Who By Fire, Who By Water: A 9/11 Memory on the Eve of the New Year

I remember thinking it was a small plane. Out of control. A pilot’s mistake.

I remember the assistant on the other end of the phone call, speaking to me in my hotel room in Houston, being the one who told me: “Nina, I don’t know if the news has hit you there in Texas — a plane just hit the World Trade Center.” As if I were on another planet, cut off from everything.

I’d been scheduling a meeting. Like everyone else, without the visuals, that was the story I told myself — a small aircraft had clipped a large building. I remember turning on CNN. I remember Aaron Brown, telegraphing shock in his eyes, delivering the news one sentence ahead of understanding it. Something very wrong was in motion, propelling us into a world we could never have contemplated.

I remember looking out the window of my high floor at the Four Seasons and seeing guests gathered around the pool. This was before the iPhone. Not everyone was tethered to the news yet — that, like so much else, only came after. I remember wondering how they could sit there, oblivious, while the great divide between before and after was already reformulating our truth.

I remember hesitating over the elevator or the stairs, then taking the elevator down to a rapidly growing crowd of strangers — isolated business travelers, suddenly unable to bear being alone. I remember standing in that lobby, watching the second plane hit on the large screen above the bar, and thinking, for one confused second, that it was the same building from another angle — before the whoosh of collective breath around me confirmed that it was not, that a second tower had been hit. And then, just moments later, I remember seeing the tower crumble, evaporating into smithereens, completely disappearing into the void— not understanding what I was seeing, thinking, absurdly, that it might be some kind of dramatization. It was then, and remains now twenty-five years later, unfathomable.

I remember racing back to my room, and thinking, for the first time, of my own room’s vulnerability — Houston, the President’s city, its own downtown skyline of high-rise towers. I remember the specific insanity of not being able to reach my husband, a doctor mid-procedure, his beeper — this was still the era of beepers — going unanswered. I remember feeling horror that my oldest son, in tenth grade at The Ramaz School, was sitting in what felt like the bullseye of Manhattan, and having no way to reach him — in the before days—the prehistoric era when he left for school without a flip phone and a hundred-dollar bill folded into his backpack for emergencies.

I remember finally reaching my husband and screaming at him to leave the hospital and get to our other children’s school in Paramus, New Jersey because a Jewish school suddenly felt like a very ripe target. I remember my father — the Holocaust survivor — on the hotel phone that had become my lifeline, telling me he always knew evil would return. He just thought it would take several more decades.

I remember learning the airspace was sealed, with no idea how or when I could get home. I remember hiring a black car with two drivers so I could be driven straight through the night, without a single stop between me and my children, and a friend who bought a car in California to drive back East because there were no cars left to rent. I remember booking one of the first flights out, to Philadelphia, arranging a car for the rest of the trip home. I remember panicking in the cab on my way to George Bush International Airport, torn between getting on that plane or getting into the hired car with the two drivers, my husband on the phone, helping me breathe.

I remember my children still didn’t have their dress shoes, and it was only a few days before Rosh Hashanah. I remember thinking I might never see my family again.

I remember the mediation in Houston not concluding that Monday night, the mediator apologizing that she had to leave, promising we’d reconvene in the morning. I remember the opposing counsel — nursing a baby she’d left with her mother across the country for what was supposed to be twenty-four hours — and not knowing how she was managing. I remember regathering in the mediator’s office on Wednesday morning, when we looked at each other and reached a resolution in seconds, because everything that had mattered had been reordered.

I remember the flight to Philadelphia: plastic cutlery, petrified faces, a heart that would not slow down. I remember arriving home to children still without their holiday shoes, and driving them straight to Nordstrom, where I was the only customer in the store.

I remember, in the days after, our five-year-old building towers out of colorful Duplo blocks, running at them, knocking them down, shouting that he was Saddam Hussein.

I remember vowing to never again leave the house without a phone in my pocket. I remember never wearing heeled shoes to work again, in case I ever needed to flee down a stairwell.

I remember gathering friends to see Blue Man Group, in downtown Manhattan, simply so a wounded industry would have an audience.

I remember being afraid we were entering an era in which we’d be targets for the rest of our lives, however short that might turn out to be — that nothing could stop someone from hitting a hundred Starbucks at once. I remember my husband, my anchor, telling me over and over that this would not happen again. I would not have believed, then, that he’d be right for the next twenty-five years.

Twenty-five years feels like forever. But when my parents spoke of the Holocaust, when I was a girl, it had happened less than twenty years before — and to me, it was already ancient history. My young grandchildren have never heard of 9/11.

And now, somehow, here we are — marking twenty-five years, on the eve of a Jewish New Year again. We still don’t know what tomorrow holds. We have no idea which plane might go down, who may fall sick, what current reality that we take for granted might shift without warning. Who by fire, and who by water. Who shall live, and who shall die — u’mi bakeitz, and who at their end, and who not at their end. The words of the Unetaneh Tokef herald this exact not-knowing.

Individually, none of us knows what the coming year holds — who shall be brought low, and who shall be raised up. But Jewish destiny is not about our individual fates.
We are a collective, a peoplehood, outliving the monsters who try to destroy us, and together we feel comforted by the eternity of our nation.

So this year, as every year, I will not spend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur trying to decipher the unanswerable. I will walk to shul, down blocks where I know my neighbors. I will sit with my daughters and hold my grandkids tight as we listen to the ancient sound of the Shofar. I will set the table with my mother’s white china, on the new tablecloth I bought in London with my daughter earlier this year. I will serve my children their favorite dishes and fill our home with my love and light. I remember yesterday. I live in today. And tomorrow, whatever that holds, I will embrace in the way my father taught me to meet everything — still here, still grateful, still refusing to take a single moment of these ordinary, extraordinary days for granted.

Shana Tova.