In this issue: Twenty-five years since the eleventh of September, and this year it falls on Rosh Hashanah. Plus Rabbi Leo Dee in Atlanta on 22 October.
Shana tova.
Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow night. Tomorrow is also the eleventh of September — twenty-five years. The two fall on the same day this year, and there is no graceful way to carry both at once, yet we must.
Let me tell you where I was.
I had just moved to Atlanta. My whole family was still in New York. The phone rang and somebody told me a plane had gone into the Twin Towers, and I said straight away: this is terrorism. They asked how I could possibly know that. I said nobody is dumb enough to fly a plane into a skyscraper. Moments later the second one hit, and the voice on the other end of the line said, oh my gosh, you're right.
Then I could not reach anybody. Every call to New York came back as that fast busy signal, over and over. People I love worked in those buildings. My father worked a few streets away. It was a day before I heard his voice — he had walked out through all of it and come home on a ferry.
And while I was still crying into a phone that would not connect, I started hearing it suggested on the news that Israel had something to do with it. I called the stations. I called them that day, in tears, because it was not true and somebody had to say so out loud.
I spent years in the corporate world afterwards, and every September we held the memorial. Now the memorial lands on our own holiday, and I keep turning it over. Is one of the worst days we know meant to be remembered on one of the happiest? I do not have an answer for that.
What I do have is a worry. Twenty-five years is long enough that people have started to forget what was behind that morning, and long enough that a great many of them have decided it could not happen to them. It happened to all of us. It can happen again. Twenty-five years ago should have been the wake-up call.
Our community pays for that every day, at every door. AIC has no building. Every evening we run happens in somebody else's — a shul, a church, a community center, schools etc. — and every one of them needs licensed armed security contracted for the night. That is simply part of what it costs to gather now. We would rather be spending it on the programming. We spend it because it is what keeps the doors open.
So we educate, we advocate, we empower, and we remember. That is the work, and it does not pause for a good year. It is what a good year is for.
And the year turns anyway. This year you filled the rooms. You brought neighbors to briefings they did not expect to care about. Some of you got on a plane to Israel when going was the harder choice. AIC is grassroots and all-volunteer, and none of it happens without the people reading this.
There is already an evening on the calendar for October, and it is below. We'd love for you to join us.
May you and your family be written and sealed for a good year, and may it be a sweeter one than the year behind it.
Shana tova u'metuka.
— Cheryl Dorchinsky, Executive Director
In person · Free · Toco Hills
From Darkness to Light: Rabbi Leo Dee in Atlanta
Thu, Oct 22 · Doors 7:20 PM · Program 7:45 PM ET · Toco Hills
On 7 April 2023, Rabbi Leo Dee's wife Lucy and their daughters Maia (20) and Rina (15) were murdered in a terror attack in the Jordan Valley.
He has spent the years since talking to Jewish communities around the world about what a person does the next morning, and the morning after that. His book The Seven Facets of Healing is built around seven things Lucy used to name — family, friends, fitness, function, finance, fun and faith.
He is direct about the politics as well. Terror against innocent people gets condemned without qualification, and he has been sharp in public with journalists who blur the difference between a victim and a killer.
AIC hosts the evening with Congregation Beth Jacob, Congregation Ohr HaTorah and New Toco Shul. Free to attend, with an optional contribution at registration that covers the security costs of the night first. The address in Toco Hills is sent to you when you register.
Every evening you come to, somebody built.
AIC is grassroots and all-volunteer. Nobody here draws a salary, so every visiting speaker, every briefing and every delegation happens because a person picked up a piece of the work and carried it.
We want to run more of it this year, and put more people in the room for each one. That takes volunteers — at the door on event nights, on social media, on the phone, on the setup and the cleanup nobody sees. Some of it is an hour a month.
Tell us what you are good at and how much time you actually have, and we will match you to something real instead of putting you on a list: atlantaisrael.org/volunteers.
MITZVAHS THAT FLOAT
A duck in Katzrin, and a shopkeeper who said keep it
Somebody went into a shop in Katzrin, up in the Golan, to buy a bottle of whiskey for Shabbat, and found a duck sitting on the bottle. The owner said someone had been hiding ducks around the shop, and told them to keep it.
They wrote in afterwards: “I love it and keep it in my car looking out over my travels.”
That is the whole Kosher Duck Revolution. Somebody leaves a duck somewhere in the world, a stranger finds it, and their day is better than it was ten seconds earlier. It has happened in Windsor, in Bangkok, in Athens, on an El Al snack tray. Send one into the new year with somebody at kosherduckrevolution.com.
Jewish joy, weekly
Finding the Joy · Uriel ben Avraham · Parashat Nitzavim-Vayeilech · Sep 4
Your Weekly Dose · Rabbi Eliyahu Schusterman · Sep 4
Spiritual Sparks: You Never Know!
Spiritual Sparks · Rabbi Ze'ev Smason · Sep 3