By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–Though an imposing figure of bulk and professionalism, rarely not dressed in his suit and tie, or in his naval reserve attire that he wore with quiet pride, he was a man of raw language, practical pursuits, and the New York streets. And this for the most part meant the island grid of Manhattan; he had little patience for New Jersey and not much regard either for the provinces of Queens, Brooklyn, and so forth. Well, there was the time he took me out, via three train transfers, to this particular Syrian restaurant he liked way out in Queens. And there was this Armenian place that he insisted upon after I accompanied him to a funeral he performed in Brooklyn.
But for the most part, my sanguine friend Allen Kaplan, rabbi, radio commentator, consummate Gotham grouse, roamed the streets of Manhattan and whenever I visit, his ghost accompanies me most every step of the way.
We worked together a generation ago in adjacent offices at the headquarters of liberal Judaism, there on Fifth Avenue, across from the Central Park Zoo. It was the early 1980s, people still smoked in the bars and the restaurants, the city was not starchy clean, shows like Cats, Evita, Pump Boys and Dinettes, and Miss Saigon were playing on Broadway, Times Square had not become Disney, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the market was raging with bulls, and nobody was thinking about Islam. Even Seinfeld hadn’t come along yet to help fawn the genuine rebirth of New York which is now in full swing and high spirited, if at the cost of some its grimy character, of Allen Kaplan roaming its streets
in search of a perfect bagel, and a young man taking a young woman into his arms for a deep kiss at 5th and Central Park South without the intimacy being recorded by the omnipresent NYPD surveillance system.
New York is a good city with clean water, an intricate and pliable transit system, an astonishingly declined crime rate, a vigorous tourism industry and animated convention, theater, library, museum, and media cultures. It has recovered from the unimaginable September 11 attacks with heart and dynamism, lifting the soul of the entire country and changing the national view of the city completely. A lot of Americans have come to New
York since 9/11 and many hardly even realize that anything happened—few visit the sanitized construction site anymore or even see the glaring two-pronged absence in the high skies of the Battery.
And that’s where the ghosts come in. Almost three thousand people died that day, so many in the most terrifying of ways, including the hundreds on two airliners who knew for hours that they were going to die. The notable absence of completed reconstruction at ground zero is a political and civil ignominy that defiles their memory and mocks the puffiness already that too many police officers and firefighters have pulled from their colleagues who actually perished that day. Shame on the politicians and businesspeople and opportunists who have waged turf wars over this project and assured that September 11. 2011 will come and go without a finalized building.
Rabbi Allen Kaplan died of a strange blood disease over four years ago, after lying and suffering in Sloan Kettering Hospital for eleven weeks. He was a New Yorker of a different era. Few people knew that he put on his naval chaplain’s uniform on September 12, 2001 and spent weeks on the site helping to find victims and console survivors and emergency workers and breathe in God-knows-what toxic fumes. So I hear his footsteps on Lexington Avenue and on 14th Street and I get angry when I see limited production where One World Trade Center should already be soaring.*
Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com