Though the 25th anniversary month of 9/11 is now over, I’ve decided to continue sharing “Rising from the Rubble,” from my magnum opus Cinnimin, in installments, until I reach the end of what I completed for NaNoWriMo 2023 and the most raw, immediate experience of living in the post-9/11 world. It just feels right to keep a serious mood during the lead-up to the third anniversary of 7 October. The scene immediately before the one starting this excerpt is a sex-related conversation and sex scene with Mancika and Ammiel, so it’s been omitted. Its final line is “The new world of After hadn’t gotten any easier to navigate, but it was made infinitely more bearable by the comfort of one another in the midst of so much turmoil.”
The fourth day of After, September 15, dawned on a world slightly, just ever the most slightly, starting to adjust to their raw new reality. Nothing would ever be remotely the same again, but there was no other option but going forwards one incremental day at a time. Dwelling too much on their agony would only prolong their healing.
Mancika and Ammiel coupled thrice before having a breakfast in bed of blueberry bagels with peanut butter, dried apricots and pineapple rings, and grapefruit juice from sealed paper boxes in the pantry. After brushing their teeth, they put on their nicest clothes to try to feel more normal. Mancika changed into a dark pink velvet dress with a lavender camisole to cover the low neckline, and Ammiel changed into a light purple suit with a necktie full of bold color splotches in abstract patterns.
They found seats in the left back row of the synagogue, near the door. Since Tuesday, Mancika only felt safe as close to an exit as possible, and she had no more daydreams of someday living high up in a luxury apartment of at least fifty stories. Even ten stories now seemed far too risky.
Just as she’d done at Kol Nidre in the wake of the O.J. Simpson verdict that now seemed like a minor situation, Mancika took shelter under Ammiel’s tallit and snuggled against him. She barely paid attention to the service, which was led by Lev today. Once again, she didn’t open her siddur.
When Lev took out his small Torah scroll in a dark blue velvet cover, Mancika was mentally transported back to Jersey City on Tuesday evening. Lev stood holding it by the waterfront, swaying back and forth as he chanted El Malei Rachamim, with the smoke-choked skyline across the river, a huge hole torn in the skyline evoking the absence of presence and the presence of absence, while a plethora of boats continued going back and forth and fireboats turned their hoses on the flaming rubble. She was still brushed with dust, and that inhuman scent carried all the way across the river and seeped into her lungs. Four days later, Mancika could still recall that grotesque, toxic smell, the unnaturally grey sky, and that primal feeling of fear.
“Since we don’t have any Kohanim, Bat Kohanim, or Levites here, why don’t we honor Mancika with the first aliyah?” Lev asked, jolting her out of her flashbacks. “For anyone who doesn’t know this brave young lady, Mancika Laurel was in the World Trade Center on Tuesday and spent the entire morning nearby after her escape. She went back to look for a friend after the second collapse.”
Mancika wished she were invisible.
“No one else here has anywhere close to your incredible survival story,” Lev continued. “This is the least I can do for you after what you endured.”
“Please accept the honor,” Lara concurred.
“You also need to bentsch Gomel,” Lev said. “That goes for Dvora and H.G. too. They must have the second aliyah.”
“Not without my Ami,” Mancika said. “I need him with me for support. He also saved me from falling into the rubble and took control of the entire situation. If not for him, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of the city or started healing.”
“We’re an inseparable pair,” Ammiel said.
“Sure, come on up,” Lara said.
Mancika slowly rose to her feet and ambulated to the bimah without letting go of Ammiel or leaving the shelter of his tallit. They gave their Hebrew names to Lev, though saying her father’s name was like poison upon Mancika’s tongue. She had little hope he’d ask for forgiveness before Yom Kippur.
As she chanted the blessing in unison with Ammiel, Mancika thought about all the people who weren’t in synagogue today because they’d been killed four days ago or were trapped under the rubble, their hope and strength waning, or confined to a hospital bed. If one of any number of things had gone differently on Tuesday, she might’ve been among their ranks. Perhaps she and Courtnie would’ve been lingering over breakfast when it happened, and unable to escape before that last hideous moment she’d never forget witnessing as long as she drew breath.
During the three lines of the first aliyah, she couldn’t stop replaying that sickening image in her mind’s eye. Ammiel had to nudge her when it was time to recite the after blessing. She pronounced the words in a daze and then shuffled off to the other side of the lectern.
Dvora and H.G. were called up next and recited the blessings in a similar deadened voice both before and after. Even Lev, who’d only seen the horror from a distance, read the parashah in rather hushed, sombre tones, using the Eicha trope. This might as well really be Tisha B’Av instead of the Sabbath before Rosh Hashanah.
“Do any of you know the words of Gomel?” Lara asked afterwards.
“I’ve said it after each of my births, but I never memorized the words,” Dvora said.
Lara held out a laminated card with large print and directed the congregation to the page in the siddur. Mancika, Ammiel, Dvora, and H.G. read it first in Hebrew and then English, “Blessèd are you, Lord our God, King of the world, who rewards the undeserving with goodness, and who has rewarded me with goodness.” Everyone else responded in Hebrew and English, “May he who rewarded you with all goodness reward you with all goodness forever.” Mancika stumbled back to her seat still holding onto Ammiel and immediately flopped into the chair.
For the third aliyah, Lara called up Adam and Golda, followed by Wilhelm and Ravid, Trixie and Kalanit, Sharona and Roger, and Jozef and Svetlana. For the Maftir aliyah, Mrs. Jurić was honored. Last but not least, Nikos did Hagbah and Basya did Gelilah. Then Lara chanted the Haftarah, Isaiah 61:10–63:9. Mancika mutely touched the velvet Torah cover when Lev brought it around, fighting back more images of the memorial service by the waterfront and the phantom stench.
Once everyone was seated and the Torah put back in the Ark, Lev looked out at the small group of attendees and began his sermon.
“Today in Nitzavim, we read the famous lines about how the Torah isn’t in the heavens or beyond the sea, but rather very close to us, in our mouths and hearts, so we might have it at all times, easily accessible and able to be properly observed. But what does this mean to us in the wake of the cataclysm we survived?
“We just left New York, most of us here, and another group came from Washington. Both of those cities have very large Jewish communities full of resources of all kinds—synagogues, schools, social clubs, libraries, kosher restaurants and groceries, bookstores, Judaica stores, neighborhoods, ample chances for singles to find spouses within the fold. Now, though we’re in a Jewish community here too, it’s not nearly the same. The nearest city only has a synagogue and resource center, and locals and vacationers alike understand that. Thus, only people who don’t mind the lack of a large, vibrant community choose to settle or vacation here.
“Despite everything we just knowingly gave up, we’re not missing the most important thing. We still have our precious Torah to follow, no matter where we are. Even a community of one in the middle of nowhere can keep the Torah. It’s not contingent on living in a city with a huge Jewish population like New York, though it’s often much harder in a place like this. I was born in the Soviet Union, where all religion was illegal and pushed deeply underground. My family did their best to keep the Torah in those constrained circumstances, and the only thing that changed for us after we came to America was that we were now at liberty to openly practice our faith without fear of imprisonment and torture. Our Judaism means more to us because we were forced to be religious in secret and didn’t always have access to a Jewish community.
“We too, in this unusual situation we now indefinitely find ourselves in, can and will also do our utmost to observe the Torah no matter what it takes and prove a very small community like this is just as meaningful as anything one can find in a place like New York, Jerusalem, or Los Angeles.”
Mancika thought about her mother’s family struggling to keep their faith alive in postwar Hungary, and how her grandma Etu had been deprived of everything in the camps. On the Christian side of her family, her great-grandparents and great-great-grandpa had been taken away from all churches when the Turks forced them to march through the desert. They hadn’t even been able to read the Bible without punishment. All any of them had had in their various circumstances had been prayer and personal beliefs, which could never be extinguished no matter what happened in life.
Just like they had, Mancika too was determined to rise above tragedy and emerge with her humanity and dignity intact. She might be depressed and traumatized now, but darkness only lasted as long as the nighttime. Once morning arrived, the darkness would slowly begin fading away and become but a memory.
Raizel closed the Chumash Rabbi Jenny had loaned her as soon as she read the last words of the Haftarah. Looking at words on a page, along with some footnotes, was no substitute for actually listening to them being chanted and watching the pageant of the Torah being paraded through the sanctuary. It was like reading song lyrics instead of hearing them being sung, or listening to someone describing a work of art instead of seeing it in person. That secondhand experience was so cold, emotionless, impersonal. It also lacked a rabbi’s sermon and spirited discussion of the parashah with the entire congregation.
Continuing to look through the Chumash would only depress her and remind her of everything she was now so most cruelly deprived of, so Raizel set the book on her side table and reached for today’s New York Times. Reading the paper was depressing too, but she had to know what was happening outside her hospital bed.
There, on the front page, was a photo of Mayor Giuliani, Bush, and the city fire commissioner. No one in Raizel’s family liked Bush, and most of them still felt the election had been stolen, but it seemed somehow comforting to see him taking charge and acting presidential during a crisis. Temporarily, he could be forgiven many things, and perhaps he’d permanently redeem himself by how he acted now. Raizel was further heartened to read about how he’d visited the rubble and declared, “The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” She hoped the guilty parties would be bombed into oblivion and the surviving masterminds given the death penalty after trial.
The second page contained a long story giving her even more reassurance justice would soon be served, an announcement of how the Justice Department had identified nineteen suspected hijackers. There was also a story about one of them in particular begun on page one and continued on page four. The FBI had “a fairly high level of confidence” in the accuracy of their identifications, all of whom were Middle Eastern Muslims. Raizel felt sorry for all the innocent people who’d doubtless now be subject to persecution merely on account of happening to share the same ancestry and faith. She hoped they wouldn’t all be forced into internment camps like the Japanese had been.
Page three was almost entirely devoted to detailing the believed hijackers’ movements and who was on which plane. Raizel’s hair stood on end as she read about how all of them had been living normal lives and blending into their communities, all the way up to getting on the planes they hijacked. The people they rubbed elbows with might’ve seen some of their activities as strange or suspicious, but probably never dreamt what evil they were capable of. The greatest measure of their evil lay in that frighteningly normal façade.
As expected, the stories about the cataclysm and its aftermath continued for many successive pages. Each line and photo drove home the heartbreaking impact of what had happened. Normal life had ground to an unnatural halt even longer than it had after JFK’s assassination a generation ago. It was impossible to flip a magical switch and go back to the soothing world of Before when nothing would ever be the same again.
Presently, Kim came in with a piña colada milkshake, and Wendy checked Raizel’s vitals. They changed the dressing on her stitches, cleaned around the pins in her external fixators, and replaced that dressing once she finished eating. Then they put more morphine in her IV, and Raizel soon succumbed to the tempting, soothing song of Hypnos. At least in sleep, she was free of pain and the constant cruel reminders of the bizarre new world she now inhabited.
Mancika took the lit Havdalah candle extended to her by Lara in the chapel. She knew she was being given this honor in lieu of one of the younger girls like Sharona or Rifka for the same reason she’d been given the first aliyah this morning, because she was in the World Trade Center on Tuesday and hadn’t left the vicinity until Officer Baron finally ordered her away from the rubble. She resented being felt sorry for and treated like some kind of great hero simply because of where she’d been and how she’d refused to get out of the path of danger.
All the same, she accepted the candle with a forced smile and held it as high as the top of Ammiel’s head, hoping no one realized what she was doing. For all she knew, they presumed her radicalism extended to dismissing the custom of holding the candle as high as she wanted her husband to be tall as a silly superstition like kaparot and not naming children after the living.
Mancika recited the blessings with everyone else, smelt the spices when the box was passed around, and held her free hand up to the candlelight. The sound of the candle being extinguished in the saucer of leftover wine at the conclusion was sweet indeed. This week, it marked not just the end of Shabbat, but also the snuffing out of the traumatic first few days of After, bidding them forever goodbye and slowly moving on towards the next phase of processing and healing. The nearness of Rosh Hashanah made the symbolism even more powerful a reminder of starting over.
