The Good Men Project

A Picture taken on Yom Kippur

I was struck by a remark in the French documentary “9/11.” In the film by two French brothers on the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center one of the brothers is caught in the falling debris of the first tower. He’s pinned down with firefighters on an escalator. The camera is rolling. There’s a long scream of steel buckling and tearing and debris smashing. In a blizzard of ash and dust the screen goes dark and silent. Only when his finger clears the screen do we know the one brother has survived.

The brothers were in New York making a movie about a New York City firefighter. When the terrorists hit they followed the fire crews into the burning towers. Separated for hours on the day of the attacks, and fearing the worst, the two are reunited that evening at the firehouse in a powerful embrace.

“When I realized I was still alive the first thing I thought,” says the brother who had been pinned down, “was that I was going to be a better brother.”

That poignant moment of self-revelation with its hint of atonement recalled for me a Yom Kippur service I’d attended a few blocks from another building that had been blown to bits in a blind rage by Islamic fundamentalists.

Eighty-six people were killed July 20, 1994 when a bomb-laden vehicle was driven into the lobby of the Jewish Center in Buenos Aires. Two years before the Israeli Embassy in downtown Buenos Aires was blown to rubble, killing 28 people.

As with the World Trade Center, the killers left no message but death itself. No one claimed responsibility; in fact, 15 years later authorities have yet to capture and punish the people behind the attacks.

I arrived with my family in Argentina in late 1994. I was working for a U.S. media company, sent to run one of their newspapers in Buenos Aires.

There was a lot going on in Argentina in the mid 1990s – surprising economic prosperity contrasted against rising government corruption, the fallout of years of dictatorships and their human rights horrors – but the most puzzling, and among the most troubling stories, as far as I was concerned, were the unsolved bombings and the open-ended fear they evoked.

Unlike the attacks in the United States in 2001, international outrage didn’t follow the bombings in Buenos Aires, and for that I can blame only a popular sense that this was a “Jewish problem.”
That damaging impression was supported by the authorities (including the Argentine president, who, The New York Times reported, was allegedly behind a cover-up of the investigation that pointed to Iranian intelligence forces).

Over the years Elie Wiesel, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and other international leaders visited and put pressure on Argentina, but Argentine Jews, it’s fair to say, felt very much alone in their own country and in the world as they dealt with their fears, anger and, for some, the decision to remain or abandon their country.

About a year into my time there, I promised a Jewish friend who wanted to visit us that we’d observe Yom Kippur together. A doctor from New Mexico, Richard Lieberman and I met when I was a reporter for the daily paper in the state capital, Santa Fe. We’d become close friends, so much so that he flew down to visit us for two weeks putting all his faith in me, his religiously confused Catholic-Anglican-Episcopalian friend, to find a suitable Jewish service.

It would not be hard. The large Jewish community in Argentina is tight and strong and resolute. I had covered it, and the story of the attacks, and I knew I could find us a well-attended service. Although Richard never let on, as a Jew familiar with the attacks in Buenos Aires, he in fact suspected that this would be a Yom Kippur like no other.

On the assigned evening, after a day of fasting, we sped off in a cab to join hundreds gathering at the city’s largest service on the holiest night of the Jewish year.

We had to be dropped two blocks from the center where the service was to be held, our way barred by massive concrete security barriers. Private Jewish guards vastly outnumbered Argentine police as we walked toward the building, where a huge, mostly silent crowd, bundled against the southern hemisphere winter, funneled nervously through metal detectors, past tough-looking, gruff security personnel.

Inside it was standing room only, 2,000, maybe more. We stood, packed in tightly, shoulder to shoulder, the rabbi on a stage.

I felt genuine fear. I looked for exits, processing what I would do in the event of a blast and a panicked lunge for the doors. Everyone in that hall shared that sense of vulnerability – and defiance. By coming there we had created a target.

There was the singing of the Kol Nidre and a moment when, at the rabbi’s instructions, we lifted our coats in an act of shared shelter and embrace, a hot wave of body heat and the sour odor of sweat and wet wool passing through the crowd.

The rabbi was mesmerizing. Calmly, he remembered the 1992 and 1994 victims. They’d been taken from the world, he said, with so much they still wanted to do, conversations and friendships and opportunities that should have been theirs.

Then he instructed us to shut our eyes. The fasting, he explained, had converted us from humans to spirits; we no longer needed earthly sustenance, just food for our souls because our lives were ending. The end was delivered quite like that, with little warning. He told us we were joining those from the bombings. I didn’t know any of the victims, but I tried to imagine their faces.

“Your eyes are shut,” he insisted, “but you are seeing your body now, looking down at it, looking at who you once were.”

I examined what I was leaving behind, the rabbi encouraging regrets and joys, loves and losses, and mistakes. I was making a list of decisions and personal crossroads and people I wanted to remember. It was long. I needed paper and pencil.

Somewhere amid the busy current in my own mind I stopped listening to the rabbi. And when he stopped talking, I barely noticed. He was silent for what must have been a long time, and it was when I became aware of it that I heard the breathing, hundreds of us, young and aged, whimpering, wheezing, coughing.

There was sadness in the silence, and regret and resilience, and all of our collective histories asking for something more: justice, peace, love, patience, humor, kindness, meaningful friendships, and the time to accomplish all that. I am not a Jew but I felt the weight of history standing there, the dispersed tribe, remnants of the Holocaust, the Inquisition, Roman times, the recent bombings in that very city, living in the Diaspora, connecting to Zion. Asking for forgiveness and a clean slate.

When the rabbi called on us to open our eyes and let in the light I was surrounded by people in tears. Spontaneously, the crowd began to embrace, and Richard leaned in and held me tightly. He whispered: “I will be a better brother.”

Richard had nothing to set right in our friendship. The words were not for me in particular nor, I think, for his only brother, with whom he is close. The words were simply the end of his prayer to himself that night; I was just fortunate enough to be there next to him.

Richard knows that a second chance is a rare gift. Soon after his visit in Buenos Aires he survived a real brush with death – from heart failure. Like a finger rubbing ash and dust from the lens of life, he emerged from the experience with a clearer focus. At 54, he left his job at the hospital, where he was unhappy, and started a private practice, which is now three practices in three towns. The lifelong bachelor married the girl he’d dated for a decade a half. They have a daughter now, Elianah, who is four years old.

Richard tells me he’s never been happier.

Biddle Duke has been a newspaper reporter and editor for 26 years.  He now owns and runs two weeklies, a magazine and a website in Vermont, www.stowetoday.com