9/11

I's hard to believe that it's been five years since 9/11. I was going to write out my whole story of that day but, frankly, while I was in Manhattan, I didn't come anywhere near danger. (It is very kedai to see the documentary by those two French filmmakers who were there to witness the whole thing.) Suffice it to say that I was on the FDR Drive when the airplanes hit, I had a long day wandering around Manhattan, and ended up in YU and took the train back to Brooklyn with R. Shalom Carmy.

My roommate and chavrusa from my first year in yeshiva was in tower 2 when the first plane hit. He got out of there as soon as possible and was actually a guest in my house a few weeks later on Sukkos. Two other friends of mine had offices in the towers but were not yet at work when everything happened.

A colleague of mine at the time had just left a job on one of the top floors of one of the towers. Almost everyone she had worked with died on that day. I don't think she ever recovered but a few months later she went back to work at that company and help rebuild the department.

Also, a former boss of mine, a real prince of a man, lost his son in the towers. I later learned that he was the hardest agunah case emanating from the tragedy and a number of Torah lectures were given to explain the conclusion of the case.

Five years ago. It seems like yesterday. I'm not sure what can be learned from that day other than learn Torah no matter what's going on around you (I guess I shouldn't have omitted the learning part of the story, but I spent some time learning in a pizza shop while chaos was reigning in the streets).

There is also a great hashgachah peratis story about my delivering prozbol documents, missing my rav and davening later, so that I ended up being late to work that day. Except that I worked in midtown, so the story actually isn't that great. But it makes me think twice about other people's hashgachah peratis stories. Although because of the prozbol aspect, I did get an extra half hour of learning before selichos.