Park Avenue Synagogue Livestream

here [Music] [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] shabbat shalom it is it is nice to have you all here it is just a pleasure to be here cantor davis it's nice to be here with you as well shabbat shalom when god was creating the earth god created angels first then god asks the angels should i create human beings and the angels say well what are humans going to do and god tells a little bit about what humans are going to be like and the angels say it doesn't sound like a good idea they don't sound like the the best things to create and god reaches out god's finger and destroys the angels god creates a new set of angels says hey angels how are you i've been thinking about creating human beings and the angels say what are they going to be like god says well this is what they're going to do and this and then the other thing and the angels say doesn't seem like a good idea god god reaches out god's finger and destroys the angels god creates a third group of angels and says i'm thinking of creating human beings what do you think i should do and they say god sounds awesome do whatever you want for angels to not be perfect is to cease to exist because that's why they were created which is different than us we are created god knowing that we would fail god knowing that we would sin and yet still we're here so as we go into this shabbat which is known as shabbat shuvah the shabbat of chuva we think of our ability to be better our ability to redo something about our lives recreate ourselves that is fundamentally what it means to be human that that option is always available to us so as we go into it we spend tonight we spend this shabbos thinking about all of the ways in which we want to be better in the year to come and all of the ways in which we can make that happen now to begin with though we're going to call on some people who have absolutely nothing that they need to change about themselves right you're good benjamin's like what's happening benjamin and dahlia mazel tov to you you are here to celebrate your name mitzvah right yeah woo is right it is so good to have you guys it's gonna be great i promise it's gonna be so fun we're so excited to celebrate with you guys tonight um we are going to invite you and your family to join us up front i forgot sorry we're in our sea tour lev shalem uh for people who are here with us they're near you if you are joining us from afar welcome you can find an electronic version of this on our website if you're able i would like to invite you to please rise we invite our bene mitzvah and judy and jeff as well please everyone the whole family to help us light shabbat candles we're on page four [Music] [Music] hello [Music] m [Music] you may be seated we turn in our prayer books to page 10 yadid nefesh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] no [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] myself [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] we turn nrc dream to page 20 romimo [Music] hello [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello [Music] please rise if you are able we turn to page 21 for me more la david [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] on [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] my [Applause] [Music] [Music] may be seated shabbat shalom so tomorrow morning we're going to read about moshe in his final days with the israelites before they go into the land and he does not and we're told that moshe writes a shira a song sometimes translated as a poem he writes this shirah which will stand as a testament for him but we're told that in the future it will be as a witness which will confront the israelites this poem that he writes now the rabbi's debate is the poem the parsha that's about to come up that's a big poem seemingly written by moses is it all of the book of deuteronomy is it the entire torah whatever it is what does it mean that this text serves as a witness to confront something or someone now i spoke uh over rosh hashanah about a text that i use often to sort of confront myself to make me feel am i in the right space am i doing the right thing am i uh am i on the right track if you wanna check out the sermon i'm sure it's online download pas connect um i think it was okay rabbi and you thought it was fine all right okay okay so the the text for me is a person a dominican devarim a person is known by three things they're known by their cups their pocket and their anger check out the sermon for a greater treatment of that text but as we turn to lachado di which is famous as being a shira a poem that our people have been saying on friday nights for generations i want us to think about on this shabbat chuva what a poem a work of literature whatever it is a saying a phrase that we want to use this year as something that could be a testament to us or something that might confront us when we're not doing what we're supposed to do so it might be a verse from torah it might be a verse from liturgy it might be a verse from ted lasso that's a pretty good place to get it from whatever it is think of a phrase you could call it a mantra what it what is a phrase that will keep you going on the path that you want to go on this year what is a phrase that will like moshe's poem be a testimony and something that will confront you if you're not don't have one right now then as we go through legato d on page 23 take a look at some of the poetic language there and see if something strikes you as something you might be able to use this year we turn to the charado d on page 23. [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] me [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] a [Music] all right now if you thought of something maybe tell the person next to you wish them a shabbat shalom and tell them what text you thought of or text somebody a shabbat shalom or a hello [Music] all right there's plenty of time to keep thinking guys you have all year have a seat if you're able we turn to the psalm for shabbat on page 28. foreign [Music] oh [Music] m [Music] [Applause] [Music] of [Music] we turn to the blessing of the children if you have a child nearby even if they're becoming adults in the eyes of the jewish people right now you can still give them blessings even if they just started their junior year of high school you can still give them blessings even if you're sending blessings out to colleges across the world you can still give blessings we say over all of the children our community a fraim and is you see me they gotta make you like sarah rebecca rachel and leia is may god grant you wonderful things and most of all peace [Music] [Music] from generation to generation these lips will praise your name [Music] aware as we are all the blessings in our life we are aware of the need to pray to god and ask for help with those blessings if there's anyone here with someone in their hearts in need of healing we invite you to rise wherever you are as we all sing together amisha bearer [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] no [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] renew our spirit and let us [Music] amen you may be seated it is with sadness that we announce a few passings this week in our community we announced the passing of hans de reuter brother of fruki to fruki and family we're thinking of you may hanza's memory be for a blessing we also mourn the passing earlier this week of ira fertile um father of stephanie donath to stephanie to jamie and the family we're thinking of you and may his memory be for a blessing and also the passing earlier this weekend laid to rest earlier today of ike eisenhart father of jeff eisenhart jeff jeff to you to susan to rachel we're thinking of you may his memory be for a blessing is there anyone who is observing a yard site in the week to come and if so please rise so we can acknowledge their names thank you and from our communal list we're observing yard sights um you can remain standing uh of the following always in our hearts but especially this the week of their yard site sylvia alden vicky alpert florence irenstein morton baum manfred berman lola b burson rudolph cohen irene cohn ray cooper francis evans jesse fabian esther finger miriam fromberg charles goldman esther gallagher lieber gobstein aydah greenberg harvey guberman jack herstrick helene hoenig lewis hoenig hannah hope zoe jacobson benjamin jaffe joseph karpf samuel klaus dorothy coven phyllis kushner howard lakes alexander lapidus neil levin miriam levy gary lichtenstein lawrence lillian beatrice lindauer selma london sybil luss bader adele mahler donald malter irving mann norma markowitz audrey newworth faye neetsburg michael oliskey david pearl lillian pearlstein kermit pearl mudder esther rabin harry rabinowitz mel rich joseph rosensoft bernice sachs phillip schaeferman abraham scharf manus schwartz phyllis shapiro harvey sivardolov adolfo starosta jonathan stein richard stifel rose strom edward wasserberger alana werdiger and lawrence werther for all those who are in a period of mourning or anyone observing a yard sight i invite you to please rise if you're able mourner's kaddish page 30. [Music] is [Music] [Music] may their memories be for a blessing if you're able i invite everyone to please rise we begin mari with barclay on page 39a [Music] i [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we may be seated [Music] [Music] we're on page 40 leading into the shema on page forty-one [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] continuing through the bottom of page 42 with our silent meditations [Music] him [Music] continuing through page 44 the song at the sea as the children of israel willingly accepted god's sovereignty moses and miriam singing joyfully on the top of page 44. [Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] i [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is traditionally at this moment in time when we arrive at hashke venu we ask god to spread over us a canopy of peace and we remember that we all live in such a fragile sukkah such a fragile state of existence a state of being which of course on this the eve of 9 11 at 20 years henceforth has a special poignancy as we turn our attention to memory and so it's with that thought in mind that i am going to stray from tradition rather than me introducing the prayer we're going to call on a dear congregant adam levin to share some remarks from the bima adam you have the ill fortune of going through your entire life being known just as kimmy's brother um and then rafe's brother-in-law and now you are alana's husband and then you um are going to be the father please god of a player to be named but tonight um on a more serious tone you are neil evans nephew and so we call on you to share a few words and that's a title that i forever you know feel respected and happy to have had and continue to have um thank you rabbi cosgrove and the park avenue synagogue community for having me here this evening my uncle neil levin was killed at the world trade center on september 11th at the time he was the head of the port authority for new york and new jersey and he worked in the towers that morning he was attending a breakfast at windows on the world i was actually in my second week of college when this tragedy occurred my uncle never had children of his own and my sister and i were like his kids i looked up to him my entire life i always i'm always conflicted over the pain of losing him in such a violent manner i wouldn't give up the 18 years that i had with him to not experience this agony but there are moments when i wish it didn't have this kind of eternal public existence losing someone so violently is a unique type of forever pain many people across our planet today live with this kind of loss and within the history of the jewish people this is a constant unfortunate theme when 9 11 occurred a friend told me something that i found extremely resonant she said that i would always have a hole in my heart for my uncle but that my life would provide me with future joys that would surround it and make it more tolerable to bear and as an adult i channel my uncle in two primary ways he spends so much of his life making the world a better place for the jewish people he was a wexner fellow a strong zionist and a fighter on behalf of holocaust survivors to reclaim funds that they had deposited in swiss bank accounts out of fear during world war ii the volunteering that i do today on behalf of uja and jfna is mainly inspired by him and then the other is the type of uncle i am from my two nephews my sister my brother-in-law are here tonight becoming an uncle myself has given me an opportunity to connect with neil like i never thought that i would be able to do again honestly i feel neil in my heart when i hold and play with my young nephews and people who know me well know that i like to call them my angel nephews and that's why i call them that people often ask me how i feel on september 11th or on a monumental anniversary like tomorrow and sadly when you lose someone as part of a global kind of violent tragedy the pain like i said before is constant the anniversaries are hard because the world and the media take note but within me the day does not feel any different from the day before or the day after and i try to be quiet on september 11th and try to move through the day like a shadow being still and knowing that i have the strength to mourn him and experience the sadness of his absence thank you again for having me here this evening i think that rabbi cosgrove's ability to bring moments of thought and reflection towards september 11th both this evening and then through his davar torah over rosh hashanah can give light and perhaps relief to the suffering people like me experience every day over this kind of violent loss adam thank you and we wish you and kimmy and your whole family comfort and the blessing of memory this day and every day we turn on page 45 we pray for peace and comfort hashtag [Music] [Music] [Music] m oh [Music] [Music] me [Music] [Music] if you're able i invite you to please rise vishamuru page 46. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] my [Music] is [Music] i [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] let's take a few moments for our silent meditations beginning on page 47 through page 52 the hebrew the english the words on the page the words on our hearts there are special insertions for this shabbat shiva these days between rosh hashanah and yom kippur to take note go at your own pace you may be seated as you conclude [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Laughter] [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] i [Music] is [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's a great pleasure to call on our bene mitzvah benjamin and dahlia phillips to come up i invite you if you're able to please rise as we are led in kidus blessing over wine we are on page 55 page 55. [Music] amen [Music] [Music] let [Music] up [Music] [Music] [Music] how do you like that wine benjamin dahlia do you guys know what the word for klempt means okay it means when you're like gushing up with emotion it's a yiddish word why am i for clamped other than the fact that it's your name it's because this here right now is the very first time since march 6 2020 that i have stood on the bema with binet mitzvah and so it is a very emotional beautiful moment that um we can all be very joyous for so we can all say lechayam you guys can finish that wine if you want i'm so excited i'm not even going to check let's all remain standing alainu we are on you guys can grab a seat now so the cantor can come back up and lead us in allenu page 56. [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Music] i [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we may be seated in just a moment as we always do we'll say kaddish but we will precede it by way of the memorial prayer the memorial prayer said in memory of all those lives that were lost on 9 11. and we were speaking as a clergy team there are different ways that this date 20 years is being memorialized in the new york community in the national community the world community there's a reading of names that are happening at the memorial downtown and how would we do we go around and acknowledge everyone in the community who lost a loved one do we acknowledge everyone what is a proper way to do it and as we were talking about this internally as a team um the uh i received an email and uh doran thank you very much for the email because i arrived here in 2008 i wasn't here as the rabbi in 2001 but you um you shared with me the following reminiscence that i'd like to now share with the entire community you shared that here in the neighborhood around the corner from our synagogue on 85th street our community had suffered a grievous loss our local firehouse ladder company 13 engine company 22 sent its men down to the towers when the call went out that tuesday morning it suffered one of the most devastating losses of any firehouse in the city nine firemen never came back their pictures are have been on the outside of the firehouse since in every 9 11 since many in the community go there to pay tribute to place foul hours and contribute towards their memorial fund but duron you went on to explain to me that in the week that followed at the rosh hashanah services on september 18th park avenue synagogue had invited the firehouse to send some of its men so they could be recognized we were at the most this is doron's words we were at the most important moment of our service we were standing a thousand people with the ark opening the cantor chanting unitana tokef who will live and who will die to my right door the door to my right the door opened rabbi stern emerged through the door behind him was anyone here at that moment you were there okay okay i um um behind him i could see escorting some people four firemen from the local firehouse up the aisle towards the bema they were in full gear the fire truck parked outside as people began to be aware of what was happening the prayer stopped and the crowd burst into applause the four firefighters went up on the bma as everyone could see the applause continued and continued and continued for many minutes unabated all the emotions of that week burst out with many many tears i feel as if it happened yesterday after many minutes the applause died down rabbi stern asked the firefighters if they wish to say anything any words he looked at the senior person the fire lieutenant there was total silence the lieutenant looked around more silence and finally said no we're overwhelmed and so the people began to walk they began to walk down the aisle the applause erupted again with even more fervor people reached out to hug and kiss the firemen and everyone cried from one corner of the room i was sitting there and the firemen were approaching i could hear a few voices singing god bless america soon over a thousand people were singing god bless america as a firemen now wearing yarmulkes slowly made their way to the exit engulfed by gratitude affection and embraces and oonatanatoka never to be forgotten we remember thomas casoria michael alfaros thomas hetzel walter heinz vincent kane dennis mchugh martin mcwilliams thomas sabella grigori stosic and all of the firefighters first responders all those whom we recall at this time all our loved ones if um i you would i'd invite the community to please rise as a cantor chants in el maleh followed by a kaddish which we will all say together [Music] m [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hearing [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] later on [Laughter] [Music] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] shalom [Music] my [Music] exalted compassionate god grant perfect peace in your sheltering presence among the holy pure and the pure whose radiance is like the heavens to the souls of all those we recall today may their memories be for a blessing may they rest in peace master mercy may they find enter eternal shelter beneath your sheltering wings and may their souls be bound up in the bond of life god is their portion may they rest in peace and let us all say amen page 58 together kaddish may god ordains harming the universe grant peace to us to israel to all of humanity and let us all say amen we may be seated kendra davis i want to thank you for leading our services so beautifully this evening as well as to david enlow and to the entire ensemble thank you so much rabbi watkowski thank you for your words of wisdom and your leadership of our community to ross and to oscar and the entire team who make possible our services both here in person but also virtually to anyone and all those people watching from afar we thank you there are all sorts of new things going on um with the virtual watching something called pas connect this is who's downloaded it onto their phone okay all of you who haven't download it on your phone because not only is it a neat way to watch the services but it's always new material you can listen to rabbi watkowski's old sermons the cantor's music it's a way to access uh 24 7. you you can be part of the community and for all ages on a couple announcements sunday september 12th at 1 p.m dayenu the jewish organization advocating for climate legislation we will be meeting at 1pm at grand army plaza so if you'd like more information speak to me or speak to rabbi watkowski about that and then this monday at september 13th at 11 o'clock our arts engagement committee um has an event so registration online to be part of that um dalia benjamin mazel tov to you it's like you're it's here your name it's a weekend you guys excited are you for clamped all right i am all right so mazel tovan judy and jeffrey mazeltov to you to the whole family from near and far on this very happy occasion uh services tomorrow at 9 45 in the morning where you will be called up to the torah and we'll celebrate a very happy occasion in the phillips life we look forward to it what we are going to do now is we are going to sing shalom alechem we are so honored to have jennifer senior here in our miss we are going to go immediately after shalom alechem to the dialogue here so if we have a lot of people here people at home can't see that but if um for some crazy reason you have dinner plans and you're walking out then please do so quietly because we're going to start immediately here i think there'll be a slide there'll be chairs here and then we are going to have a dialogue with jennifer making sense of the senseless 20 years after 9 11. and it's also available on live stream and pas connect so with that did i get all the announcements all right okay so cantor davis will conclude with shalam shabbat shalom everyone [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] me [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] i [Music] m [Applause] [Applause] [Music] oh shalom [Music] okay it is a great pleasure to call on aaron richards frankel a long time and wonderful member of our community to introduce our speaker this evening erin spot shalom thank you so much everyone at park avenue for inviting me here tonight and especially rabbi cosgrove it's so nice to be back here in person inside this beautiful sanctuary a community is really made up of the people and it's lovely and comforting to see so many familiar faces after so long it's also very meaningful that my parents husband john and daughters ariel and gemma are here in person as the super rabbi he is rabbi cosgrove called me about a month ago to check in specifically as it relates to marking 20 years since losing my first husband gregory richards during the attacks on 9 11. in his wonderfully compassionate and disarming manner the rabbi asked me how are you doing this has always been an incredibly difficult question to answer honestly when i last stood here five years ago i wrestled with that same question i guess in some fashion i've been asking myself that question for the last 20 years but during this call with the rabbi i told him about an amazing brutal poetic and brilliant piece of writing in the atlantic that illustrates the lingering trauma for all of us family members in the 20 years since the events of that day i haven't read or seen anything that captures grief the way writer jennifer senior did in her article titled what bobby mclevene left behind tomorrow every text i get from friends kindly reaching out saying thinking of you or asking how are you doing instead of replying with a simple thank you i might have the impulse to include her article i never had the right response but without living it directly jennifer managed to get it just right more importantly jennifer illustrated the universality of grief and hope as you hear her explain her quote from the article life loves on i'm sure you will reflect on your own journeys we have all lost we have all have our stories this is mine covid along with a normal tragic hand that life can deal us has brought us all so much loss so much grieving here we are still standing maybe a bit broken but life manages to live on so now to introduce jennifer jennifer senior is a staff writer at the atlantic and author of all joy no fun the paradox of modern parenthood which spent eight weeks on the new york times bestseller list and has been translated into 12 languages and was named one of slate's top 10 books of 2014 prior to joining the atlantic she spent five years of the new york times yay new york times first as one of the three daily book critics and then as a columnist colleen columnist for the opinion page before that she spent 18 years as a staff writer for new york magazine writing profiles and cover stories about politics social science and mental health senior has won a variety of journalism prizes including a glad award two front page awards from the news women's club of new york and the erickson prize in mental health media her work has been antholized four times in the best american political writing and her profile of the psychologist philip brickman was selected for the best american science writing of 2021. senior has been a frequent guest on npr and numerous television programs and she has been a speaker at ted's annual conference and the sydney opera house she lives in brooklyn new york with her husband and her son jennifer senior [Applause] i'm before we hear from you aaron thank you so much for those beautiful words um for just being you for being uh gemma and ariella and asher's mommy um john shabbat shalom to you marine aina go blue it's great to see you um and um [Music] jennifer welcome welcome to park avenue synagogue we are so honored to have you here uh and to be in dialogue with you your article in the atlantic as aaron just said was extraordinary aaron might have been the first to send it to me but it was really this article that was sent around by everyone and we all read it and we were all so moved by it i it reminded me just from a a journalistic quality of it of that famous jimmy breslin article when with jfk and he he focused in on the the gravedigger and made the small big and your story as aaron said brought out the universal dimensions of memory of grief uh and and set the the cultural conversation here 20 years since since 9 11. we're deeply honored to have you um i i'm just wondering if you could um maybe we could begin i'd there might be one or two people who haven't read the article i don't know who they are but um on a certain level it's a story of a diary um that sort of a purloin diary that belonged to bobby mcelveen and was given in those moments after 9 11 and um by his his parents to his almost fiance and then the question of to whom this diary belongs but like all great stories it's really about much more than that so perhaps you could begin just by sharing with us the the genesis of this story and what it's about yeah and actually the genesis is a good way to do it first of all thank you for having me here it's so nice to see you again um i don't know if is this working i'm audible okay uh okay oh i know you're right it's oh okay how's that i'll talk like this um so the um you are right it is to some degree about it's a custody dispute over a diary right that's not how the piece started um my editor called and said to me my first week on the job we're going to be doing something about september 11th uh you know some kind of package do you have any stories to tell and i said to him you know i do the story i have is actually about a marriage um it's about i conceived of this first as a story about how two people survived losing their firstborn and grieved so so so differently um the mcelveens the father bob senior fell right into you know he uh he calls it 911 truth i think what he believes are conspiracy theories he has embraced them with a real order that um surprises everyone he wakes up every morning and every day for him is september 12th he wakes up determined to solve a mystery to expose american wrongdoing he thinks that the united states actually embroidered the twin towers with explosives and brought them down that it was the government's doing um this is what he thinks um and helen his wife um whether she believes this or not this is not her way of grieving she doesn't wake up every single morning and think about this it's the last thing she wants to think about she spends her days or she spent most of her days for the last 20 years trying very hard to stifle her grief um she didn't want to manage other people's awkwardness she didn't want to manage other people's um discomfort and she didn't want to uh be pitied so she would you know she chose not to talk about it and they stayed married for 20 years with one person talking about 9 11 all the time and somebody else not talking about it at all so i was really interested in that but it occurred to me that there was a larger story to do and i just didn't really think about doing it because it would have it would have involved me actually having to do something and i'm trained not to be at the center of a story you know i don't appear in stories um if i do it's kind of like a cameo i'm like for five seconds you see me getting on the bus and that's it like i'm barely in it and but i decided okay i'm gonna do it you know and it was this when bobby died he was a big journalist a furious journaler which i and it's unusual for a teenage boy he did it right through into his 20s and when he died his last journal was sitting on his desk and his father was in such a few state of grief that as he was clearing out his room just kind of trying to make order in there my brother was in there because my brother was bobby's roommate um and uh his very serious girlfriend who was about to be his fiancee was in there and uh his his fiancee took one look at this journal and said i'm i'm all over this thing can i have it and his father looked at her she was looking at him deceasingly i i would imagine and he said sure take it you know and his wife was so unhappy about this she was she fumed for years she couldn't believe that her husband gave away the very last thing that her son ever wrote this precious thing that might have given full visibility into his final thoughts his final ideas whatever he was becoming whatever ideas he was struggling with i mean it was a way to spend time in his company again it was one last time to enjoy him and it was just poof it was gone and she tried to get it back she kept asking this her the fiance for it back and she couldn't get it and i thought you know it's been 20 years i'm going to try and get it and i got it i'll spoil that because i started to say in the beginning but i mean you know after 20 years everyone was ready to um kind of move some distance past it we can talk about it so it really became an and i think we're getting some static on your oh i'm so sorry okay but it's okay um it's so much better if i should i move it over what about that i can okay actually is this better okay let's give it a try so the the cust the custody battle was not just about the diary the customary custody battle was about memory it was really about who owned now is this this theme of sort of who owns the grief who was the rightful heir to but who gets to tell his story and i mean that that seemed to be sort of the thread that was going through your article and probably through uh you know today's 20 years since and who owns the memory of the loved ones lost on 9 11. and i keep thinking about the fact that if it hadn't been a physical object if bobby had lived now he would have actually do you know what else is too awkward great let's do that um should i just wait a minute there's a doodad here right there here we go now this is on okay so uh if bobby had been alive you know if this had been 20 years later he would have had there would have been an electronic record in the cloud right you would have known everything he'd thought because he would have been they would have had texts they would have had uh emails they would have had so many things but they didn't these physical objects became so yes i think you're right um i mean some of it is just about i think the preciousness of the physical object and who gets that and some of it is about i think yeah who gets to grieve and who um what was interesting to me is these two women were talking right past each other about like really who um who was suffering most and they were each suffering very differently and they were not speaking in a way to one another that i think acknowledged the other's pain and they were the way the way a future spouse she was grieving a future she was never going to have and i think that in some ways his mother was grieving right there was a sharp moment in exchange where the mother said something to the effect of you're young you'll be okay and obviously and and her and her whole thought was first of all this was supposed to be my future and who says i'm going to be okay and you know where and i actually took for a very long time i thought the mother had the only kind of reasonable point of view which is how could you possibly rob a mother of every molecule of you know belongings that your her her son had that are you know i it seemed inconceivable to me that there could be another side to this and it was totally humbling to see indeed not only could there be another side but i could have been dead wrong actually right right i wanna i wanna i have like eight thousand questions about the article and not a lot of time uh sorry so let me just um you started the article um in reference to your own relationship bobby had sort of a kid brother status to you and um the happenstance nature of the college dorm room that had he have been in one room he wouldn't have been your your brother's good friend roommate and your brother's you know friend and etc etc and i you know i touch a little bit on this um in my remarks on rosh hashanah about the happenstance nature and of of life and of death and it seemed like you were just sort of touching in your article on the these sub themes that we all can't help think about when we think about i mean i i people have been emailing all day today about the stories of those whose if they were somewhere else right they would be alive or if if they you know they they went to their dentist that day or they were on the golf course that day and they're you know there's something deeply happenstance that people seem to be focusing on when it comes to 911. yeah we we all do these magic tricks where we try to undo things i mean we in fact i think i was telling you this that daniel kahneman and amos sversky didn't it was mainly kahneman did all this work he's a behavioral psychologist who did all this work about the particular ways that our minds make efforts to undo things that have happened to us and the so if you think about my brother and bobby this is not something you would undo this is just the way you said that life was shot through with contingency if my brother had walked into if he had been the first to arrive at his dorm he never would have thrown his belongings on a bunk bed with bobby mcelveen and they wouldn't have spent the first year of their college lives chattering with one another and getting to know each other really well they might not have been living together on september 11 uh september 11th who knows he might have been living with someone else who would have said i'd blow off that conference tomorrow morning i mean we don't know right you know you can rewind the tape and replay this in a million different ways um bobby started his job in july what if he hadn't taken that job it was just two months before right i mean there are a million agonizing ways that you can think about what if he hadn't what if he hadn't what if he i mean what i can't get and just to show how magically parents kind of think about these things to this day bob senior his father thinks that if he had been with bobby he could have protected him like that's a real active fantasy in his head that if i if only i had been in new york by his side it's very paternal token is a strong parenting instinct but it's also an undoing instinct it's like if i could have what tackled him been on top of him maybe i would have pulled him over to a coffee cart they recovered his body so he was quite far from the site that's another reason that i think everybody kind of mentally tries to undo this he wasn't in the building they found his body he was very close to being back to his office so again it seems like what if he had taken a different route what if he hadn't lingered over the breakfast tray what if he hadn't you know he was friendly you know i imagine him chatting up the guy he bought coffee from i don't know we all have undoing fantasies yeah so so take me through the you know there there are different sort of trains of grief leaving the station and you just touched on this a little bit from the brother jeff who sort of has this insistence of of of not living just in the shadow of this this trauma and the loss of his brother to the father bob senior and conspiracy theories to the mother and and you also spent some time ultimately with jen the almost fiance trying to make sense of her journey of grief to healing so it seems like everyone is going through their own independent journey so they saw a therapist in the beginning the family that said to them not with jen there was a lot of acrimony with jen because she had taken the diary but the three mclevanes had seen a therapist who had given them a metaphor that was kind of an organizing metaphor for them which was um imagine that you're at the top of a mountain and you each have a broken leg and you have to somehow get down you can't help each other because you have a broken leg so it's on you to figure out how you get down and it's a really great metaphor um the problem with that metaphor which i discovered is that some people don't get down the mountain and they don't want to get down the mountain they actually want to inhabit their grief and they need it and um there's something slightly oppressive about that metaphor in the sense that it sort of makes you think that if you don't get down the mountain you're doing a bad job grieving you're grieving incorrectly um the biggest revelation to me was that bob senior has no interest really in getting down the mountain he he likes it up there he's very comfortable up there and he's 76 years old and he doesn't see any reason to leave to lead his life any differently like he's this is for him what he does so so the fact that bob senior is investing all his energies 20 years later on conspiracy theories right i also read that in in this era of conspiracy theories of trump of of stolen elections and otherwise but here i mean you could read it as a coping mechanism of protection you can read it he's not going down the mountain it's denial i mean how do you and there's literature i mean you you can go on the web and you you read this stuff about conspiracy theories um how do we make sense of of this whole universe trying to explain 9 11 with lies right so there are a few things to say about that first of all if you ask his son jeff jeff will look at you and say that's cheapening what my dad is doing you know by saying it's his way of grieving you're cheapening what he's done he's read a lot he really believes this this isn't to him just some you know then you ask him is this a way and then he'll go to his father and say is this how you grieve and he'll say yeah totally it's how i grieve so he doesn't think it's cheapening it but he also believes it um i think you know we think of conspiracy theories as be i mean they are dangerous you could argue that this was the first kind of internet driven conspiracy theory right like this sort of seeded all the others and we tend to think of them as you know things that people who don't have any power embrace i think it's true that bob mcelveen's senior did not feel much power i think he felt lied too he expresses some sympathy some sympathies with you know trump voters in my piece i think you could maybe draw through line there um you know but it can also you can it's a way of subduing i mean any narrative any story you can hang on to in order to sort of give shape to something senseless also makes sense right i mean it could be all of these things the weird psychoanalytic liberty that i would maybe weirdly take on this stage but not on the page um but probably in conversation with mr mcelveen i would probably ask him if i you know the next time i see him i probably would does it serve him a purpose to like embrace a theory that no one else is ever going to embrace because then he gets to keep mourning like he gets to keep grieving i mean this is a way for him to spend company spent i'm sorry spend time in his son's company every single day because no one will ever believe him so it gives him the possibility to wake up and do it all over again if someone believed him he couldn't do this anymore so i mean i should ask him um and then his wife um bobby's mother um you had a very powerful line about radical acceptance right what it must take for i don't know if indulging her husband's ideas is that is that too strong or that's uh i mean that she's sort of has to navigate her own grief vis-a-vis her husband's behavior which is totally different than hers right and i i don't think indulging is too strong um and it's a really humbling lesson i mean when i'm sitting there having like a really trivial argument with my husband like the first thing i think of it's like oh my god like compared to what other people are willing to tolerate and think about um i'm interested in two things with her first of all that she's lived around him for so long that this is sort of evidence that some beliefs can kind of become contagious because at this point she's willing to concede certain like she if he wants to believe that the government like brought down the towers she'll run with that she'll run with it she won't even argue and at this point she's heard so many times she might even but the point is she has no stake in this she has no state and she certainly has no stake in his very very very specific kind of arcane theories for why the government brought down the you know the world trade center which i haven't even discussed and they're they're really kind of particular but her idea is look this is what i have in common with my husband what i have in common with him is that we both lost bobby and he is the only man who can understand that grief um there are a million things to love about my husband that have nothing to do with how he grieves when he recorded he was the only one who deigned to play sports with me i was a really sporty woman and no one else thought like would even invite me to play tennis and my husband did my husband coached bobby and little league and you know organized races around the house and put up ticker tape around the house for one week i mean he was a very imaginative loving dad i know him as this incredibly lovely man i mean i adore the guy so it's like it's not hard to see why you could accept him and that this is part of the package now you know okay so so tell us how i don't want to give away well we've sent out the article to the community the whole world it's been on the shelves so yeah it's a spoiler alert but how did eventually um the almost fiance jen and bobby's mother reconcile the diary moment or how did jen see it i'll just spoil it see it within her power to let the mother have the diary back oh right i mean she was going through her own kind of radical acceptance moment herself like i mean both jen and the mom have something in common they had a lot in common which is very touching right i mean bobby and fell in love in some ways with a woman who was i i think a lot like his mother um one of the things i had in common is that rather than try and impose any kind of order or structure on this thing they just accepted the idea that the universe is capricious and at times perverse and demented and rolls grenades in front of you and they explode and that's it and this was going to be what they were going to have to contend with and so one day she woke up and thought i should give this back to the macklemons and it was about 10 years ago and she never acted on it so when i showed up at her door she was so ready to do it she was just so ready to do it and i think did she understand why she resisted that yeah at that moment yeah i think at the time she did want control it was the only thing she had and i think that also you know i think everybody has sort of a superman moment where they want to rewind the clock you know the the movie super lit we're all old enough right where you're just spinning the globe backwards right and and so for both her and for helen that was a way to sort of get back to september 10th right um and bob senior had it too i mean he kept thinking about if i had been there i could have protected bobby right i mean everybody it's this very protective instinct and this again it's an undoing instinct and so i think they all had some kind of version of like wanting to assert control in the beginning um she also as i said you know here's what's crazy if she had been engaged like officially engaged with the mackelveins had a ring in their house for her she they were you know uh bobby had already asked i had already like asked her like her father permission to get married to her and uh there was a ring sitting out in suburban philadelphia that was all waiting for her um and so if they had so much has been engaged or if they had been married if they had had kids there'd be no dispute this would have been her diary it would have been hers to keep along with like a claw you know a house and right like a million other things they had nothing shared nothing right so you can sort of see it and and by the way that was a huge thing for helen to understand the other thing and this is really interesting so bobby was 26 when he died right so if you if your son dies when you're 26 the bulk of your memories are from him being under your roof he is still to you in some ways a little boy and here he was still living with his college roommate right he was still young so i think in his mother's mind she was in some ways like thinking that his things were her things i don't think she had rounded some corner and thought of him yet as someone who was going to be starting his own family with another person and having a you know living in another house and that wasn't with my brother or you know i don't think that she had fully seen the whole picture and i think when she saw the diary and saw that she wasn't in it it wasn't about her right it wasn't about his nuclear family it was about his prospective family it was rolling forward um and and both you know there was also something about in your piece about the distortions of memory right i mean that you know just how long did she stay at the mcelveen house after one person remembered a week the other person remembered six months eighteen months i don't actually remember what the actual truth is but that it's kind of very rabbinic idea that um i don't know if it's rabbinic or human but that we all remember things differently right and that that's part of the grieving process as well uh and the fallibility no one's lying here we just remember the same event differently the fallibility of memory is like this i mean i'm now so transfixed by this so right if you ask jeff mcelveen who's bobby's younger brother um jen lived with the mcelveen family for six months after bobby died if you ask helen his mother how long jen lived with them the answer is one week i mean how you can have such disparate memories jen thinks it was about two months we'll never know but that wasn't the only thing i didn't even include all of them i had a running file on my computer of all the things that people like remember differently i mean um okay bob senior didn't remember that his son's body was recovered at the periphery of the world trade center i mean the periphery peripheral you know like he could have been very close to merrill lynch at the time if he had remembered that he would have been spared so many nightmares he was for years terrified that bobby had died by jumping but if he had remembered this and it was my brother who actually had a note from bob senior that said you know lieutenant zone so has come to now or detective stones who came to the house and told us that bobby's body was recovered from the periphery based on where he was we're not even sure he ever visited the building then they learned more and learned that he had but he'd clearly left but think about that he forgot about something that could have given him great comfort i mean i i'm amazed that he didn't latch onto that right what they latched on to what they chose to forgot whether that wasn't conscious or uncon i mean well it conflicted with his narrative about how he died which was in an explosion in the lobby of the building that the government had done so it served another end right but i mean yeah there were cross purposes those memories um so to ask the the obvious question how is the family reacted to the article they're very happy but i mean it's not because i'm some kind of genius it's because they're not fancy people and so they don't have like golf tournaments every year for him or they don't do big stuff for him every year they're also very modest and kind of introverted and self-effacing and with every passing year they just got really upset that his name isn't really out there in the world so you do something like this and then his name is out there in the world right so i mean if it had been like you know read by one tenth the number of people i think they would have been really happy right but that this was i guess a accurate b a tribute uh and all the more so at the 20th anniversary here and now um which which i think is also um i mean we aaron we spoke a bit about this um before of of to go from the immediacy to where um someone is at 10 years to 20 years uh to the journey of grief um i mean no one ever uh i mean i i feel that as a rabbi no one gets over loss it's just a man a matter of learning how to manage loss this would have been a this was a very different article at 10 years as it is now at 20 years it's funny you say that helen told me that she wouldn't have been forgiving she wouldn't have been able to forgive jen if i had done it at the 10-year mark like jen might have surrendered the diary and i don't think any of the charitable beautiful things that helen said about her own behavior at the time um any of her insights into what the diary actually said i don't think it would have happened she had to go on a spiritual journey she had to sort of you know she woke up on the 10th anniversary of september 11th and thought i'm still angry i'm still fluorescently furious i am so so angry she found herself a new therapist got really spiritual got a whole new yeah i mean people people's grief it's like a live thing you know it's not right and so in reflection now as a journalist on on this piece and or are you i mean th this this is really caught all of our emotion all of our attention you heard the effect that it had on all of us who have read it and uh i just want to congratulate you if i could say such a thing for having written something that that moved us all that touched us all and that spoke to us all and thank you so much for joining us this evening thank you for being part of this um and thank you all those who are here and thank you all those who have been part of this via live stream and you are always welcome here jennifer at park avenue synagogue thank you so much thank you everyone you

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Length: 115min 11sec (6911 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021