Then on December 7, 1941, The Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
News of the war floated in through radio broadcasts and news reels at the cinema. One year later, 17 years old and filled with a sense of patriotic obligation and duty, my grandfather enlisted in the US military. He chose the Army Air Corp, a fairly new division and precursor to the Airforce. Having heard the stories of WWI, he reasoned that this new air division would keep him in the sky and out of the trenches. Given that he was 17, he had to obtain written permission from his parents. They proudly signed the documents. Faith gave her blessing as well.
Morris was enrolled in City College at the time, and never actually graduated. When he returned from the war, the GI Bill allowed him to go straight to dental school at NYU. As a suburban dentist, he would eventually build a life for his family well beyond what his immigrant parents ever imagined.
Like a lot of people in his generation, my grandfather spoke of his service to his country with pride. It imbued him with a patriotism that lived comfortably alongside his bleeding heart liberal values and his strong Jewish identity.
Fast forward 60 years to 2001. I was 17 years old and a senior at Westfield High School in New Jersey, just a few miles outside of Manhattan.
On September 11, at 8:50 am, I walked into homeroom. The instructor, with a bewildered sort of tone, said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. He didn’t have many details, so I booted up the desktop computer at the back of the room. But in 2001, the computer was rudimentary and the internet was slow, so I returned to my seat and, like my peers, took the information in small bits as it trickled into the school. Classes were unofficially canceled, but we were held at school.
A loudspeaker announcement ordered students who had parents that worked in or near the World Trade Center to come to the office. The rest of us wandered around the halls for the day, sometimes stopping to watch the news coverage on the various TVs around the school.
12 people from my hometown died that day, counted in the 750 souls from New Jersey. Our graduation speaker that year was a survivor of the attack. We departed to college feeling vulnerable, second-guessing the security of our American future.
I only recently lined up my grandfather’s experience and mine, their parallels sending a shiver down my spine. Both are days that live in infamy, forever named by their dates. Both shattered the protective veneer of ordinary life on American soil.
More poignantly, my grandfather and I were both teenagers when we experienced a defining moment in American history. On the precipice of adulthood, these days would change our respective relationships to national identity. Each forged a bond to our peers in a shared generational experience that would influence our politics, livelihoods and even how we parent.
And yet this is also where our experiences diverge. Born in the 1920’s, my grandfather already knew a broken world. WWI lingered as a national trauma. The Depression had busted through American institutions and families causing economic and emotional hardship.
For me, 9/11 was a more stark line in the national landscape. There was the idyllic simplicity of before and the forever changed tumult of the after.
Most notably, 17 year old Morris stepped into a dramatically more unified America. The war and legislation like the GI Bill provided upward mobility that helped my family and others catapult into the middle class. The struggle for civil rights and gender equality followed in the next decades.
While 17 year old Mara experienced a brief national coalescence, my early adult years were dominated by deep mistrust in the US government due to a deceptive and divisive war as well as a crippling recession.
This breeded an emergent societal polarization, a widening divide that has come to roost today. All this, with the fact that millennials are the first generation in modern American history to grow up and expect that they will not achieve the upward mobility and economic security of their parents.
I am neither a historian nor a futurist. But I am a mother—now, the mother of a teenager. Having reflected on America’s 250th birthday this summer, and on this solemn 25th anniversary of 9/11, I find myself wondering:
When my children look back at America’s 300th birthday, what will they say were the defining moments of their teenage years? What events will have shaped their understanding of who we are as a nation, and what kind of generation will those moments have made them?
Will it be COVID - another moment of national unity that quickly gave way to deep societal divisions?
Is it climate change, with its extreme weather events impacting physical and social well-being?
For Jewish teens, will it be October 7th - a calamity also defined by its date - that has both bonded and divided our community?
I shudder knowing that the next generation will likely face catastrophes that I can’t even imagine today.
There is no lack of large-scale problems facing today’s teens.
However, Dr. Eliza Filby, a historian and expert on generational change, argues that the nature of the concept of a “generation” is changing. Whereas once generations were defined by fixed age-brackets that included common experiences and shared media, technology has made today’s experience more individualized. The lens by which we hear about, digest, and endure our reality is dizzyingly fast paced and polarizing.
Hyper-individualized internet algorithms create hyper-individualized perceptions around national and global experiences like Covid, Climate change and October 7. We literally live in different realities.
Filby calls this “fragmentation of shared generational experience.” As this fragmentation occurs, societal trust erodes. We lose not only a shared sense of the present facts, but also lose a shared framework for imagining the future. We no longer share a common story about where we are headed.
As a result, we are starting to meet the future with anger, apathy, and binary thinking, rather than communication, discernment, and compassion.
Writer David Wallace-Wells describes an “[unnerving] implicit philosophy” in how we currently interact with one another and the world. He argues that we are no longer “relating to the future…as citizens or moralists, problem solvers or advocates, but as gamblers, each of us surveying the horizon of possibility somewhat indifferent to human outcomes and looking instead for a betting edge.”
His concern is that, when it comes to imagining the future, we’ve become cynical gamblers and not responsible stewards.
Along those lines…another date - not as infamous, but consequential in its own right: September 17, 1787. The close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The Constitution was finalized. The uncertainty ahead had to do with its ratification and implementation. In a famous exchange, prominent Philadelphian Elizabeth Willing Powel asked founding father Ben Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,” to which Franklin responded, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Reflecting on America’s 250th anniversary, the NYTimes Editorial Board rightfully pointed out: “A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee.”
The future of American democracy, they argue, “is whether self-governing people still share a common reality. Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds.
A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps.”
This certainly reflects our reality today and our fear of a crumbling democracy and a splintering populace.
“Two and a half centuries later,” the Editorial Board warns, “[that initial constitutional] wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it...— America is still being made.”
A gambler places a bet and watches for an outcome completely outside of their control. The founders’ wager was different. Early Americans were not betting on the future; instead they firmly believed in their ability to shape it. That wager has been inherited by every generation, not as a guarantee, but as a responsibility.
This early American ethos was inspired by the democratic thought born in the Bible. Ancient people consulted oracles, cast lots, read omens, and interpreted dreams in an effort to glimpse what was coming. The Hebrew Bible itself describes some of these practices. For example, we read about the Urim and the Thummim, two stones that were waved about as divination tools by the ancient priests, used to "inquire of God.”
Our ancestors were not gamblers, though. They were builders, partners with God.
So Exodus describes how the Urim and Thummim stones were placed in the High Priest’s ornate and sacred “breastpiece of decision.” The divination tools sat directly over his heart, reminding him and the community that God’s wisdom and human decisions work as partners.
Because while the future is written by God, it’s shaped by humans. Like the weighted stones of the Priestly vestments, this is a heavy, sacred responsibility.
Which brings us back to the question: if generational experiences and media are increasingly fractured, and there is no common reality to agree on, how can we stay stitched together? As Lincoln warned in one of our nation’s darkest moments: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Again, Judaism has a blueprint for this, as through the generations, we too have faced internal and external conflicts that threaten schism. And yet we have persisted for millenia, our people still intact.
Pirkei Avot, the famous collection of rabbinic wisdom, begins: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in administering justice, raise many disciples and make a fence around the Torah.”
Each name in this spiritual genealogy represents a generation. We know that each generation listed faced a set of internal and external challenges. They were no less divided and dissenting.
But by passing judgement deliberately and fairly, by sharing knowledge truthfully and broadly, and by living by a code of compassion, we survived.
Also, notice how the genealogy moves from the singular: Moses to Joshua, to the plural: Joshua to the elders, to the prophets, to the Great Assembly.
Judaism has survived because to now, each generation understood itself as part of something bigger than itself.
Our ancestors knew that progress lies in expansion: expanding ideas, expanding who had access to those ideas, and expanding the definition of the “we.”
The power of American democracy, like Jewish civilization, lies in the collective responsibility and fortification of the “we.”
Now, I am painfully aware that in segments of American society, Jews are being actively cast out of the “we.” It is breaking our hearts, it is splintering our people.
I will state clearly that these segments of American society make themselves weaker when they cast Jews out of the “we,” and that the Jewish people are justified in demanding our safety while also insisting on our full participation in the American project.
I also understand that we will sometimes have the impulse to capitulate, to run away, to disengage, or change ourselves in a way that will herald acceptance.
But being part of a people, a community, a democracy, is not about finding a world in which everyone agrees. It is about accepting responsibility for one another even when we don't.
Rabbi Hillel understood this thousands of years ago when he cautioned: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?”
The Jewish way is to do two things simultaneously: to stand up for ourselves, and remain part of the larger “we.”
Which brings us to our Rosh Hashanah observance. At the heart of our prayer today, we recited Unetaneh Tokef, a terrifying reminder of how little control we have. It anticipates the many calamities that may befall us this year. Wildfires and floods, cancer and terror. It asks, who will live and who will die? Who will be safe and who will suffer? Who will flourish and who will struggle?
But Unetaneh Tokef does not leave us there, frozen in the face of an unknowable future. Instead it asks us: what will we do with the future’s uncertainty? Our lives may be shaped by forces beyond our control, but we are not powerless.
Our approach to these terrifying possibilities is “teshuva, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah,” that is: returning to the right path, meditating on goodness and giving righteously. It powerfully asserts: the severity of life can always be mitigated with moral courage and, above all, human connection.
This is because Judaism frowns upon closing our eyes and throwing the dice. Instead, we are told to place our bets on one another.
I think about my grandfather at seventeen, standing on the threshold of adulthood. He looked out at a world he could not possibly understand or predict.
Sixty years later, I stood at that same threshold, a seventeen-year-old watching the world change.
Now I look at my own teenager and wonder what she will face.
None of us can know what the future will ask of our children. We cannot know which dates they will one day remember as the “days that changed everything.” We cannot know which institutions will hold, which moral assumptions and considerations will fall away. We can’t know if new technology will herald an age of broadening wisdom or if AI fabrications will darken critical thinking and cloud judgement.
But in the face of this uncertainty, we have a choice. We could choose to be gamblers, casting our lots with one side or another in a “winner takes the future” game.
Or, we can choose to be stewards, shaping the future with critical thinking, equity, and kindness at the center.
My grandfather stepped into an uncertain future at seventeen and with a sense of duty and purpose.
It turns out, so did I. While my peers and I struggled to define what it meant to be American, I’ve come to see being American as building a “we” out of people who might otherwise have little reason to see themselves as belonging to one another.
We cannot guarantee what America will look like on its 300th birthday. But we are not helpless in shaping what comes next. Now is the time, as a Jewish community, to insist on connection.
We must teach our children to broaden their horizons and, most importantly, to care for one another. We must teach them to stand up for themselves without giving up on the larger “we.”
This year, let us not allow disagreement to become estrangement. Let us pledge to volunteer, vote, and donate in ways that don’t hedge our bets or draw lines in the sand, but instead build bridges.
Let us pray with our whole hearts that when our children’s turn comes to forge the future, they will have the courage, wisdom, and love to choose themselves and one another again and again. Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be worthy of God’s blessing.
Closing benediction
Kit Dillon is an author who writes on how to prepare for a crisis. You can collect cans and store water, but true preparedness, he explains, is “[expanding] your home beyond just the four walls. Learn what others have to offer and recognize what brings us together and what we hold in common…”
In other words, the answer to an uncertain future is not necessarily to fortify our personal bunkers: whether that be physically, emotionally or spiritually. The answer is to engage with one another.
Dillon puts it even more vividly: “The sirens will sound...Pack a bag if you want. But the real preparation begins when you knock on your neighbors’ door and invite them over.”
We cannot know exactly what is coming for us personally or communally. But preparing for it does not mean figuring out how to survive on our own. It means figuring out how to survive together.
L’Shanah Tovah tikateivu, may the new year be a good one for us ALL.
