For as long as I can remember, summer time is camp time. I had a particularly challenging time in the summer of 2001 when I spent the summer working as a chaplain in NYU medical center. Summer in the city was not my thing, but alas I learned a lot that summer. While I got to learn about the needs of Jewish patients in the hospital and how to support them, I learned more about how to be a chaplain for all of the patients in the hospital. I was humbled by my colleagues and how their faith fortified them for the work of being available for the people we were trying to serve.

I was thinking about this yesterday as it was 9/11. Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the attacks. At the time I was learning at in the basement of Ramath Orah which was the location at the time of YCT. While it usually felt horrible to be learning all day in a room without windows, on a day where New York City was under attack it felt rather comforting being underground  ensconced in sifrei kodesh. We were totally safe there in our Torah bunker. The issue was that my now wife of 21 years was learning at HUC at the time which is all the way downtown. It is from there that she witnessed the Towers falling down. After a long day of difficult communications and a long walk uptown, she got back safe. We were both very lucky. Many were not.

I have not spent that much time thinking about that period of time over the last two plus decades, but the 22nd anniversary has brought back many memories of that time.

For me the memories are less of 9/11 then 9/12. It is not the story of terrorism that sticks in my memory, but the tremendous altruism that followed. During the summer of 2001 I spent the summer as a student Chaplain at NYU Medical Center. When I came to YCT on 9/12 Rabbi Avi Weiss came into the Yeshivah asked me to join him. I grabbed my Chaplain ID and book with Tehilim and I was off to spend the day at Ground Zero. In many ways it is still soon to put those experiences into words. I hope to return to this topic over the next few years to share my reflections of 9/12 with you. In subtle ways that day has framed my rabbinate and my being your Abba. For now let me just say that I feel blessed to have witnessed first hand the humble heroes who responded selflessly to the call to save lives.

One memory that stands out for me was spending hours with a Monk outside the makeshift morgue. We alternated reading Psalms in Hebrew and English. In our desire to give strength to these humble heroes around us we gave each other strength. Him with his frock and me with my kippah standing together in solemn prayer. What an anomaly in history? While it often gets lost amongst my intense love of and passion for the Land, the State, the People, and the Torah of Israel, I am proud to be an American. I do not always know how to talk about it , but it is something that I choose to celebrate every September 12th.