Face to Face

The Manhattan skyscape changed yesterday. So did the world we live in. Let us count the ways:

1) Little Joanna Macdonald lost her father. He went to work in Manhattan Tuesday morning and didn’t come back. One human life, the Torah tells us, is an entire world. Tens of thousands of other worlds, big and small, were similarly shattered or destroyed.

2) America entered global space. The same space of the globe as London, Paris, Berlin, and yes, Tel Aviv. The space where the destruction of war hits at home, where you live. Yesterday, Joe Middle-America received his citizenship of the world.

3) Terrorism is no longer a word. It is now a taboo. No longer can anyone dance on two sides of the fence. You’re either one of us who value human life, or you’re a terrorist.

4) NATO is at war. In fact, the entire civilized world is at war. With whom? With a Saudi multi-millionaire in hiding? With those countries that shelter terrorists? No. We -- all of us who are for a world worth living in -- we are all at war with those for whom the world is no more than a killing-field, for whom suicide and mass murder are the doorway to paradise.

Let me put it this way:

About five hundred years ago, a great part of the world slowly woke up to a journey. Not just a journey to a New World across the sea, but a journey to a new world in the heart of Man. To a world of human dignity and worth, of social contract and rights, a world of progress, a world worth building and believing in. As Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Nachmanides) had predicted centuries before, Adam awoke and humanity was born.

Part of humanity refused to travel that road. They had also read the words of the prophets, the story of Adam, male and female, created in the image of G-d. But that’s where it stopped. Their leaders couldn’t buy into the idea that human life has value and that any good could come from this world. And their people had no chance to protest. Instead, a civilization that had just begun to flourish began to stagnate, in many cases to become parasitic. And to harbor the virus of terror that strikes today.

Today, the two worlds, those who have traveled and those who stayed behind, stand face to face. Today we say to the screaming imams who incite their congregations to thirst for blood, to the Mullahs, the Kadis and the Ayatollahs of the world, to those who have taken the Divine spark of Man and twisted it into a missile of destruction, who have taken human devotion and caused it to degenerate into a disease of mass-murder, we say, "It is time for you to be destroyed, to be utterly pulverized to the ground with all the vengeance of which the human soul is capable -- or to renounce your ways and turn to the path of dignity the rest of the human race has chosen."

And we, us little people stuck in between, what should we do?

We should make our statement as well. We should go outside and plant more beauty in the ground. Teach our children to love and to do kindness. Build homes that cherish the Torah values that have so much transformed the world. Give quietly to those who have less than us, and lend a hand to those that suffer. Gather with our community to study and to pray with a single heart. Do all those things that heal the world and bring out its beauty, that make it into a good place, a place of which it’s Maker is proud, a world as it was meant to be. And live in that world now, as much as we possibly can.

In a few short moments, the darkness will vanish and that new world will come to be in all its glory.

And that will be our revenge against terror.

A good and sweet year to all humankind. May this be the last year of sadness and horror and the first of geulah and the liberation of the Jewish people and all humanity.