By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — I am hardly part of a 9/11 family but I did lose someone who was trying to help that day.
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 few regards 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. We had the same nickname for each other—chaver, the Hebrew word for “friend.”
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 the city, 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 yet 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 of fifteen years ago with heart and dynamism, lifting the soul of the entire country and changing the national view of the city completely. The new One World Trade Center is noble and defiant in stature; the Reflecting Pools in the lost towers’ footprints are painfully beautiful.
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 airliners who knew for hours that they were going to die. Then there were the indefatigable volunteers—like my friend Allen—who vacated his office after the impacts, donned his Naval Reserve officer’s uniform, and spent days and days assisting the rescue operations as an all-faiths chaplain and consoler.
Captain Allen Kaplan died of a strange blood disease in 2007 after lying and suffering in Sloan Kettering Hospital for eleven weeks. He was a New Yorker of a different era. He was my best friend and I miss him terribly today.
Few people knew that he put on his naval chaplain’s regalia on September 11, 2001 and spent weeks on the site helping to find victims and comfort 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 sad when people forget the anonymous ones who gave their lives and whose faces appear nowhere.
Bless your soul, chaver.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. … San Diego Jewish World’s eulogy series is sponsored by Marc and Margaret Cohen in memory of Molly Cohen, and by Inland Industries Group LP in memory of long-time San Diego Jewish community leader Marie (Mrs. Gabriel) Berg. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)