My heart was filled with sadness as I gazed out of the airplane window after landing at Newark airport last Friday. The landmark World Trade Center towers across the river in lower Manhattan were nowhere to be seen. I was at the same airport the last time I gazed at them in early August, on my way home to Israel. The violent alteration in the famous skyline was clearly visible in the mid-afternoon sunshine.
Later that evening, I fought off jet lag to speak to hundreds of New York-area residents at a Christian congregation north of Newark. The last time I was there was in January 2001.
I confessed to my audience that I had felt slightly worried while making my way across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Would terrorists attack the city once again while I was there? I told the crowd that I realized it was a bit silly for someone from Jerusalem to fret about a potential terrorist threat in New York! Nevertheless, I admitted that I could not entirely suppress the nagging suspicion that I was entering an even more dangerous spot than my hometown in the troubled Middle East.
One of the pastors later pulled me aside as I was leaving the congregation’s large suburban building. He handed me a cassette recording made during my previous visit. “It’s cued up to the spot where you warned us that the Bible says the towers will one day fall down all over the world,” he informed me. As I took the tape from him, he said I had “noted that New York has some pretty impressive towers, but also pointed out that the Bible indicates they will come down one day, impressive or not.”
I had entirely forgotten that I had referred to falling towers during my 2001 visit. As I was later putting myself to bed, I recalled that the ominous comment was connected to some verses recorded in the biblical book of Isaiah that had struck me just before I set out on my U.S. speaking tour last year. Among them were prophetic passages in Isaiah 30, verses 25 and 26: “And on every lofty mountain and on every high hill, there will be streams of running water on the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. And the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven days, on the day the Lord binds up the fracture of His people and heals the bruise He has inflicted.”
I informed the congregation during my previous visit that the verses in Isaiah 30 were extensions of an apocalyptic theme that appears in chapter 24. There, the great Hebrew seer foretold that the world would one day be “split through” and “reel to and fro like a drunkard.” The earth would experience such divine judgments because it was “polluted by its inhabitants” who had “transgressed laws, violated statues and broke the everlasting covenant.” I had opined that this is a fair description of contemporary America, along with many other places around the globe.
On Sunday, I visited Ground Zero with a friend who used to live just a couple blocks north of the fallen Twin Towers. After greeting the familiar doorman, he took me up to the roof of his former apartment building – the exact spot where CNN and others set up their cameras soon after the Sept. 11 attack. I told him that I had felt quite emotional every time I viewed the tragic scene via television in Israel, realizing that it was from the top of a building I had stayed in many times. “Your fantastic view sure looks different now,” I mumbled as we stood together in the bone-chilling wind, staring almost straight down into the jaws of hell.
Adding to the sense of gloom, my friend donned a protective breathing mask he had brought with him. I mentally noted how closely it resembled the gas mask I frequently wore during the Gulf War, which began 11 years ago this week. He explained that the residual dust aggravated his asthmatic condition, which was the main reason he moved out of lower Manhattan soon after the terrorist atrocity.
Then, he revealed that another reason had played a major role in his decision to flee Babylon for the suburbs in New Jersey: Fear of what might come next in the Big Apple. I fully understood my friend’s concerns. After all, the first news item on the radio that morning was the rather unsettling revelation that security experts have recently been out on the streets of the City That Never Sleeps sniffing for potential nuclear-laden dirty bombs. My guess is that they may also be hunting for any Soviet-built suitcase nukes that might have been smuggled into capitalism’s golden economic hub.
As I left the New York area this week, I could not shake my gut feeling that America is in for more trouble, and probably just ahead. The fact that Osama bin Laden and his nefarious allies declared full war on the world’s current superpower last September was only underscored for me by seeing, in person, the remaining rubble of the World Trade Center. Maybe it was not so strange after all that I felt more nervous walking the streets of Manhattan this visit than I do trundling around Jerusalem.
Related offer:
All-out war in the Middle East? Get “Israel in Crisis” – an up-to-date assessment of what the future holds. Now available in WorldNetDaily’s online store!
