To commemorate the 9/11 attacks in New York ten years ago, I offer an excerpt from my new novel, The Unexpected Goddess. It appears after the first chapter, and speaks to what I consider the real meaning of the attacks:
David, who is fifty-five, is a reasonably happily married with three kids, a successful stockbroker, a Republican, and, since his marriage, had become an ever-increasingly devout Jew. Now though, in part because of my influence, my brother is beginning to question his beliefs. We speak on the phone about once a month and during our last conversation, he announced that he had just finished reading You Are Not Your Story, and that it was, in his words, “a mind-blowing book.”
Then he asked me what my intention was in writing it, saying: “Are you trying to turn the whole world upside down, Steve? I mean, Judaism’s been around for over 5,000 years and you are trying to say that it, and all the traditions and practices handed down to us by the great rabbis, is just, essentially, a story? My God, do you realize the implications of what you are teaching?”
“Yes,” I said to him. “Judaism, like any other religion, is just a story… an ancient, beautiful, and complex story, with very practical teachings that work well in the world, but a story nonetheless. I’m teaching people to see that they have a story, but they are not their story. I’m showing them how to awaken to the reality of what is, to realize their true nature right here, now.”
I paused to allow the silence between us to be felt. We were speaking on the phone, he in New York, me in California, but we were sharing each other’s reality, as if in the same room.
“So that means Islam is just a story too?” he said after a minute or two. “And the 9/11 hijackers who flew those planes into the twin towers were driven solely by their anger towards America, as well as their fundamentalist Islamic views? They were totally caught up in their personal and religious story, in other words… And you’re saying that if they were free within, if they had done the practice you describe in your book, they would have lived in reality as it is here now, and would have felt some kind of brotherly love for mankind instead?”
My brother’s brokerage firm was within a mile of Ground Zero and he was at work when the attacks happened. Like most New Yorkers, like most Americans, he had been shocked by 9/11. He had lost friends, people he knew who were working in the buildings that morning. He had been traumatized for months after.
I was living at home in Sebastopol when 9/11 occurred. A friend called me and told me to turn on my TV. As I sat there and watched the planes striking the towers, my heart went out to the passengers aboard and the people in the towers, but I was not surprised by the event. After all, a radical Islamic group had a attempted to blow up the World Trade Towers before. I just thought—and I wasn’t alone in thinking this, of course—that they had finally figured out a diabolically ingenious method of doing it.
“Yes, David, that’s what I am saying. People who are awake and free within feel the oneness of all of life, and so they don’t hurt other people. That’s one of the key messages in my book. But the hijackers were fervent believers, victims of their Arab and Islamic culture. They were totally identified with the Islamic story between their ears. You could say that they were driven by an almost robotic behavior, and it led to disastrous consequences for America on the morning of 9/11.”
I paused briefly. “The same thing can be said of other fundamentalist religious groups, however, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism. Clinging to a fundamentalist view creates robotic-like rituals and actions, no matter how sincere the actions of the believer.”
David was silent for a few moments, as if taking in what I said. Then we moved onto other subjects, and spoke briefly, as we occasionally did, about our parents, and especially our mother, and the anguish she still lived with.
