The introductory paragraph was written by Rabbi Kushner specifically for this compendium, in answer to the question, “Why did September 11 tragedy strike so many innocent victims?” The sermon that follows was delivered by Rabbi Kushner on Rosh Hashanah 5762.

Why do bad things happen to innocent victims in God’s world? God’s promise was never that life would be fair. The blindness of nature, treating good people and bad people alike, and the capacity of human beings to choose evil, ensures a certain amount of unfairness. God’s promise was that, when life was unfair, we would not have to face the pain and the unfairness alone, because God would be with us. The author of the Twenty-Third Psalm does not say “there is no evil in the world,” nor does he say “people get what they deserve in this life.” He says that there is evil, there is undeserved suffering, and that life is precarious, but he is not afraid of the evil that exists “for Thou art with me.”

I had another sermon I was going to give this morning. It was a good sermon, too, but you’ll have to wait till next year to hear it because of the events of last Tuesday. Last Tuesday, just a week ago, was September 11, a date whose numerical value ironically is 9-1-1, when enemies of the US inflicted on the nation the worst act of terrorism we have ever experienced. Before last week, it would have been hard for us to imagine anything more cruel than the bombing of the US Federal Building in Oklahoma City, with 168 dead. The casualty numbers out of New York City and Washington will probably be thirty or forty times as great, the equivalent of an Oklahoma City bombing every day for a month.

Last Shabbat in synagogue, we read the opening words of the Torah portion Nitzavim. Moses addresses the Israelites for the last time and tells them his words are meant “for those who are here today and for those who are not here today.” And, as we read those words, I found myself wondering in how many synagogues and churches, thoughts will be turning to “those who are here today and those who are not here today.”

So, we have to talk about it this morning because it is on everyone’s mind and lies so heavily on everyone’s soul, because it has been hard to think or talk about anything else for the past week. We have to talk about it, though it’s hard to find anything to say except how much it hurts and how angry we are.

I remember, when I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, that every year our beloved old rabbi (who was probably younger then than I am today) would begin the Rosh Hashanah service with a prayer whose opening words were, “tichleh shanah uk’laloteha, tahel shanah uvirchoteha...” May the old year end with all of its calamities, and may the New Year begin with all of its blessings.

And I remember that that prayer always made me uncomfortable. I would say to myself, “That prayer belongs back in Europe where life was hard and every year brought more trouble. But here the years are good.” Yet, yesterday and today, I found myself praying that all the killing, all the hatred, all the tears and bloodshed of these past twelve months vanish along with the old year, and that the coming year be free of all that.

But what is there to say? How does one make sense of a senseless tragedy? How does one come to terms with the knowledge that some people hate other people so much that they would kill themselves in order to kill thousands of strangers?

After the terrible events of last Tuesday, a number of colleagues I spoke to had all independently come up with the same insight: We are all Israelis now. Now all US citizens know the feeling of vulnerability, of uncertainty, that Israelis feel when they go shopping, when they send their children off to school in the morning, when their sons and husbands leave for military reserve duty. And if we are all Israelis now, maybe we can learn something from Israel’s fifty-three years of hard-won experience dealing with the threat of terrorism.

How do Israelis handle the danger? They go on living. They continue to shop; they continue to ride the buses; they continue to send their children to school. There is always an element of concern, which is why they compulsively listen to the news, every hour on the hour. But they understand that if they ever stopped going on with their normal lives, they would be conceding the field to the bad guys, and they are not prepared to do that.

You know the story we read from the Torah on Rosh Hashanah, the story of how God commands Abraham to offer up his son as a sacrifice and then intervenes to save the boy at the last moment. In the Torah, though we don’t read this far on Rosh Hashanah, the very next thing that happens is that we read of the death of Sarah, Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother. Though the Torah never makes the time frame explicit (it could have happened years later and probably did), Jewish commentators have always suspected a link between the two events. They imagine Sarah dying immediately after and as a result of Isaac’s near-death experience. One midrash has Satan telling Sarah that Isaac has been killed, and Sarah dying of grief. Another pictures Satan telling Sarah what really happened, that Isaac was almost killed but was spared, and Sarah dies anyway. Why? The midrash doesn’t try to explain it, but Avivah Zornberg, a brilliant Israeli Bible scholar, understands it in this way: Sarah dies of despair, because she can’t stand living in a world that random and unreliable, a world where life hangs by a thread every day. How can you live in a world where you say goodbye to your loved ones in the morning and you can’t be certain you will ever see each other again? All that uncertainty is too much for her.

This week, I suspect a lot of people are feeling like Sarah. They are saying to themselves, “How do you live in a world like this?” They are asking, “Where can I move to, how can I change my way of living so that I don’t have to be in danger?”

To those questions, Israelis, I think, have given us the answer. For the most part, they have rejected Sarah’s reaction to the threat of terror. They have squared their shoulders, summoned up their courage, and gone on with their lives. And I would hope that all US citizens and residents, now that we know the vulnerability that Israelis have been living with, will do the same.

I intend to get back on airplanes when airports re-open and my schedule calls for me to fly somewhere. I was on a plane at Logan last Tuesday, planning to travel to Toronto, when we got word that all flights had been cancelled everywhere, and I will be back flying again after the holidays. I will not let the terrorists tell me how I can live. I will not let them keep me from doing the things I want to do, not my business travel and not my traveling to visit family. I will act prudently and carefully, but I will refuse to let them control my life or shrink the boundaries of what I feel safe doing.

I understand the Torah’s admonition “choose life” to mean “don’t be afraid of living.” Don’t be afraid to live, even though living may be painful or precarious. Do you want to get even with the people who did that to us last week? You know how to do that? I would paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “Living well is the best revenge.” My adage would read, “living normally, living bravely, is the best revenge.”

In the same way, as I have listened to callers on talk radio and read the letters to the editor, I have heard a great deal of anger and a desire to get even with whoever has done this to us, which is understandable but problematic in its own way. But, occasionally, I have heard or read people suggesting that maybe we (in the US) should moderate our support of Israel so that we’ll no longer be a target for terrorist hatred. And I want to say to those people that that is so totally wrong. Muslim fanatics don’t hate us because we’re pro-Israel and they won’t stop hating us if we were less pro-Israel. They hate us because we stand for democracy, for gender equality, for treating women as full human beings, for freedom of speech and worship, for values that they are terrified of. But, more than that, to change our foreign policy because of terrorist acts is to reward and encourage more terrorism. It is another form of yielding power to the bad guys. I would urge anyone who thinks that way to read the history of the 1930’s, when world powers decided that Czechoslovakia was being selfish and stubborn by not sacrificing itself so that Hitler would no longer threaten the rest of us, and you know what that led to. Appeasing terrorists has been compared to feeding your friends to the tiger in the hope that the tiger will eat you last. It is what weak, powerless countries do, not strong independent ones. And I pray that our government, like the government of Israel, never shrinks to the point where it would do that. Don’t let the bad guys win.

A second concern is how we as a nation will respond to what was done to us. Ever since Tuesday, we have felt hurt and angry and, most significantly, we have felt helpless. There seemed to be so little we could do to help the victims or to hurt the perpetrators. And when a person feels helpless, there is an almost irresistible impulse to do something to reclaim power, to restore a feeling of being in charge. That’s why the most sobering comment I heard all week was from a caller to a radio station who quoted the adage, “Be careful whom you see as an enemy for you will become like them.” Last week, the danger to the US was from stolen airplanes and falling buildings. Today, the danger to the US is that, out of our pain and rage, we will forget what we stand for as a people. We will betray precisely those values that our enemies hate us for. The perpetrators of last week’s atrocities earned our contempt by killing innocent people in what they believed was a just cause. It’s important that we never become contemptible ourselves by becoming like them, by scapegoating innocent Muslims or Arab-Americans who share our values, not theirs, by raining bombs or missiles on somebody, anybody, just to feel powerful again. I would hope that we will identify and punish the people and the governments behind last week’s event, and punish them thoroughly. I’m old enough to remember how we did that after Pearl Harbor. A movie about Pearl Harbor puts these words in the mouth of the Japanese admiral, “I fear we awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” And I expect that the same thing will happen again. But I hope that, in the process of bringing people to justice, the US never stops being America.