Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Atoning for past sins

Thursday, Sept. 27, 2001 | 8:57 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

IT IS THE Day of Atonement. It is Yom Kippur.

This day has come and gone for 5,762 years and with it have come and gone stories of great success and great failure, unbelievable exhilaration and unbearable pain. But through all those years and, perhaps, in spite of them, the people of the Jewish faith and the inhabitants of planet Earth have managed to evolve to an unparalleled place in world history.

When you look at the events of the past two weeks against the backdrop of five millennia, what happened in New York and at the Pentagon should become easier for us to accept. But that won't happen.

It won't happen because we don't have the benefit of looking back on those murderous acts from a future none of us is intelligent enough to contemplate in the year 2001. Acceptance of those horrific acts and the people who committed them, paid for them, planned them and abetted them will not ever happen. Let me rephrase that -- must not ever happen.

And while it is the Jewish people of the world who will go to their synagogues Thursday to ask God to forgive the sins for which they atone, it is incumbent upon the rest of the world to join in to seek some understanding of the events that have devastated a city, a country and the largest part of the peace-loving world in which we live.

As I think about the kinds of sins for which we are supposed to atone -- that of jealousy, being disrespectful, dishonoring fellow human beings and of coveting that which is not ours -- I am struck about how minor they all seem compared to the horrendous nature of the terrorist attacks that have changed our nation and the way we will live in the years to come. And I wonder what we have done as individuals that might have created the environment for this ugliness to manifest itself.

Unlike the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, I do not believe a loving God would have visited this horror upon us just because we think it humane and appropriate and, dare I say it, even Christian to accept those who live differently from most of us.

And I don't think that those among us who believe in free will and the ability of human beings, especially the female of the species, to choose for themselves have caused the Almighty to bring down his wrath upon the World Trade Towers in the form of suicide bombers. Nor do I believe that the American Civil Liberties Union, which at times argues well beyond the bounds of the Constitution of the United States in an effort to save the meaning of that precious document for future generations, created the wherewithal for the madness that ensued on Sept. 11.

No, I believe that what happened two weeks ago was the direct result of decades of collective back-turning of the "civilized" world away from the hatred being spawned in the Middle East and other parts of the globe because to have done otherwise would have created a cost that our capitalistic society was unwilling to bear. Well, just like that gas station mechanic's commercial from years past says -- you either pay me now or pay me later -- it came time to pay up for our indifference.

This is not in the form of second-guessing because I don't believe such an exercise bears any fruit. Rather, I am more concerned that we learn very well from what I hope will be the last lesson on this subject we will ever need to have.

When you turn your back on wrongdoing, when you justify bad behavior because the cost might be too great to do otherwise, and when you allow the bad to succeed over the good, you invite exactly what happened Sept. 11.

As a peace- and freedom-loving world, we have done just that. We have known that terrorists were being funded by our "friends," and we have known that those who professed friendship for us were allowing those who bore us ill will to live safely and train for their terrorist raids within their borders. And we have said and done nothing to stop it.

We have conjured up all manner of economic and geopolitical justifications to absolve our guilt for knowingly allowing murderers to grow up amongst us and rationalized our efforts by pointing to greater good theories that today seem meaningless.

In short, we have done it all wrong. And what that means on a day like this, when we ask God to forgive our sins and to allow us to live and prosper in the coming year, is that sins come in all shapes and sizes. There are those which are prescribed in our prayer books, and then there are those which give us nightmares as we watch helplessly at the images of airplanes slamming into innocent people at work in tall buildings.

I understand atoning for the easy ones that we will address in the synagogue. But what we do as a nation and as a peace- and freedom-loving world to atone for what we allowed to happen on Sept. 11, well, that remains to be seen.

It may be sufficient if we learn from this last tragedy enough to make sure we never let it happen again. Or, it may take more, like a punishment so swift and so devastating that those who would even think of repeating such acts will immediately atone for just having the thought.

Whatever the answer, the world awaits. Those with and those without sin, waiting to cast that first stone. Waiting to clean up the mess we have allowed to soil this wonderful world of ours.