With September 11 imminent, I thought I’d share my experience of that day in 2001, something I’ve never done in writing until now.
At the time, I was working at Agudath Israel of America’s national offices, mere blocks from the World Trade Center (I recently retired from that job). On any other Tuesday morning, I would have been arriving at work just around when the first plane hit the Twin Towers’ North Tower.
Over previous years, I had occasionally, morbidly, pondered what would happen were the towers to somehow fall over—after all, there had been an attempt to topple them back in 1993, when Islamist terrorists engineered a massive explosion in the parking garage beneath the Center. That blast carved out a nearly 100-foot crater several stories deep, and left six people dead and more than a thousand wounded. But the towers remained standing.
So, looking up at them as I would walk up Broadway from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, I would sometimes imagine them falling, wondering if, were they to topple like LEGO buildings in my direction, they would reach where I stood.
In the end, though, in 2001, when other Islamists hijacked planes and flew them into the buildings, the structures collapsed rather than toppled. And I was on the way to the dentist.
Several weeks earlier, I had a terrible toothache and wasn’t able to sleep because of the pain. But I “self-medicated” by forcing myself to drink a few shots of schnapps, something I am not wont to do. A few days later, the Daf Yomi (Bava Kama 35a) recounted how Rav Papa’s cow, suffering from his own toothache, uncovered one of the Amora’s beer barrels—Rav Papa sold beer—and performed his own self-medication. Ever since, I have prided myself on being as smart as Rav Papa’s cow.
The anesthesia worked, at least until morning, and I called the dentist to make an emergency appointment. The molar, it was determined, had to be excised, and I came home with stitches in my gum and gauze in my mouth.
Weeks passed and I healed, but felt an unusual pressure at the site of the tooth. Peering into the mirror with my mouth opened wide, I saw that the stitches, which I assumed were the dissolving type, were still clearly there. I called the dentist and was told that they were traditional stitches and needed to be removed in the office. They had neglected to schedule me for that procedure. (Rav Papa’s cow would never have been so negligent.)
So I asked for an appointment as soon as possible. “Well,” said the scheduler, “we have an opening on Tuesday morning, September 11, at 9:00, if that’s good for you.”
It was. In more ways than one.
So, after Selichos and davening, rather than boarding my regular bus to the ferry to Manhattan, I boarded one that would take me to my dentist in Staten Island. On the bus, the driver heard a message from the dispatcher advising all buses that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. He, and we passengers, whom he apprised of the news, assumed it was a small private plane whose pilot had lost control, and that the only casualties were probably those on the unfortunate plane. I didn’t imagine anything more… consequential.
Until I got to the dentist’s office, when, walking into the waiting room, I saw everyone gathered around a television, watching as a second plane hit the South Tower.
Even then, after the stitches were removed, I tried to go downtown, boarding a bus near the dentist. But the bus was turned away at the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and so the passengers disembarked and I made my way back home.
There have been times when I have regretted not being there to witness the historical and tragic event we know as “9/11.” After all, on any other day, I would have been mere blocks away.
But, at more thoughtful times, I remember the stench of downtown when things went back to what we’ve come to call normal, and the myriad health problems of those who were in the area during the attacks.
And I thank Hashem for my toothache.
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