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.