Audible Silence at Ground Zero

‎If tears could build a stairway,
And memories a lane,
I'd walk right up to Heaven
And bring you home again.
-Unknown



On the eve of the tenth anniversary commemorations of the September 11th attacks. At the World Trade Center. Standing, silent. Fighting the tears, losing.

Frustrating: an inability to understand the magnitude of horror. Wanting, burning, screaming. Sighing, breathing, sighing. Finding the words always remains a challenge. And amid the clutter of conversation busying the mind, a jolt of lightning. From the past. Collapsing the illusion of silence. Collapsing the illusion of being unable to hear the silence.

Audible silence at Ground Zero.

And then a fire truck zooms by waiving red, white and blue. It departs from Ladder 10, where "All Gave Some and Some Gave All." Where heroes were born, and from where they left everything they ever knew to help strangers they would never meet.

It passes with force. Its lights, blinding, penetrate a dark street where family members and friends gather to mourn under the sky. Its lights ignite memories. They give life to the chaotic emotions which swallowed that day turned night. That clear, beautiful day, when everything turned to black. When we lost so much life and so much innocence.

But all around me on this night I see messages of hope. Of possibility. Of defiance. Of still a dream that is our brotherhood. I turn away from the truck and follow its lights across the pavement. There, on a Wall of Remembrance dedicated for the first time, thousands of inscriptions remind and rouse me. One reads: I miss you so much. I love you more than you know.

It's an eerie night in Lower Manhattan. Wreaths join the company of people who stare blankly into a space that's no longer there. A plane flies by overhead, and then the images appear.

One, by one, by one.

Impossible images. Like an image of a falling man from a burning building. Like an image of a falling building where around it are fallen men. Like a bullet to your mind and to your heart.

And you remember.

I was not yet living in America on 9/11/01, but growing up on the streets of Jerusalem, in the shadow of war, amid the pandemonium of two intifadas, I was well sensitized to tragedy on an unbelievable scale. Similar impossible images were conspicuously reflected in marketplaces. Busses were blown up. The shards remained alongside the aid workers, fighting to save life where the very value of it was so indiscriminately desecrated. Hatred for no apparent reason.

And yet, I was incredulous. Terror does not become easier to digest simply because you are accustomed to it. Man will always grimace when pinched. That day was no exception. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in my childhood home, I watched the twin towers burn on television. The shock reverberated; its waves reached human hearts around the world. And still, some men danced.

The realization that my enemies are not only my own was a strange form of liberation. But in no way did it mean freedom. It meant a struggle for freedom. It meant, maybe, a stronger resolve. A common thread through a woven dress. A donning of jerseys. A shattering of naiveté. A new commitment to Aung San Suu Kyi: fear is not the natural state of civilized people, and we will not live in fear.

An understanding, a re-awakening: our democracy will not be given to us. We must take our democracy. We must take it from those who are sworn to our destruction. Who detest human dignity and who mask their contempt in a masquerade of religious indignation. Who conceal hatred in a veil of love.

Love for hatred. We cannot leave this trickery unchallenged if we have any hopes for an end to bloodshed, but we also cannot only speak of it. While our right to life and our right to freedom may be self-evident, these rights are by no means impervious. They may be trespassed, broken. And so we need them protected.

But guns and wars across the world will not protect them. We, the individuals, carry that responsibility. Through our actions. Through our unity. Through kindness one towards another.

It begins with finding common ground, with tearing down the walls which separate us—the walls which fell parallel to the towers, and which have helped us build so much due their collapse. On that fateful day, we demonstrated to the world that we cannot be defeated not because of our military or missile capabilities, but because of our undying spirit. Because as much as you try to kill us, we will not die. And as much as you try to strip us of our humanity, we will continue to preserve it.

And we did. Our firefighters sprinted into infernos with at least a suppressed awareness that they might never again see their children. For many, if not all, the mission must have been clear. The dangers must have been communicated. If not that, encountered. But they were unphased, unambiguous, our heroes. Al-Qaeda may have succeeded in dampening their morale, but they could never defeat their tenacity and their sense of sacrifice.

We are reminded, too, of the passengers aboard United Flight 93, and of a virtuous battle to storm the cockpit of a plane likely bound for Capitol Hill. A field in Pennsylvania today bears witness to these brave souls, who in a time of desperation chose to think outside of themselves. Their legacy assures us that tragedy, in its manifestation, uniquely intersects with hope—and that there is hope, within us, insofar as we keep it alive. Moral responsibility is dressed in civilian clothing: it is neither cloaked nor costumed; it is bare, naked, and ordinary.

It's true what they say. We are the 9/11 generation. It has typified our teenage years and will undoubtedly impact the rest of our lives. It forced us to expand our imagination of what is evil, while at the same inviting us to expand our imagination of what is good, and of what binds us. And it does one thing more, today: if we are to honor the memory of those who perished ten years ago, it bestows upon us an obligation to live in their stead—as they had lived. To act as they had acted. To dare as they had dared.

To return an attack on our dignity with a reclamation of it.

Chasing After Dawn

I know where the longest light in Prague is. It's at Dukelských hrdinů and Veletržní.

Bring some home-made sandwiches and a sesame street juice box, because you might as well as plop down and picnic there while you wait for the little green man to remember you depend on him. But maybe don't, because Stromovka park is near enough that perhaps you'd make better time planning which grassy corridor of sunshine would be best suited for whichever sandwiches you happen to have in your basket. In that case, then, do bring the sandwiches.

It's my last night in this magical city and I'm camping out to watch bright red streaks dance over the Charles Bridge. Because you have to beat the laughable tourist trap that makes you wonder if they give out free souvenirs on Vltava River. And because you might as well do it in fashion, no? Bring a camera.

And if you're headed to a terrace atop a Velehradská apartment, then maybe bring a sweater. It gets chilly. But the breeze is different here—it's non-intrusive and understanding. It's communicative, friendly. The kind that sends goosebumps diving into your arms and lights a fire in your heart. That envelops you in a blanket of tranquility and calls your attention to the numerous, dazzling stars.

I went searching for Kafka's grave. I was convinced it was close to Žižek, but I was mistaken. Maps lie. And sometimes they're really just silly—like they’ll indicate a cross-section with a road that's fifty feet above ground without accounting for topographic change. Wait a minute, where did that street go?

The best are the Czech people with just enough English to understand that you're lost, but way too much Czech to actually help you find your way. They respond to you in their native tongue as if, from the time you asked them for directions, some supernatural force has endowed you with a capacity that would render asking to begin with a little bit ridiculous and kind of a waste of their time.

Smiles get you the farthest, but more on that later. I have to run now. I’m chasing after dawn.

Praha, I'll be back.

Europe's Little Secrets

Like a dream. Like running through open space under a knowing Sky. Like silence—after a really loud life. Like a trance that enchants you. Europe. Like finding a corner of shade in a battlefield of blistering sun. Like sitting in it.

Spellbound.

If Neverland exists and Peter Pan still lives, then Switzerland must be on the way to Wendy Darling and the Lost Boys. Or maybe it's humanity's version of a land J.M. Barrie dared to imagine and to which we can only aspire. Maybe it's just the best version of it that we have. But it'll do, I'm sure.

There's a peace in Zurich that I have not felt anywhere.

We boarded the train to Landeck on a clear afternoon. Boys fiddled with phones and reflections in mirrors as I readied the camera for what was to come. Moving forward and sitting backward. Looking sideways while thinking straight. English before me and German behind me. Swiss German. Schweizer Deutsch. The kind that makes you stop in your tracks. Have I heard that before? Berlin, 2010—where the rubber meets the road and where a young Jew meets a young German.

Preconceptions. Like what about the past? And, should I really be talking to this guy? Or that girl. The one that turned me upside down and inside out, at a memorial somewhere.

Noises. Like the one we heard at the Barracks in Sachsenhausen that were barely audible. Spaces. Like the visible ones which weren't there. Well, where are they if not here? Stephan told us: the history of mass murder is the history of things you can no longer see. Oh.

But that stupid history. That stupid, stupid, stupid history. Who are you, anyway? And what have you done with half the world? Berlin, where it's blurry. Where Walls becomes Art after War becomes Peace, and where images flash before your eyes without asking permission.

Like a train bound for the mountains on the way to Neverland. Postcard mountains. The kind that make your eyes glisten in disbelief. That make you incredulous, but not enough to keep you from documenting the journey. Evidence. Do people really live up there? I asked. Green pastures. Steep hills. Remote cottages. But all the way up there? How do they get up there? Hold on to your children and belongings up there, please. And for a moment I wondered, who are their children? What are their belongings? And when the firewood depletes and the cool of the lake sneaks up from below? What then?

Europe carries little secrets on her back. They're too much for one generation to carry, and so we whisper them to each other in dark, brushed alleyways so that we won't forget what the cobblestones know. The cobblestones are shy and won't tell us much. But not the Stolpersteine—they're telling. Sometimes more than we want them to be. They're screaming. They're memory. And they'll be here to remind us when we forget. When our children become curious and we become tired.

Now? Now I’m in Austria. Where the sunlight breaks and chases. Where the mountains play a game with it and loop around the clouds they just fall short of. Forty German teenagers are currently on their way here from Munich. I hope they're as excited as I am. I hope we'll grow together and tell secrets to one another. About our identities, and about the future. About our fears and about our hopes. About the mountains, and about the clouds. And about who beat who when the sun came chasing after them with secrets from the past.

When G-d Promised Us Pneumonia

I remember when we all jumped at once. Shy, red leaves glided in the wind like paper airplanes that never land. Smiles on the horizon of our eyes met faces we knew were out there but could not see.

It was summer. We were young, fruitful; an unlikely collection of flowers descending boldly upon a world which would have liked to believe we were mutants. We weren’t mutants.

The water was freezing. I was the first to dip my feet in because no one had summoned the proper courage to do so and because I knew the sun would break. So sitting on the dock, locking my knees with my hands, I met my fears at home and stretched out my legs to meet my reflection. It was numbing, liberating, tantalizing, except that Sarah conspired with Khalid to make my encounter with -15 degrees more intimate. They pushed me in, those weasels.

Days like those made me wonder what we're all really doing here. The four of us were never supposed to be. We were not allowed. We came from different sides of the same war zone—a bloodied, wretched place where children are dissuaded, disenfranchised, derelict. It dawned on me one night here that our very existence communicated a message that no tank or anti-tank ever could.

We were Muslim. Or maybe Jewish. No, seriously, what were we? Our elusive aura deluded even the most perceptive. We made no apologies. This frustrated the compartmentalizers, I'm sure. Not because they wanted our apologies, but because they didn't: they wanted to figure it out for themselves, but they couldn't. We were confusing. We were proud. We were just us, without conditions or preconditions: self-made heartbeats who thumped and longed for the impolite.

After my body recovered from the trauma, I shouted this to Sarah. I said, Hey, Sarah, what makes us beautiful? She held her head high, clearly still reeling from the success of her mischief, and, gazing outward in my general, ambiguous direction, yelled back: We don't apologize!

When the sun broke, I butterflied back to the base where the others were chatting. Opening my eyes after the last stroke I saw Khalid, Sarah and Amra lying on the plywood and staring at the caricatures of the sky. They were arguing with one another about the personification of the clouds. I spotted my moment. Yes, that's right, I attacked, splashing them with some of their own medicine in the form of ice on bear skin. Who ever said that revenge wasn't sweet?

Soon, we were freezing together—laughing, diving, spitting in the face of tanks and anti-tanks. The expanse of the lake was rejuvenating. We couldn't see its end but we imagined it. We embraced it, like a young love whose capacity it is to hurt us, but which we’d never fail going to bat for.

G-d promised us pneumonia, but we didn't always believe G-d, we only trusted Him.

And I remember. Purple flirted with orange above us when Khalid suggested it, that we'd all jump at once. He said it'd free us. That is, if you want to be freed. We scrambled back to the dock and readied the cameramen who weren't there to greet us, but who we hoped would take a photograph for the compartmentalizers to mull and choke over. We wanted this one imprinted in our minds. Like that time Amra crisscrossed a farm in India running from a cow she was charged to take care of but which refused to be milked. Like all those times when we'd choose dairy she'd suddenly complain that she's lactose intolerant, and how we'd always know that she's really just a coward. Coward, get it? Amra said we weren't funny.

We lined up symmetrically along the rugged floor of the last refuge point that still imprisoned us, and jumped.

The Call of Memory

On a spring day five years ago, I stood inside the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and prayed. I sought fervently to believe that what appeared so heartbreakingly before me was an illusion. That it could not have happened so transparently. I imagined the world from inside a German cattle car, which, only 65 years prior, served to actualize Hitler’s genocidal ambitions by carrying tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers.

I promised the six million souls looking down on me that I’d always remember them. But I have since, intermittently, found myself contemplating the ramifications of that commitment. What exactly are the responsibilities of the rememberer? Is he to sing? To safeguard? To study? Perhaps simply to know — to be aware of the horrors that once besieged European Jewry?

Too often, in the weeks leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day, we forget how to remember. The lessons that emerge from the Holocaust, though all rooted in tremendous gravity, are not all centered around pain and suffering. Anecdotally, as well as in diaries, journal and survivor testimonies, we bear witness to stories of profound decency in unthinkable conditions.

We draw strength from the arresting bravery of some 400 ghetto fighters who mounted a rebellion in Warsaw on the eve of Passover, 1943, with just a few automatic weapons. We learn of the poet Paul Célan, who translated William Shakespeare’s sonnets while imprisoned in Romania. We turn our gaze to the pervasive stream of paintings, drawings, music and writing that were left behind in the camps.

In the eyes of scholar John Felstiner, creative resistance is “more human than blowing up a train, because of everything it takes to make a piece of art or a poem. The personhood is what the Nazis were trying to destroy, to try to erase from the globe.” The rememberer, in my mind, exists primarily to champion the victory of personhood. To emulate the daring pronouncement so many victims made — that they were, albeit in bleak and deplorable circumstances, alive and breathing. He exists to assert the legacy of the victims as impenetrable and lasting.

But why? We need to pay tribute to these courageous individuals because, in many ways, they show us how to live, and how to remember; that to remember is to live, and that we have a choice now — as they did then — to maintain our humanity in a cry of tolerance against fascism, or to remain reticent, apathetic and uninvolved.

In reflecting on the future of memory, Hedi Fried, survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and founder of the Stockholm Storytelling Project, says it is especially important for the younger generation to learn her story, one that is hard enough for her, who experienced it directly, to understand. But she begs us to remember another imperative: namely, that “democracy dies if you don’t work for it.” It crumbles, much as it did across this century of blood and loss — in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia and now in Darfur, where genocide still rages.

We are not helpless, but we are also not as helpful as we could be. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique responsibility to validate the lessons of the past. At this juncture between life and death, between what we can see and what remains to be seen, passive commemoration does not suffice. It cannot. If we are to build a world centered on dignity, tolerance, and respect for the Other, we have to make it such. Holocaust Remembrance Day lasts for 24 hours. Yet the realities of the Holocaust are eternal. They require us to be constantly cognizant and vigorously vigilant.


Many today still do not taste the liberties a young Sophie Scholl once dreamed of when she left the word “Freedom” on a scrap of paper before being led to her execution. There are still dictatorships impinging on people’s basic human rights; there are still maligning grips of revisionism — those which seek to distort, deflect, twist and undermine our collective consciousness. There are still violent expressions of racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism.

In some ways, none of us are really free — not until we have risen to the challenge that memory has bestowed upon our generation. For the world shakes as I write; it erupts with uncertainty and flings to the fore a barrage of recurrent tensions and chaos.

Our only hope lies in remembering how to remember.

New Age Vision: TEDxTeen 2011

We are the music makers
we are the dreamers of dreams
standing by lone sea-breakers
and sitting by desolate streams
world losers and world forsake-ers
on whom the pale moon gleams
for we are the movers and shakers
of the world forever it seems
-Arthur O'Shaughnessy



This past weekend, I had the privilege of joining 200 young global leaders at the annual TEDxTeen Conference in New York City. An independently organized event (by definition), this was a coming together of thinkers and doers who don't believe much in the status quo. Or in the narratives that society has established for them as invincible. Rebels, really: the round pegs in the square holes. New York skyscrapers in rural Scottish villages. Clear skies on gloomy afternoons. People who like singing in a silent auction. Who like running in a walking world. Who don’t subscribe to notions of apathy or indifference, but to endlessly bending the arc of history: towards hope, towards progress.

TEDxTeen inspires young people to collapse the barriers that limit them, power through the gates of their dreams and create lasting and effective change.

To be unafraid.

Because there's a blossoming world around them, full of lilies—all waiting to be watered and to be shared. There is a teary-eyed world around them, too, where dictators lurk and ravage. Where basic freedoms are denied and where the quest for human rights is subdued, suppressed, subverted.

There are cries to be heard by them, also. And so we need them empowered. We need warriors of peace, like Amr Ashraf, and disruptive innovators like Sheel Tyle. We need those who are charged with missions. Not those who are born into a mold that directs them, but those who direct the molds that would otherwise reject them.

One day. Three sessions. Fourteen speakers. We were hit by a blizzard, you might say. And our minds were zapped, pinged, prodded, and teased. But they were also uplifted—catapulted into a different dimension where truth was put on trial and re-examined, and where ideas of "possible" were challenged, and augmented. The atmosphere in the auditorium was electric; I cannot remember the last time I felt so invigorated and alive.


I could spend a wealth of time telling you about the outstanding individuals who took the stage and rocked it. Literally shook the very foundation of it because they were as honest and daring as anything on it. I could tell you about how Natalie Warne rescued Chicago from the rain and a complicity that would undermine the fate of 30,000 child soldiers caught in the vicious web of Africa's longest running war. Or about how Zander Srodes boldly set off fireworks on the beach one summer day, met a woman and a mentor and fell in an unlikely love with sea turtles. Or maybe I could relate the poignant story of Dan Eldon's journey into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, and how the image of him dancing in the heart of Kenya with a scary monkey mask will, quite assuredly, stay with me forever.

And yet: these talks will soon be online at TEDxTeen.com. I invite you to watch them there and to share them with your twitter followers and anonymous extraordinaires.

Instead, for a moment today, I want to tell you about a thirteen-year-old boy named Osiris, whom I met at the conference and chatted with briefly over Vitamin Water. A robotics prodigy, Osiris is a freshman at a technological high school in Atlanta, Georgia—with a unique desire to live. Indeed, vibrancy and tenacity emanate from him with force and conviction to the likes of which I have seldom borne witness. I asked him why he was here. He replied that, when he was younger (likely when he was 10 or 11), his father tried unsuccessfully to introduce him to TED. Recently, however, he has re-discovered the online phenomenon, and watches several videos nightly.

But Osiris didn’t travel hundreds of miles to Manhattan simply because he’s a TED enthusiast. He has a new vision for the world—as he described it to me, a world which thinks critically as opposed to comfortably. To that end, Osiris shared with me an experience he had not long ago with a group of his classmates. They were working hard on a science project constructing an electric car. Osiris took the initiative and led the engineering effort. His classmates, after recognizing an initial failure in the car's functionality, presumptuously decided to destruct it—undermining all the work he had done. Instead of pausing to consider how they might implement a constructive solution to the problem, they chose not even to identify it. This frustrated Osiris, who claimed he knew how to fix the car but was not given the chance.

In a treasured moment toward the end of our conversation, Osiris revealed to me that he often gets bullied and teased in school. He described an incident of confrontation with an older teenager who decided to pick on him for no apparent reason. In those situations, he told me, I want to scream: Why are you doing this to me? I'm trying my hardest!

He then turned to me and fell silent. Yet before I could reassure him, he added: Or maybe I'm not.


By the end of the day, inspiration loomed over my head like a scent that paralyzes on a spring morning in Zurich, or a botanical garden in Haifa—there, where those lilies protest to the sun: more attention, please. It twirled around me like a drug one would have thought to be destructive, but which actually sustains. And by the time I was ready to leave, the scent had entrapped me, and for a moment I was far away in those cities, negotiating with the wind and bending over to smell the flowers.

For a moment I was there. For a moment I was anything.

Kathy's Story

The following are a series of interwoven reflections on Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, a tragically beautiful, under-recognized film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s award-winning novel. I’ve tried my best to foresee the unseen tides.

We’re not immortal. We’re mortal.

By the meadow, Kathy waited. Standing before her, guarding, was a barbed wire fence on which two white pieces of cloth shivered, timelessly, and ricocheted against the metal and against the wind. Far out, beyond the solemn gate of reprisals, were memories of her youth, those which she could see but not feel. Death had taken them from her. Life had, too.

But Kathy waited. She thought that if she waited long enough, that maybe a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy. He'd wave. And maybe call.

And if he did? She’d be reminded of all she’d lost and gained. Of how she hoped to lock the treasures of her innermost with her closest, but how time had dwarfed them all. Outplayed them. Outsmarted them. But not outlasted them. Not her. Not yet.

And if he did? Perhaps then her heart would ache stronger than before, and she’d be brave, though wishing furiously that what she had been told could never be true was in fact a lie—that she could get a deferral. That there, then, if she waited long enough, Tommy would come with buckets and shovels and they’d go running down to the beach, sit down and build a castle. And if the waves were conservative and their water on short supply, that the tears they had cried at Hailsham would fill the empty space where passageways and bridges were to be.

If only we could stop the seconds on our mortal clock, then maybe half the tears would go to joy and not to sadness.

To love and not to madness.

It depended on how hard she squinted. Also on Tommy’s ability to rise, resurrected, and return with the hair he had grown at the cottages where paths split and then diverged. And split again and converged. And split a thousand times like blood that spatters and friends that disappear. And splinters. That hurt. But how that pain makes you feel alive and how if you never felt it, you’d be worried.

Time can’t make us happy. A closing window can. If we were given a preview. But what does that tell us about the way we live our lives?

Hailsham didn’t just change them—it was them. Before they were born (if they were ever that), it waited for them. Not across a meadow like a longing or a hope, but across a prison where a guard awaits to escort a new inmate—like a minor, for example, who had been accused of breathing on the wrong street or looking in the wrong direction.

I didn’t know they made laws like that.

They did.

I think Kathy sighed. When she finished, I think she frowned. When she finished, I think she inhaled again. And when she finished, I think she cared, and held on.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them and not let unseen tides pull us apart.




We all complete, no doubt. And maybe we’re all distraught by the time life has lapped us; when we fall down against the barrier gasping for the air we never thought we’d need. But Kathy, if she were with us now, would likely argue that as much as we may often want to look back, or look forward, it may pay more dividends to stand in place. She’d talk to us across the meadow, where her and Tommy would be reunited and from where they would run to the sand and make it into a castle, to compensate for all the years that were taken from them.

Kathy would tell us to live.

Time We Let Free

Fear is not the only thing that hides in closets. Nor are shadows.

Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.

We believed in ghosts, then.

But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.

And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).

Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.

And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.

Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.

They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.

It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.

No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.

Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.

Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.

Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.



But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.

And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.

Life in Death

Sometimes, when I stroll along the cracked pavements of city squares and pavilions on a cold New York City night, when I breathe and then watch curiously as the water condenses to fog, when I pass a perfect, silent stranger painting smiles on the faces of passerby, I pause and think of them.

I think of victims. All victims of an unknown time who died in an unknown place.

Perhaps the sky is their graveyard, or maybe the open field at Treblinka, or the forest of Sobibor. Or maybe it's the streets of European towns that bear the marking of their deaths.

But, particularly, I think of the victims whose memory has been ingrained in my heart—those whose stories I have read and whose personal, but universal messages I have come to know. And to cherish. And to cry over. Sometimes, when all around me I see vivid signs of life, I think of death.

And then the death haunts me and when I sleep it chases me. In the morning, I awake, and it awakes with me. I wish not to overcome it, for I fear that I will forget it. And then, who will be left to return to the open field at Treblinka? Or the forest of Sobibor? Who will be left to teach that bystanders are as complicit as killers? No, I cannot forget.

So, instead, I look for ways to keep death. To enshrine it. I carry the pain of death with me. I tuck it in the pocket of my consciousness when I walk and talk and run through meadows where lilies sing and dance before the knowing sky—the sky that remembers all that we cannot—above a graveyard somewhere.


Today is the 66th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, designated by Resolution 60/7 of the 2005 UN General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, member states, communities, and individuals everywhere renew their commitments to the values of human dignity and reaffirm their resolve to fight the forces that would do away with us.

On its face, it seems that, though late, the world has made progress—that which can be measured, poured into a cup and quantified. Yet, while the establishment of this universal memorial is to be celebrated, it is not to be taken for what it’s not—a sign that the countries of the world have dealt adequately with the past and are working together in common purpose to build a better future. Many, in fact, are not nearly. Many have failed—as evidenced last week, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center published a report of nations’ grades based on their efforts to bring former Nazi criminals to justice. Many literally failed.

Holocaust memory—fancy it a species—faces the threat of extinction. In America, two states out of fifty have instituted high school curricula focused on the rise, atrocities, and moral implications of Nazism. Record counts of antisemitic acts have been recorded in communities across Europe over the past year. Neo-fascist groups bent on the indoctrination of youth have surfaced all over the internet. And while it may seem plausible to some, no—Iran’s Ahmadinejad does not stand alone in his denial of the Holocaust. Nor does Venezuela’s Chavez.

A "Day," no matter how "International," will not prevent the ultimate reality if each of us does not step in and speak out on behalf of the victims. If we do not take to the streets and call for the extradition of those who had consigned them to their deaths. If we do not build a foundation upon which their stories can rest and teach and inspire our contemporaries not only to learn about the perils of intolerance, hatred, and bigotry, but to make meaning of them in these changing, difficult times; arrive at mutual understanding through dialogue; breathe life in death.

We must always remember these truths. That there is, at the end of every tear, a smile. There is, at the end of every tunnel, light. There is, at the end of one generation’s responsibility, another’s.

And sometimes, when the air is cold, I breathe it in and out again. And then I close my eyes and think of those whose breaths were taken from them. I feel the whistle of the wind around me and hear the clucking of distant steps. I see the open field at Treblinka. I imagine the forest of Sobibor. And the streets in Amsterdam, and Paris, and Prague.

I think of life. And then of death. And then I take my breath and slowly, between my lips, breathe one into the other.

Remembering Tuscon

And what is the best time for remembering? At noon
when shadows are hidden beneath our feet, or at twilight
when shadows lengthen like longings
that have no beginning, no end, like God?
-Yehuda Amichai, Who Will Remember the Rememberers?

Tragedy often numbs us. It numbed me on January 8. How could this happen?

A bullet. Thirty-one bullets. Six lifeless, nineteen injured. A nation devastated. A brave congresswoman fighting for her life. Making strides that leave the doctors speechless. We are wise to acknowledge miracles, they say. Yes, you are.

I tried to enter the mind of Jared Loughner, but failed. I wanted to understand, but I could not. Instead, I found solace in the stories of heroism: a judge who shielded a staffer from imminent death; a mother who dove in front of her daughter; everyday Americans who wrestled to the ground a deranged gunman and impeded his attempt to reload with an extended magazine—men and women who, when the stakes were highest, sacrificed their lives for their fellow citizens. These are heroes, I thought.

But some were beyond their reach. Some had died. And families and friends were called upon to mourn the senseless passing of the victims. But how does one mourn? And for what purpose? When President Obama addressed the nation a few days after the shootings, he put stories to the faces, to the names, to the ages. He attempted, with his words, to remember the victims for what they represent in the lives of us all. But what especially struck me as key was the connection he made between memory and action: beyond our reflections, Obama contended, our conduct must subscribe to the victims' legacies.

Does it? And what, after all, are the obligations of those left behind? Many understand the concept of commemoration as honoring the legacy of the dead. Have we done that? And if we haven’t, how do we?

Remembering Tuscon must ultimately be a difficult undertaking. Memory, by nature, binds the past and the present. Memory is a recollection; the thrust of a moment, a person, a feeling, into one’s mind. The task and challenge becomes carrying memory into the future. It begins by transcending what we know and assuming what we must.

To me, the only way to keep the victims of the Tuscon tragedy alive is to live in the way that they would have. While meritorious, reciting psalms does not constitute due service. It’s not enough to gather under the roof of a basketball arena one winter evening. It’s not enough to visit a make-shift memorial. Or to write on a Facebook page. Or to cry.

Perhaps the first step is to imagine. Perhaps the first step, as many have well done, is to tell the stories—to humanize the victims and the values for which they stood. But beyond that, commemoration must be constant and forever. It must reconcile the loss, embrace it, and then internalize it. And once it has been internalized, it must be transformed. Into kindness, into respect, into civility—into what a Jared Loughner tried incomprehensibly to take away on that heartbreaking Saturday morning. That, we must redeem.

In the end, memory calls upon our conscience. To act. Not out of remorse, but out of determination. To undo. Not our ethical temperaments, but our ethical lapses.

In the end, memory calls upon our image of a nine year old Christina Taylor Green. The youngest of the Tuscon victims, she had just been elected to the student council at her elementary school and had gone to visit Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to learn more about the political process. A dancer and a swimmer, she represents, most unbearably, pain at its sharpest. But she also represents the imperative at its highest. For her, we must live—we must live in the way that she would have.

So do it for Christina Taylor Green: blossom. Bloom. Rent a yacht and do the things you always wished to do out at sea but never had a chance.

Stop.
Breathe.
Dance.
Swim.
Run for student council.

Dream.

Christina: I hope that we, in our small way, in the hallways and classrooms and streets of our country, find your courage. That we aspire like you, and push bounds like you. That we are never afraid to follow our hearts like you. And that we smile because you were, and because you are, and because you will be.

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina, I hope you’re jumping in them now.


This post is dedicated to the victims of the Tuscon shooting tragedy of January 11, 2011. May they rest in peace.

Why Peace in Sudan Matters

You sigh. A day's worth of searching for firewood in the remote outskirts of Abyei slowly fades as the sun above you turns a starker, darker orange. It then sets and sets off the recurring fear voicing from within: it will get colder tonight.

But that fear is compounded with an even greater one. You hurry, your heart beating fast and faster, back to the camp, to the "safety" of the camp, because you know those men. You know what they do and what they did. Your friends have been raped. And they have been killed. And the risk you take to defend your family is the greatest risk of all. And so you run, empty-handed, because you don't want to be buried the next time the sun turns a starker, brighter orange.

It began yesterday. In an unprecedented moment in our history, the people of Southern Sudan took to the polls to cast their vote on a referendum that could see their secession from the north and the subsequent birth of a new nation. This pivotal event was the intended culmination of a peace process between the north and the south, its timetable determined as part of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, signed in January 2005 between Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan. Independence is looming; decades of civil war, anguish, and genocidal crimes could soon come to an end.

Not so fast? The peace process could also well be undermined, as it has been undermined time and again by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir and his proxy-militia in Khartoum -- nefarious violators of humanity whose own self-interest unleashed mass-atrocity crimes in Sudan's region of Darfur for the past eight years, leaving more than 500,000 dead and more than 3 million displaced. He and his clowns have done so before. We needn't look farther back than April of last year, when Al-Bashir, for whom an arrest warrant was issued in March 2008 by the International Criminal Court, conspicuously stole the election, gerrymandering his way to power via intimidation tactics and the instigation of unadulterated chaos - you know, typical behavior for a mass-murderer.

And so political turmoil has precedent. Violence has its stage set. The votes are being cast, and the world remains watching.

But what responsibility does the world have, anyway? Why does peace in Sudan matter so? Why does the international community have a responsibility to ensure that peace and stability endure after the creation of a new African state? To solve oil-revenue sharing squabbles? Secure post-referendum border demarcation? Speak, stand, stay?

Sixty-two years ago, delegates at the United Nations had a vision: that conscience should be able to stand up to power, and that the small countries of the world should not fall by the wayside as they submit willingly to the agendas of the big ones. Yes, this was the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt. A world rid of war. A world where the worth of a child in Nairobi was equal to that of a child in New York, and London, and wherever else. Sifting through the rubble and devastation of two world wars, she, together with the other idealists of her time, framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first bill of rights to which all human beings are entitled. These were thirty independent articles, not dependent ones. Among them was the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to security. The right to a nationality and the right to work. The right to an education and the right to participate in community-life. In other words, the rights we "know" but never knew we had.

Eleanor Roosevelt understood something profound about the world. She dreamed because she understood- not only the moral imperative that lay in giving hope and purpose to people everywhere; to protecting innocent civilians from the failures of their own governments; to democracy; but what lies beyond: namely, the nature of our connectedness in a post-modern world. That the butterfly admired by one little girl somewhere is the same butterfly admired by any little girl anywhere. That the persecution of one people implies a threat to all people. And that the grass really is only green until it's not.

The history of genocide teaches one thing: hate incubates. It festers. It grows. It multiplies exponentially until words become chants, lies becomes truths, and ideologies that once seemed ridiculous, well- are no longer. Incredulity dies. Rather, it dissipates, more quickly in a community environment than we realize. But what is community, after all? In Hitler's world, perhaps it was Germany, perhaps it was Europe. Yet, had he been able to, is there any doubt in your mind that Hitler would have exterminated the Jews of America? The homosexuals of America? The disabled people of America? All of America? I have little doubt. And that's for one very simple reason: in the so-called "logic" of Nazism, hatred of the Jew preceded the general hatred of mankind. The Pan-German idea excluded all who were deemed racially inferior. The blood stains of the 1940's bear evidence to what was done, not what was intended.

"Community" today implies and implicates differently than it did in post-WWII Europe. Differently than it did on 9/11. Differently than it did when Barack Obama defeated John McCain. Globalization is globalizing. And imagine Hitler with the power of the internet. Just stop, just stop and imagine. Frightening, I know. But it underscores the fundamental point: social responsibility in today's world has pretty big feet.

What matters there matters here. We cannot rest on our lawns, gazing at the stars, indifferent until tragedy knocks on our door, fainting with sadness when it does. We cannot remain diffident, blissfully ignorant, uninvolved, simply because the referendum (whatever that word means, anyway) is happening half-way across the world and not next door. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique obligation to ensure that the world continues watching; that it does everything in its power to prevent future violence from unfolding in Sudan. Because peace is at stake there. Not only for them, but for us. And if we don't speak for them, who, said Martin Niemoller, will be left to speak for us?

The people of Southern Sudan are ready and deserving. They don't want self-governance. They want independence. They want the privileges we know, and those we often take for granted. They want to be able to protect their families and their children. To walk outside their towns and cities without the fear of being raped. To keep warm at night.

As we do, they want to be free.

We'll do it together

One. One. OneOne.

The journey begins. And I begin with it.

Also with us is Bertrand Russel, recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature and special guest in this first blog post of many to come.

In the prologue to his autobiography, entitled What I Have Lived For Russel reflects:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

"I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

"With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

"Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

"This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Russel's convictions, in many ways, mirror my own. I often grow frustrated at all that I cannot change. I sigh when the pain felt half-way across the world reverberates and overwhelms me. But it never quite defeats me.

I look forward. To thinking with you. To writing with you. To questioning with you. To keeping alive the dream of peace- a flame that must be kindled and kept.

We'll do it together.