How 9/11 taught us to find sparks in ashes

(RNS) — “That day they wounded New York,” as Leonard Cohen put it, was a bright, clear Tuesday. I was sitting at home that morning in Port Washington, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, preparing my sermons for the High Holy Days. I felt something.

Moments later, a friend called me and told me to turn on the television: “We are under attack!” he screamed into the phone.

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people.

They were the victims of an ideology that combines resentment of American power, jealousy of American success and anger at American secularism — all the “sins” Cohen enumerated in his song, “ On That Day .”

The first verse goes:

Some people say

It’s what we deserve

For sins against God

For crimes in the world

That ideology is still with us, with various ideological franchises: Al-Qaida, Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — with admixtures of antisemitism thrown into the toxic stew.

In the minutes after the planes hit the towers, and the reports started to trickle in about the casualties and the expected casualties, I called a staff…