Treasure Trove: Infamy, Interconnectedness and Ice Cream

When we talk about the horrors of October 7 we don’t need to say the year.  For those of us of a certain age, the same is true for September 11.  When we don’t attach the year, it is easy to forget how long has passed.  For those who need reminding, it has been 25 years since the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States of September 11, 2001.

This is the cover of  Toronto’s Globe and Mail the next day.  The “day of infamy” reference comes from the speech that President Roosevelt gave to a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbour.  In asking the Congress to declare a state of war between the United States and Japan, Roosevelt said that “we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will see to it that this form of treachery will not endanger us again.”

I remember the treachery of September 11 very clearly.  It was a beautiful fall day in Toronto and for a reason I can’t recall, I dropped the kids off at their Jewish day school.  At the time, you were allowed to check your emails while you were driving (I am not saying that was smart to do, it just wasn’t illegal) and I checked as my blackberry started to buzz with CNN Alerts.

It didn’t take very long on that day for everyone to understand that America was under attack. What was not known was how broad the attacks would be, and how many targets there were. The tallest buildings in Toronto were evacuated as a precaution, and obviously work felt meaningless. People started wondering whether Toronto’s Jewish day schools might be targets too and some parents started to head to the schools to pick up their children.

Around lunchtime, my daughter Naomi, then 11, called to say that most of the kids had been picked up by their parents because there was a rumour that there was a bomb in the school.  There wasn’t, but rather than trying to convince her, I left the office and went to pick up Naomi and her two sisters, Orli, who was then 7, and Yael who was 5. Since it was a beautiful sunny day, with all three kids now safely in the car, I made the executive decision to take them for an ice cream.

As we walked into a Baskin Robbins, I turned to them with teeth gritted in anger and a waving finger and said “We are not going to let the terrorists change our lives. We are having ice cream.”  I now go for an ice cream every September 11 to remember that horrible day. My wife and kids do too.

September 11, 2001 and the weeks that followed were very hard for everyone. Life had changed, but by how much, nobody knew at the time. We were all sad. Even though we may not have personally known any of the victims, we all knew that each one could have been us. It was evident that life could change in a big way, or even be extinguished, in an instant. That was a frightening thought.

A few weeks after September 11, I saw an advertisement in the Ontario Reports, a weekly publication of court decisions. The ad simply said “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

The quote is from John Donne, a 17th century poet and cleric, and speaks to the fact that we are all connected and intertwined, and that what impacts one person impacts all of us. The first words of this passage are well known. Those words are: “No man is an island.”

Even in the 1600s, people knew that there should be no comfort in knowing that something bad was happening to someone else. Left unchecked, it will eventually happen to us too. The opposite is also true.  If something bad is happening to us, it will eventually happen to others.  History has taught this painful lesson many times.

25 years after September 11, 85 years after Pearl Harbour and three years after October 7 treachery continues to endanger us, and as John Donne might add, not just the us that is the Jewish people, but all of us, which is everyone.

When I have my ice cream this year, I will reflect upon what I can do to help get the treachery to stop.  I can’t make it stop on my own, of course, but maybe I can help a little.  Even that is a big task.  To make sure I will really have time to think about it, this year I will have two scoops.

For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which have appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove