There are three pivotal moments I remember feeling we are all really not that different from one another.
The first was in 1994, Luciano Pavarotti (who passed away 13 years later), Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras performed at the Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles with Zubin Mehta conducting. As I walked back home from our office, a few blocks away in Beverly Hills, I could hear their voices through the open windows. There was no traffic, no one outside, just the sounds of the three tenors in concert emanating from people’s homes.
The second was in 2001. The United States of America experienced the first attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, it seemed, we were no longer immune. The City of Beverly Hills held a community commemoration event at the urban amphitheater between the Fire and Police Departments. We stopped to light candles in front of the Fire Department, where a giant ladder was extended into the skies with an American Flag at its tip.
I remember people walking throughout the City toward the Civic Center, parents and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and infants. Our walk was solemn, our discussions subdued. Our hearts were filled with tears, and we were united. We were one. It took the horrible events of that Tuesday morning to erase any difference in one’s cultural heritage, skin color, accent or political ideology. We were all Americans in America, under attack, remembering the fallen, giving thanks to our First Responders and to the men and women of our armed forces.
The third event was on June 17th, 2010, when the Lakers played and won the final game of the season at the Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles. People were crowded inside and outside restaurants and bars on Canon Drive in the Business Triangle in Beverly Hills, listening to radios in their cars and looking at their phones at the live broadcast.
Technology has changed over the decades, and today information streams live to our iPhones and other hand-held gadgets, all in real time, wherever we may be in the world. We feel all-powerful, commanding and in control. How gravely mistaken we are.
The feeling of a unique moment engulfed me once again, as people congregated outside or around the mega screens in their homes. Who even remembers 20” black and white TVs, when there are now 46”, 60” and larger flat panel televisions, using plasma, LED-LCD and various other materials and technologies?
As if all men and women are created equally, the shouts of elation, hand clapping, jumping up and down and joy could be heard through the open windows and doors. It was surreal, for once again all differences melted in an instant, as if they did not exist a moment before nor continue to exist a moment later.
Engraved in my memory are these three defining moments of humanity in the Los Angeles locality. Much has changed over the 16 year period that spans between the first and third event, but apparently human kind is one, when the various layers that separate us, be it wealth (or lack thereof), family, friends and various status symbols are peeled away. Thus, the greatness of these moments is the ability to show us we are really not different at all.
In 2001 we made a silent promise not to forget, but time and distance so easily eroded that promise. Use of the words “Terrorism,” “Islamic Terrorism” or “Muslim Terrorists” are no longer allowed in our country. They are not politically correct and are unpleasant to our President and his Administration.
When someone shouts “Allah U Akbar” (“god is great”) and starts shooting in Fort Hood, he is a deranged individual. When homicide bombers blow themselves up in crowded places in the name of the moon god for the sake of some 72 virgins under the age of 12, they do not represent Islam. When death threats are made against the creators of South Park for a seven-minute segment in which the Prophet Muhammad is depicted, the fear and intimidation campaign is permitted.
We now have a President we elected who, despite claiming to be Christian, seems to hold his Islamic roots with much reverence and keeps apologizing to the Muslim World and extolling Islam. A day will come and history will be the judge if the Islamization of America and her downfall started with President Barack Hussein Obama. The caricature of Shariah Law over the White House or Lady Liberty covered in a veil may not be so far fetched any longer.
The Lakers’ win in Los Angeles in June 2010 might have been the very last game for a very long period of time. We are on the verge of mega events whose magnitude will astonish the reader decades from now. How could humanity not find the way to recognize that in all of us flows the same red blood, that we were all created in the image of God? Goodness will always prevail over evil, but evil will always survive, thus we must always remember history lest we repeat it.
I can only try to imagine a dinner table with no dinner, when our markets are flowing with bounty of the earth from all corners of the globe. I can only attempt to understand what it means not to have running water, or no water at all, when we clean the sidewalks with fresh drinking water. I cannot fathom turning an electrical switch and nothing happens. We’ve had some power outages, mostly orchestrated to make billions to some unscrupulous, unregulated operators, but these are generally rare, not systematic and quickly forgotten. I do not know what it means to be told “we cannot” when coming to my parents and requesting something.
But my parents, and my late grandparents lived exactly that way. They survived the last World War, times that a person had nothing to eat but a sliver of hope to survive. When one had to believe with the utmost conviction that some good remained in the world, that the nightmare would pass and better days return.
As I sit and eat pistachios from a two-pound bag from Costco, I think of my mother’s memory of a small bag of 50 grams (one and three quarters of one ounce), shared between her and two of her friends, for this is all they could afford. But when she tells the story, she is filled with a spark of happiness, all these decades later.
It was in Israel when people had very little, they were happy. They appreciated returning to their homeland, and were forever grateful for the Almighty for this miracle. It was a miracle of witnessing. It was the gift of being in their ancient land and seeing swamps dried and malaria driven away, a desert blooming and Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) grow and once again become a Land of Milk and Honey.
They took nothing for granted, as we do today. Israel today is on the brink of extinction, as the world teeters on the verge of a new World War. Israelis do not fathom that we are all equally hated, those who advocate for the Palestinians and those still stand firm against our enemies’ attempt to eliminate the Jewish State. Likewise humanity, so thrilled at condemning and hurting Israel she does not see she is inflicting the same pain on herself, is doomed.
The Lakers game of June 2010 was a pivotal point for me and reminded me that as times become tough and unbearable, there is something deep inside us. Something that allows us to rise again from the ashes of the self-inflicted hate we are about to unleash and horrors we are about to create.
Despite all our efforts to the contrary, humanity will survive and continue to exist, although none of us shall sleep in the coming years as darkness engulfs us.
May I have the strength to remember these moments, Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, the heroic decision of the passengers of United Flight 93 and our ability to forget our differences when music or sports unite us, along on the journey to the dark times ahead. If I could only capture that spark of happiness and encapsulate it for future use as an internal guiding light, it would undoubtedly be used time and time again.
