Omri Bezalel
Author | Screenwriter | Filmmaker | Producer
PARALLEL MOURNING
Every single car on the Tel Aviv highway slows to a halt. Without pulling over to the side, drivers stop their cars and step out of the vehicles. They stand. A siren sounds. The people rushing across the bridge overpass stop walking. The soldier, whose father is bringing him back to base, salutes. Everyone stands statue-still. This two-minute siren is heard all across Israel, and every person who hears it stands at attention in memory of the more than 23,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians who have died in wars and terror attacks. The siren sounds twice: once at 8:00 pm on the eve of Memorial Day and once at noon the next day. During the twenty-four hours that follow the first siren, shops and restaurants are closed. There is no cable or satellite television. The three national channels show thirty-minute short movies of soldiers who have been killed. In a country as small as Israel, there is no citizen who does not know at least one soldier who has died; Memorial Day is the most somber day of the year. Most families of dead soldiers go to their loved one’s grave — their own individual monument of grief — and stand during the siren together with an entire grieving nation.
Having served in the military and having lost friends along the way, it was strange for me to experience Memorial Day in New York when I first moved here from Israel four years ago. It was a day like any other. But more than that, it almost seemed like a happy holiday. A day when everything went on sale and people went shopping or to the beach. I passed by a bar with a sign that read, “Happy Memorial Day!” It was just another Three-Day Holiday Weekend. There seemed to be a disconnect between the public, and the military and its casualties. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Israel is a military state with conscription service: every citizen enlists. Nearly every parent’s child is, at one time or another, a soldier. There’s a strong connection between soldiers and civilians because of an unspoken contract that says, “You’ll protect me when I’m young and I’ll protect you when you’re old.” It occurred to me that the United States is very different in this regard. Not every person has family or friends in the military. The war is not fought at home but rather thousands of miles away. So it makes sense that it might be hard for Americans, as a nation, to mourn soldiers when they feel no personal connection to them. While military families might mourn the loved ones they lost, there is no national camaraderie of parallel mourning.
After experiencing America’s Memorial Day, I thought Americans lacked the ability to mourn as a nation. But then I experienced the anniversary of 9/11. It was a somber day. The air felt different outside. There was a weight to people’s movement. American flags were hanging outside stores and apartments. There was a memorial service on almost every channel. Every name of every victim was read out loud. It was strange to me that Americans seemed to mourn the victims of 9/11, but not the soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war that followed as a result. But it occurred to me that perhaps part of the connection between civilian and soldier is based on fear. It seems that Americans feel less of a connection to soldiers in Iraq because, for the most part, they have no fear that they, or someone they love, will die in Iraq. If they don’t join the army, they won’t die in the army — a different reality than in Israel. But when 9/11 happened on American soil, every American realized that he, or any one of his friends and family members, could be killed in a terror attack in the US. Americans are reminded of this fear every September 11.
A new National September 11 Memorial and Museum opened this spring amidst great controversy over which artifacts to exhibit. One such artifact is New York Fire Department’s Engine 21 — a half-burnt fire truck that Captain Billy Burke Jr. and his men rode to the burning buildings, where he died. But for Billy Burke’s brother, Michael Burke, exhibiting the firetruck is not enough. So, Burke is leading a grass-roots movement to add a sculpture to the exhibit that he and thousands of his supporters feel conveys a symbolic message of “hope, faith, and the enduring values that overcome intolerance”: Sphere (Mathias, “World Trade Center Sphere”).
Sphere is a 45,000 pound globe, by German artist Fritz Koenig, that sat for decades in the World Trade Center plaza before the buildings collapsed (Mathias, “World Trade Center Sphere”). Six months after the attack, it was reinstalled in Battery Park without any reconstruction, surrounded by benches for mourners. Ironically, according to a March 2002 article in The Herald, Sphere was meant to serve as a “temporary memorial” until a permanent one could be built. Clearly, twelve years later, things haven’t gone as planned.
I went to see Sphere for the first time on a gray, rainy, winter day. It took a while to find it, fenced off within the park, and I had to stand because, ironically, all the benches originally installed for mourners were all facing away. Not until I saw it with my own eyes did I understand what it had endured. While the sculpture may have once been a sphere, it isn’t anymore. Its 25-foot height has been shaven down by five feet. From the north-west corner, Sphere resembles a human face, with a small crater-like eye, a mass of gold scrunched into a nose, and a disfigurement of bronze smirking like a mouth. If this is a human face, it looks as if someone shot off the top of its head.
Sphere was originally installed in the World Trade Center plaza as a symbol of world peace through trade. According to a podcast of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Public Art Walking Tour, the sculpture was inoffensive and the “epitome of bland public art.” Sphere was only one of two art pieces to survive 9/11. Once it survived the attack, it ceased being an artwork. It became a sacred object that required preservation, a “physical link” to an event that shaped the world over the past decade. The evident, severe damage to the sculpture and the “misshapen shards of metal on display” epitomize the immense destruction of the attacks, and its “transition from art object to memorial.” Memorial. Sphere used to be a piece of art people ate their lunches beside without noticing it, but today it serves as the “focal point of national memory.” Sphere was built for an architectural purpose, but its meaning changed radically after the attacks. Koenig said after 9/11, Sphere had a “different beauty, [its] own life, different from the one [he] gave to it” (Miller, The World Trade Center Survivor). But why has Sphere become so important to Michael Burke and so many others in memorializing 9/11?
According to Andrew Butterfield’s “Monuments and Memories,” monuments are “the products of primary human needs,” a way of honoring deep wounds. The word derives from Latin and means “to bring to the notice of, to remind, or to tell of.” It “stimulates the remembrance of a person or event… it marks a spot and it says who.” In this regard, the re-contextualization of Sphere makes sense. Once it became associated with 9/11, triggering a memory of the catastrophe by virtue of its having witnessed and survived a national tragedy, there was no way for it to go back to being “bland” public art. Sphere’s survival means something to Michael Burke, who is fighting not only over what monument should memorialize 9/11, but also where that monument should be.
In a July 2011 Washington Times article, Burke says he feels the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has remade Ground Zero in a way that “does not acknowledge 9/11” or serve as a symbol of “the evil that struck.” The memorial consists of two voids of square pools — cascaded by waterfalls — placed in the “footprints” of where the towers once stood. Michael Arad, the architect of the memorial, has said the pools express the “absence in our lives caused by these deaths,” and that the five hundred trees surrounding the pool act as “traditional symbols of the rejuvenation of life” (Burke, “Political Correctness Gone Mad”). Burke feels, however, the memorial will only “wipe out all evidence and memory of the attacks,” sweeping the event under the rug by “replacing all reminders of the attacks [with] two immense ‘voids’” and that the 500 trees will “eradicate all trace and memory of what stood there for 30 years and its destruction on Sept. 11.” However, according to the Daily Mail’s coverage of the ten-year anniversary event at the new memorial, many of the victims’ family members are glad that a more aggressive approach wasn’t taken. Cheryl Shanes, who lost her brother, described the memorial as “really beautiful and very peaceful. It is just the way [she] imagined and hoped it would be.” Ina Stanley, who lost her sister, likes the peace and tranquility and finds the memorial “relaxing, like a world beyond the city.” James O’Brien, a firefighter in the FDNY who lost many friends that day, thinks that the memorial is a “fitting tribute to all who lost their lives.” Within a nation of so many individuals, it is impossible to construct a monument to please everyone. Considering there can be no national tragedy, trauma, or mourning without it being first individual — 9/11 is made up of 2,996 individual tragedies — is it possible to create a monument or memorial that allows for both individual and national mourning?
When considering the differences between individual and national mourning, we must first examine the difference between individual and communal trauma. In her paper “Enacting Remembrance: Turning Toward Memorializing September 11th,” Billie A. Pivnick examines how — just as individual psychic trauma can affect a person’s mental health — cultural trauma “may overwhelm a society’s ability to cope,” which in turn, may lead that society to lose its ability to “support and protect its Members” (505). Memorializing mass catastrophic loss is “uniquely challenging” because those affected must not only cope with their own trauma, but also with the “destruction of culturally meaningful places,” such as the World Trade Center (506). This makes the process of reparation and healing harder. But Pivnick believes it’s time to “turn our attention from the memorial to memorializing,” which usually begins in the form of a monument (505).
Sphere’s importance as a monument to Burke seems to come from that “uniquely challenging” struggle between personal mourning and collective trauma. His fight to include Sphere in the museum isn’t just about preserving the memory of his brother and those killed, but also the memory of the building and the attack itself. According to Burke, Arad had told him that including Sphere in the museum would be “didactic” by telling people what to feel. Burke argues that excluding Sphere does the exact same thing. To him, the exclusion of certain displays like Sphere are equally manipulative (Burke, “Political Correctness Gone Mad”). The twelve board members of The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) charged with overseeing the memorial and museum, decided that the list of casualty names engraved in the memorial would not include the individuals’ ages. There is no way of knowing that Christine Lee Hanson was a toddler. Neither are the victims’ names identified as firefighters or police officers. Michael Burke’s brother will be identified as William F. Burke Jr., not as of FDNY Capt. William F. Burke Jr., Eng. 21. According to Burke, part of the LMDC’s reasoning behind this decision is to “describe those killed at the World Trade Center as not ‘less’ than heroes and something ‘more’ than victims.” They think that by not assigning rank, job, or age, the names and virtues of the victims become equalized. The public won’t differentiate or make any “distinction in their hearts and minds” between the firefighters and police who are generally viewed as heroic, and those trapped on the top floor who are usually considered victims (Burke, “On Heroes and Victims”). But is that right? Should a person working on the top floor of the World Trade Center be remembered as a hero just for dying in a terror attack? Is his memory corrupted when he is memorialized the same way as a firefighter? As a friend pointed out, even the decision to name the event 9/11contextualizes the attacks because it omits mention of an attack, trauma, or tragedy. This is why Burke believes the memorial is not a “genuine and lasting” commemoration, but rather is “political correctness gone mad” (Burke, “Political Correctness Gone Mad”).
Political correctness highlights another difference between individual and national mourning. I have never met a mourning parent who cared about being politically correct. An Israeli father who has lost his son might say, “Death to the Arabs” as quickly as “Let’s relinquish all land; it’s not worth my son’s life.” Neither statement will be preceded by disclaimers nor followed by explanation. But national mourning cannot afford to be as emotional. The LMDC is right to be “politically correct,” by not differentiating between the casualties. Burke’s responsibility is to his brother. The LMDC’s responsibility is to everyone. To Burke, his brother is more important than any other casualty of 9/11. To the LMDC, every casualty is equal regardless of age, profession, or rank. Mourning on the national level cannot afford the hierarchy that individual mourning contains.
This tension between national and individual mourning — between the large scale and the intimate — is echoed in Mark Doty’s essay, “The Panorama Mesdag.” Doty struggles with the contradiction between art that is ambitious and larger than life, and art that is intimate and private. Visiting the Mauritshaus museum, he is affected by two works. One is Fabritius’ small, framed, rectangular canvas that depicts a goldfinch chained to an iron hoop. The other is Panorama Mesdag: a huge, circular, panoramic seascape with no frames or borders, in which the viewer is absorbed. Starting at a pavilion on the shore, the painting spreads out 360 degrees, from sand to ocean to clouds, brimming with people and boats, summer houses and chapels.
Standing in the center of Mesdag’s beach town panorama, Doty returns to his own memory of a shoreline. Suddenly, he is no longer standing in the center of Mesdag’s circle, but in the center of his own life. Mesdag conveys to anyone who steps into the panorama, “Here was a beach town, just as it was, in 1881. And here is something of how we understood ourselves” (236). Through this, we can understand just how fleeting our moments are and that we become less individualistic, and more “representative of our era” (236).
Doty’s description of Panorama Mesdag suggests the purpose of a good memorial: to say “here was a city, just as it was, in 2001. And here is something of how we understood ourselves then, and how we understand ourselves today.” The memorial is not individualistic. The memorial is the “representative of an era.” The LMDC wants a memorial that is like Fabritius’ small rectangular canvas: unassuming, unobtrusive, inoffensive, and neat, which is what Sphere was before the attacks. Burke’s movement wants a memorial with the same essential elements as Panorama Mesdag: all encompassing, that can take us back to our world — the world of that event — as Sphere did after the attack. Just as Doty no longer stood in the center of Mesdag’s circle “but rather in the center of his own life,” the viewer of a memorial should no longer stand in the center of the memorial, but rather in the center of what that memorial represents: a world before it was forever changed. A good memorial should be, as Doty describes the Panorama Mesdag, “a ring whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (235). Every part of the memorial is its center. For some the center could be the Engine 21 half burnt firetruck rig. For others the names of the victims. And for others still, it could be Sphere. These could all serve as the center for a national memorial. But when it comes to individual mourning, the center of the “memorial” is usually the gravesite.
On Memorial Day in Israel, I always try to visit Jonathan, my childhood friend. First I visit his grave, then I visit his mother. He was killed in an operation in Gaza in 2005, and one of the hardest things that followed was watching his parents’ relationship. They had an especially difficult time because they had different ways of mourning their son’s death. His mother needed to constantly talk about him and to have his friends and crew over for dinner. His father needed the opposite; he couldn’t handle spending time with anyone that reminded him of his son. Jonathan’s parents eventually divorced. His dad threw himself into his work. His mom threw herself into memorializing her son. She started with designing the grave, then a memorial navigation run, then the one year memorial which included an hour-long movie, then a memorial website; it was never-ending. Once she finished one project, she moved on to the next. Having witnessed Jonathan’s mother’s obsession with memorializing, I empathize with Burke’s need to memorialize. But perhaps Sphere acts as a frame for Michael Burke’s private, individual mourning, as Jonathan’s mother’s projects serve as a frame through which she mourns. Despite my empathy with Burke’s movement, it seems as if he might be unwittingly turning Sphere into his own grieving process. Maybe Michael Burke doesn’t want to move on. Maybe, like Jonathan’s mother, his constant involvement in this issue is what he needs to keep his brother alive. It could be Burke’s way of holding on, which — while understandable — might not be fair to the other family members of victims to whom the new memorial also belongs.
National mourning doesn’t exist without individual mourning. You wouldn’t have Memorial Day without the individual soldiers who have been killed and the individuals who grieve. There’s a word in Hebrew for a parent who has lost a child. That term doesn’t exist in English. Israel had to invent the word because it’s considered a status. Horeh Shakul: parent who has lost his child. When you hear those two words in Hebrew, something happens. The parent is re-contextualized as someone who has gone through the worst, and is living every Israeli citizen’s nightmare. The country as a whole is very sensitive to this population. During a Memorial Day national event I attended in Israel a few years ago, Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was speaking. A father who had lost his son stood up and started yelling obscenities at Netanyahu. A police officer — a large man — came up to the father to quiet him. I thought he would forcefully eject the father from the area. Instead, the police officer emotionally hugged the father tight and held him close as the father sobbed into the police officer’s neck.
Perhaps it’s easier to have a national memorial bring people together in Israel than it is in America because of the different sense of stakes for Israelis on Memorial Day than for Americans on Memorial Day. Almost every Israeli, by his twenty-first birthday, will have attended a soldier’s funeral, and realizes then that there is nothing more heartbreaking than a mother weeping over her child’s grave. The war is fought at home. Any of the terrorists that I stopped during my five-year service may have blown himself up on the bus my sister rides to school, or the market where my mother shops. This creates a culture of memorialization, which is needed in order for a memorial to be effective. It is this culture that America lacks. But I believe it’s a culture that can be changed. It would be a good start not to greet people with “Happy Memorial Day.” Perhaps schools should have kids become pen pals with soldiers overseas in order to build on the invisible connection that exists between military and country, soldier and civilian, and to debunk the myth that the war is far away. Perhaps Memorial Day should be better taught in school, in a way that could affect the broader culture. Perhaps shops — instead of putting things on sale — should close down as they do on Easter, in order to make it a more solemn and sacred day. Perhaps television channels could interrupt their regular programming to show documentaries of war and fallen soldiers. If these things existed, then perhaps it would be easier to memorialize through a memorial.
As far as the 9/11 memorial goes, I don’t think it matters whether or not Sphere is included. Perhaps it matters less what particular exhibits are displayed in the museum, and more that the museum itself is located beneath the hallow grounds of where the towers — and Sphere — once stood. Surely, anyone who steps there will automatically feel the awe. Looking at the names of the dead — regardless of knowing or not knowing their ages and ranks — will evoke a feeling. I don’t believe Sphere, on its own, could stand as a memorial for 9/11. An ideal memorial should invoke more than just destruction. Perhaps the LMDC is smart to also include a museum with different artifacts. It becomes a collective memorial where hopefully every person who visits will find at least one thing or place that connects him to the tragic event. The memorial museum at Ground Zero will mean different things to tourists, New Yorkers, and friends and relatives of victims — all of whom had different stakes involved and experienced different kinds of losses. To be able to mourn in your own individual way in a place that allows someone else to mourn in his, may mean being more tolerant of and sympathetic towards each other, no matter what our connection to 9/11 may be. Burke will still have his brother’s truck in the museum, even if Sphere remains in Battery Park. Sphere is a physical representation of the destruction, but the destruction is much more significant than what Sphere shows. True destruction comes from true loss. After all, the destruction of Sphere is nothing in contrast to the destruction of FDNY Capt. William F. Burke Jr., Eng. 21.
For me, the siren heard in Israel on Memorial Day marks the ideal memorial. It evokes a feeling inside of me. It puts my skin on edge and it allows me to unite with every other person in my country. For those two minutes, I’m alone with my thoughts. They wander. Jonathan is gone. Erez, Harel, and Nir are also gone. Tal is still alive but he got shot in the eye and will never be what he was and I think of him during the siren as well. I wonder why am I alive when others aren’t. What would my family look like had I died? What would my Memorial Day movie have looked like? I look at the older man standing across the street from me, with his hands by his side and his eyes cast down, and I wonder what he’s thinking, what he’s lost. I think about my mother. I allow my thoughts the freedom to go everywhere and nowhere, to go wherever the siren takes them. The siren is a memorial that allows individuals to be alone in their mourning process but stand united as a grieving nation. It’s a memorial you can experience from anywhere within Israel. It’s all encompassing. It is in this way that the siren allows for both individual and national mourning. In a country engulfed in grief and loss, in hope and spirit, it is the ideal memorial.
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