectful burial, which is what we gave Osama Bin Laden. I’m not angry that he had a burial with rites and rituals. I think that shows a common decency, and we want the same.
FAW: Despite intense efforts to find all the remains, the fact is of the 2753 people killed at the World Trade Center, the remains of more than 40 percent have not been identified. When the 9/11 memorial opens September 11, there will be no common burial site for the remains. Thousands of unidentified bone and body fragments will be placed near the museum behind a wall with an inscription from Virgil reading, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” There, scientists will continue trying to identify the remains. James Young is an expert on memorials.
PROFESSOR JAMES E. YOUNG (University of Massachusetts at Amherst): Once the families know that the remains are right nearby, for them the memorial experience then maybe is just a little bit too close to the forensic work going on in the medical examiner’s office. They look at that big wall, and that’s all they can think of, not just what’s behind it but that my loved one’s remains have not been identified yet. I have nothing to show.
FAW: Disaster ministries expert Peter Gudaitis counseled scores of relatives on proper arrangements.
PETER B. GUDAITIS (Executive Director, National Disaster Interfaiths Network): It’s been a very difficult path to follow, because there are religious accommodations that families expect and deserve and by law actually have a right to. At the same time, there are all sorts of complicated impracticalities to what remains that is identified, who are the custodians of those remains, and what are remains?
FAW: In a public letter, family members involved in the memorial planning process defend what is being done here, insist it is what most families want, and argue that since the remains will not be part of the museum’s space proper, nor will they be seen by the public, that those remains are being treated “with the utmost care, respect, and reverence.” But the plan to shelter remains underground near the museum where officials are considering charging an admission fee has troubled many. Diane Horning says she won’t go to the memorial.
HORNING: I don’t think there’s much dignity in that memorial at all. I will never go to it, and I would recommend that no one go to it. I think that it is a commercial enterprise. The most important thing is the building, not the people. I find that unethical, to take my son’s remains, the remains of the people with whom he died, and have it be a draw in a museum, in a pay-to-view museum.
FAW: The Mercers say they won’t visit the site of the remains.
RUSSELL MERCER: They’re just pushing us aside. Move out of the way, we want to get this done now. These men were heroes. After 9/11, the first responders, the New York City had them and the world had them walking on water. Now they’re going to put them seven stories below ground level. It’s a disgrace to these men, a total disgrace.
FAW: At the site of mass murder, whether at the memorial for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, Ground Zero, or the Pentagon, victims are honored, memorialized—sites where great evil has been committed, but also consecrated, made into sacred ground, given the blood shed.
YOUNG: I for one don’t believe that there is an intrinsic sacredness in any site. We make them sacred in our visits. These sites become part of a national civic religion, in a way.
FAW: The 9/11 victims will be honored at the new 9/11 memorial with their names placed alongside two pools built in the footprint of the twin towers. Hundreds of memorials to the victims of 9/11 have been built in the last ten years. In Hazlet, New Jersey, in the shadow of the goalposts where he played high school football, victim Steve Paterson is remembered. In Guatemala, four houses have been constructed in Matthew Horning’s name, and along the boardwalk at the New Jersey shore he so loved, there is a bronze memorial plaque. What is needed now, says his mother, is a final resting place, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
HORNING: I think that this Tomb of the Unknown should have been accessible to everyone, because it is something that happened to everyone. We have all changed, and I would like this ability to pay respect, to contemplate.
RUSSELL MERCER: That was the way I was brought up. Have some place where you can honor the remains of your loved ones. There’s no honor there, no place I can go in private, on the holidays.
JOYCE MERCER: Well, we know what happened to our Scott, but I don’t feel he’s at rest, and we can’t be at rest.
FAW: Ten years later then, despite painstaking labor here and all the effort to respect the wishes of surviving relatives, what seems clear is that no memorial can bring complete comfort, much less serve as a final resting place.
GUDAITIS: There is that sense of yearning, that loss, that reopened wound, this scabbed, you know, wound. It’s this kind of wound in the city that’s never been healed. It is a constant reminder that there’s still a chance that they could find some part of their loved one but that it’s not complete. Nothing’s complete. The journey isn’t complete.
FAW: And until it is, no matter how successful this memorial, some will continue waiting quietly with their memories and pain or tenderly maintain their own tributes for loved ones who disappeared on 9/11, and who they fear are disappearing again.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New York.
Ten Years Later: Robert Franklin
Correspondent Kim Lawton talks again with minister, educator, author, and Morehouse College president Robert Franklin, who turns to theologian Howard Thurman to make sense of the events of 9/11.
Ten Years Later: Thomas Long and Jack Moline
A decade after 9/11, we talk again with a minister and a rabbi who revisit the conversation they had in September 2001 and who offer some theological thoughts about violence, justice, revenge, forgiveness, evil, hope, and what 9/11 means. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Long is professor of preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, and Rabbi Jack Moline is the rabbi at Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, Virginia.
Faith-Based Disaster Relief
BOB ABERNETHY, host: As severe flooding crippled parts of the East Coast this week, faith groups were among those who quickly mobilized to help those hurt by Hurricane Irene. The storm affected 13 states, killing more than 40 people and causing widespread power outages that continued throughout the week. Experts estimate the hurricane left at least $7 billion worth of damage, caused mostly by the deadly floods in New England, New York, and New Jersey. In Vermont, many towns were completely surrounded by water, and aid groups had to airlift supplies to the isolated residents. North Carolina also suffered millions of dollars worth of damage, and in Virginia, at one point more than one million people were without electricity. Moderate flooding and downed trees also left many in that state stranded.
One of the major emergency relief efforts in the country has been organized by the Southern Baptist Convention. As of last year, the SBC had trained more than 82,000 disaster relief volunteers all over the country. We caught up with an SBC chain-saw crew near Richmond, Virginia, cutting up two huge trees Irene had taken down. Most of the men and women are retirees over 60 from SBC churches all around Virginia. They do the work free of charge. Meanwhile, also in Richmond, another SBC crew prepared up to 6000 meals a day—frozen chili, rice, and peaches supplied by the Red Cross and packed by the SBC in insulated boxes, each with 200 servings. Red Cross drivers haul the boxes away to schools and community centers. SBC crews from around the country also went to New York 10 years to feed Ground Zero rescue workers. SBC relief crews partner not only with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army but also with local government and FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency—church and state working together, no questions asked.
Listen Now
Listen to this episode now:
[powerpress]
Ganesha Chaturthi
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: One of the most popular celebrations for Hindus around the world: Ganesha Chaturthi, the birthday of the elephant-headed god Lord Ganesha. Hindus honor thousands of deities, described as many manifestations of one god. They also aspire to righteousness, summed up in the word “dharma.” In Flushing, New York, as Hindus gathered to honor Ganesha, we spoke of him and dharma and Hindu worship generally with Professor S. N. Shridhar of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Professor S. N. SRIDHAR (Professor of Linguistics and India Studies and Chair, Department of Asian and Asian-American Studies, State University of New York, Stony Brook): Every Hindu has a personal god, a favorite god. But there is no particular rational justification for choosing this god or that. But Ganesha is a god that is chosen by almost everybody because he is the remover of obstacles.
Hinduism inherently allows a tremendous amount of freedom to the devotees in imagining their gods in different ways, and who are we to say that my way is better than yours?
Ganesha is represented as a happy, fun-loving god. When you look at Ganesha in profile, the upraised trunk of his elephant head can give the impression of “aum.” “Aum” is the most sacred syllable in Hinduism. In pronouncing “aum,” you start with the vowel “ah” and end with the consonant “mah,” so,”ah” with your open mouth and “mah” by closing the lips. Between them, these two sounds incorporate, encompass, encapsulate everything that you can possibly articulate in the entire universe. Hindus use this as a symbolic way of representing God. Mantras also usually start with “aum.”
The Hindu worship ritual begins by invoking the presence of that particular god, Ganesha in this case, inviting and installing the gods in the image. And then you offer them hospitality. So it’s just like a guest visiting your house. You offer them a seat to sit on, drink, food, clothes, flowers, all sorts of things that you would normally offer a guest.
What I pray for depends on the particular circumstances in my life. Generally, I pray, “Give me the right sense so that I do the right things. Give me the right judgment. Inspire me with the right thoughts so that my instincts, and my reactions, and my judgment, and and my action would all be according to the principles of dharma.” The Hindu belief is that if you lead a life of dharma, everything else will fall in place.
