It all seems different now—the familiar routines of getting on a plane, planning a trip, and even deciding what you are going to do tomorrow. We now ask a new question: Am I taking my life in my hands by doing this? Is the risk worth it? The issues that concerned us deeply before September 11 suddenly pale by comparison to this threat to our very lives.

Blood drive held at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Chicago, Ill. on September 11

While the death of more than four thousand Americans that day is clearly our first concern, our loss of innocence as a nation is another. We knew all along that terrorist attacks occurred, but they were all oceans away. The bombing of American military facilities in Beirut and Saudi Arabia and of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen could be psychologically written off as the danger of doing business in Arab lands. Now, terrorism is at our very door, threatening us where we work, where we play, while we travel, and even when we open mail.

Our first reaction was appropriately emotional. We needed to express our rage, sorrow, bewilderment, shock, and our desire for justice and even for revenge. In Jewish terms, we first had to engage in shiva, the seven-day mourning period after a person dies, when the task is to remember and to emote, without responsibility for what we feel or say. The feelings, however, do not magically go away after shiva ends, and the need to emote continues long afterward, especially as we daily face the realization of what we have lost. But after shiva Jewish mourners are supposed "to get up from shiva," walk around the block with the support of friends as a symbolic way of reentering life, and then return to normalcy as much as possible. Similarly, we as a nation need to work through our emotions so that we can think carefully about how we should respond.

The Torah says, "Parents shall not be put to death for [sins of] the children, nor shall the children be put to death for [sins of] the parents; a person shall be put to death only for his own sin" (Deuteronomy 24:16). God might "visit the sins of the parents onto the children to the third and fourth generation" (Exodus 20:5), but we may not do so as part of human justice. That may seem obvious to us now, but in English law family members could be punished for the treason of other family members until 1830; that is why the Founding Fathers prohibited such punishments in Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Thousands of years earlier, the Torah made the same stipulation. Thus much as some might want to wreak vengeance on all Muslims, we dare not do so. Even though some of the emotions are the same, one critical difference between justice and revenge is that the former restricts sanctions to perpetrators while the latter does not. However we feel, our retaliatory actions must be just and not vengeful: "You shall not take vengeance . . . but rather love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18).

At the same time, we have a duty to protect ourselves: "When someone comes to kill you, rise up early in the morning to kill him first" (Talmud, Berakhot 58A). That duty supersedes some of the protections of individual rights on which we rightfully insist in peace time. Thus profiling in airports, for example, may now be right and proper; it is not fair, but life takes precedence over fairness.

Beyond that, we must try to return to our normal activities as much as possible and to proclaim, use, and defend all that we hold dear as Americans. Emil Fackenheim, in a poignant phrase, wrote that Jews must remain actively Jewish so as not "to give Hitler a posthumous victory"; similarly, we Americans must pursue our daily tasks and our long-term goals even more energetically than we did before September 11, both because we are committed to them and also to avoid giving the terrorists a posthumous victory. This includes renewed attention to health care for all Americans and to our critical and promising research agenda, including research using stem cells.

After September 11, though, American Jews and Christians must pay much more attention than we have to Islam. We certainly should not give up our own way of life or our support for the existence of Israel, but we should seek to ameliorate some Muslims' feelings of rage against us. Religiously, we need to find ways to strengthen the hand of those Muslims who interpret jihad as the internal struggles of individuals to overcome sin rather than the call for holy war against all non-Muslims. That, however, requires mutual trust. The Park Ridge Center can help in this effort by bringing people of all three western faiths together for work on health care, a shared concern.