Between two anniversaries

I remember where I was on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. But my memories of the World Trade Center began decades earlier.

As a child growing up in Bayswater, Far Rockaway, Queens, I watched the Twin Towers slowly rise into the distant Manhattan skyline across Jamaica Bay. They became part of the horizon of my childhood.

On many a morning, I would stop at the Trade Deli, grab my usual (scrambled on a Kaiser with a schmear, with legs on it), say hello to the guys at FDNY’s Ten House next door, and head across the street and up to the trading floor.

I spent several years walking between the commodity trading floor at 4 World Trade Center and my office in 1 World Trade Center, where my 1957 Coca-Cola machine patiently waited for our return. In the late afternoon, my crew and I would often close out the day’s trading sheets around a table at Windows on the World, high above the city and New York Harbor. On exceptionally windy days, pens and pencils would roll across the table as the towers swayed.

By September 2001, I had moved my office to Midtown Manhattan.

I was sitting at my north-facing desk on the top floor of a building in Manhattan’s Koreatown. It was one of those remarkably clear, cloudless September mornings New Yorkers never forget.

Without warning, the shadow of a low-flying aircraft swept directly over my desk.

Moments later, a commotion drew me to the south-facing side of the building. Looking toward Lower Manhattan, I saw smoke pouring from the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Only then did I realize that the aircraft whose shadow had just passed over me had struck the building.

Before anyone could comprehend what was unfolding, I watched the second aircraft crash into the South Tower.

Twenty-five years later, I can still see the smoke above Lower Manhattan. I can still smell its acrid burn.

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Islamist terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. We remember the innocent lives stolen that morning and those who ran toward danger.

For me, some of those firefighters were the guys at the Ten House—the men I would say hello to on my way to work.

But remembrance requires more than recalling what happened. It requires asking what we learned.

America has just celebrated its 250th birthday. Now, our nation will commemorate the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.

Between those two anniversaries lies an opportunity for national reflection.

Nations change. Cultures evolve. But the American experiment remains fragile.

The question is not whether America changed. It is what we changed, what we preserved and what we allowed ourselves to forget.

The Declaration of Independence gave America its ideals. The Constitution gave America its framework. Neither can preserve a republic if its citizens lose confidence in the principles upon which it rests.

Perhaps every generation inherits two constitutions: one written on parchment and another written into its culture. The first is interpreted by courts. The second is taught around dinner tables, in classrooms and houses of worship, on college campuses and through the devices our children carry in their pockets—by what we honor, tolerate, remember and forget.

Twenty-five years ago, Americans watched strangers help strangers. Firefighters climbed stairwells while office workers descended them. Americans lined up to donate blood. Flags appeared from windows and highway overpasses. For a brief moment, whatever our differences, there was still an “us.”

America had serious divisions before Sept. 11, and not every change since has been harmful. But perhaps the most consequential change of the past quarter-century is not that Americans disagree more. Americans have always disagreed.

It is that we increasingly question whether we still belong to the same national story. Political disagreement increasingly becomes personal contempt, while patriotism is too often confused with partisanship.

And as a Jewish American, I cannot ignore another warning sign. The Jewish people understand something about memory. We did not survive because history was kind to us. We survived because memory was disciplined. We told our children. And they told theirs.

America requires civic memory, too.

Our civic rituals and commemorations remind each generation that liberty was inherited, not invented, and that freedom carries obligations as well as rights.

July 4 asks us to look back across 250 years of an extraordinary national experiment. Sept. 11 asks us to look back across one extraordinary quarter-century. Together, they ask us to look forward.

What will America be at 275? What will a child born today be taught about Sept. 11?

Will our children understand that liberty can tolerate disagreement without requiring us to despise one another? That free speech protects ideas we dislike, religious liberty protects faiths other than our own, and citizenship entails responsibilities alongside rights?

The Great American Experiment remains an experiment. Its continuation depends upon whether each generation believes it remains worth continuing and whether we teach the next generation why.

Every civilization plants seeds: some of liberty, some of division, some of courage, some of indifference. The harvest comes years later, often when another generation is holding the tools.

America now stands between two anniversaries: one celebrates our birth; one remembers one of our greatest modern wounds. Both remind us of an inheritance entrusted temporarily to our care.

As a boy, I watched the Twin Towers rise across Jamaica Bay.

As a man, I worked within them.

And on Sept. 11, 2001, I watched them fall.

Today, that 1957 Coca-Cola machine sits in Miami, a small piece of Americana from another time. It survived the journey from an office that no longer exists, in a skyline that no longer exists from an America that in many ways no longer exists.

We cannot return to that America, nor should we try. But moving forward should not require forgetting what was worth preserving.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps the question for all of us is not simply what we watched fall. It is what we are choosing to build.

History does not preserve itself.

Liberty does not preserve itself.

Memory does not preserve itself.

Truth does not preserve itself.

They must be taught, defended and passed from one generation to the next.

Because civilizations, like nations, like families and like individuals.

We reap what we sow.