I REALLY was not planning on addressing this topic. But the Cordoba House building at Ground Zero issue seems still to be sizzling and resurfacing.
First of all, I just want to say, we, Jews and Muslims, are both currently immersed in our respective holy times. This year they coincide. For Muslims it is Ramadan. For us it is the Days of Awe of Elul. I hope through our intensified turning inward and turning toward G-d, we as religions, as communities, can reach an honest understanding with each other that will create a renewed, healthy decision regarding Cordoba House.
A lot of constitutional and First Amendment talk is flying around germane to the Cordoba House. Of course, it is perfectly in keeping with exercising First Amendment rights to build the Cordoba House. My discomfort with it is, since when is that kind of a narrow hairsplitting approach the sole consideration to making good and wise decisions? Why is the First Amendment and freedom of religion what President Obama recently invoked in lending his official support for building the Cordoba House? Read the related IJN editorial
From a constitutional perspective, I wholly support the right of any Muslim to build a mosque in the United States of America. This is, of course, what makes America great. And this is what has been a gift to the Jewish people. But I am against the building of the Cordoba House. This conflict needs to be re-framed from a constitutional to a 9/11 issue.
9/11. It is an enduring pain till this day. Many live with the unhealed, still seeping wounds or raw scars of that massacre. Not that much time has passed since 9/11/2001. Not even 10 years. In the scheme of things, in the scheme of that violent loss and trauma, 10 years is nothing.
Ground Zero is a sacred swath of New York City. It belongs to all those who met their violent and horrible death there, for whom it became their ugly grave, their final resting place in this world.
And it belongs to all those survivors, and I mean, all. Be it those people who looked evil in the eye, had a brush with the demon of death and terror, who survived that hellish day. Or be it the survivors by one degree of separation from actually being there in the flesh, such as parents who buried their children, the children who are now orphans, the spouses who are today widows or widowers, and the people whose cherished friendships met their end on that dark day.
That is who Ground Zero belongs to. Not to any church. Not to any shul. And definitely not to any mosque: rightly or wrongly, the painful reality is that a mosque is a symbol and expression of Islam, the religion or cause in whose name the 9/11 bloodbath was committed.
Honestly, if a shul were being built today in the shadow of the absent towers, I would oppose it too. Ground Zero is not any religions space.
When I made a pilgrimage to holy, ghostly Ground Zero on my first visit back to New York after 9/11, I lit a yahrzeit candle. And I murmured Psalms in memory of those who died there. But it was private. My private prayer. If Christians or Muslims come to pay their respects to whisper their own prayers, in their own way, why G-d Bless . . . we all have our own ways of remembering and memorializing.
But dont institutionalize, constitutionalize, politicize or religionize 9/11 or Ground Zero.
If you ever want to put a monument up there or near there, let it be something symbolizing America. Because on 9/11, that is who and what was attacked.
TENSIONS are running high. A critical mass of New Yorkers are expressing their pain or discomfort with the Cordoba House. Yet, the initiative persists aggressively, with Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf determined to push it through. Why is that? I find it troubling. And yes, it does make me wonder.
What really are the motives? If Cordoba House is there as an interfaith effort, as its sponsors claim, they have managed to mar that before they even started. What really are the motives, then? If Cordoba House wanted to make a true and sincere moderate-Muslim impact on interfaith understanding, here was their golden chance. Everyone is watching. Once the sensitivity and pain that the Cordoba House was causing became evident, wouldnt its sponsors humbly and respectfully pull out?
Wouldnt relocating it have been the real interfaith tribute and gesture?
Many Germans who have inherited the burden of history of Nazism have made great efforts, on the victims terms, not on their own, to show remorse and collective responsibility for the Holocaust.
This was not done by coercing victims to redefine or embrace Germans, by being overbearing or forceful in efforts to have victims exposed to a more lukewarm version of German nationalism.
The imam of the Cordoba House may have good intentions, but is misguided. Muslims bear collective responsibility for 9/11. That is the reality of, and the perception of, 9/11. To insist on building a mosque, a house of worship of a different branch perhaps, but of Muslim worship nonetheless, in whose name 9/11 was committed, is certainly not peaceful, but provocative.
I can see how to certain survivors the Cordoba House would actually feel like a stinging salt on the wound.
I know the zoning laws and ordinances are all in place. I appreciate that it is an issue of freedom of religion and First Amendment rights. But what can I say? To build Cordoba House in such close proximity, in both time and space, to Ground Zero, literally in its shadow, does not feel like the right thing to do.
Laws should not be legislated solely based on feelings and emotions. But intuition and wisdom are part of a healthy decision making process.
And paying attention to a critical mass of people who are painfully and legitimately crying out against the Cordoba House should not be underestimated. A lot of things in life are right or legal or constitutional, but that does necessarily mean they are wise.
No one is closing down mosques in this country. Again, building the Cordoba House should not be viewed as a Muslim issue, nor a legal issue, but a 9/11 issue of deep sensitivity.
In the end, when an analogous situation arose in Auschwitz, in Poland, the Carmelite nuns did not build their convent on the sacred swath of that place. Sometimes, a wound so deep takes place that it transforms a geographical piece of land to a place whose essence is that wound. Like Auschwitz. Like so many other death camps.
And like the Twin Towers that have become to us all, the sacred Ground Zero.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
