My friend Neil’s daughter Maya was born on Sept. 11, 2001. I am thinking of that child now as she is about to become a bat mitzvah. In a sense, our memory of that day, like Maya, is transitioning from childhood to adulthood.
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 Jewish day schools may 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. Rather than trying to convince her otherwise, I went to pick up Naomi and her two sisters, Orli, who was then seven, and Yael, who was five.
It was a beautiful fall day, sunny and crisp, and 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 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 Sept. 11 to remember that horrible day. My kids do, too.
Sept. 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 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 Sept. 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.”
I have kept that ad on my desk at work ever since.
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 should impact all of us.
The first line of this passage is “No man is an island.”
Spending so much time learning and talking about the Jewish community, Israel and UJA has caused me to think about the ice cream I had on Sept. 11, 2001, in a slightly different way.
I initially thought, and I said at the time, that it was an ice cream of defiance. We won’t change what we do because someone wants us to.
I now think it was an ice cream of reassurance, reflecting my hope that everything will be OK. By having an ice cream, I was telling my kids, and myself, that things will get back to normal. I wasn’t certain of that at the time, but going for an ice cream was the most normal thing I could think of to do.
Similarly, the programs and services that you fund with your UJA donations say to the people you are helping that things can get back to normal for them. Imagine how good that must feel.
Like an ice cream on Sept. 11.
David Matlow is a partner of Goodmans LLP in Toronto and, together with Andrea Cohen, is co-chairing Toronto’s 2015 United Jewish Appeal campaign.