Learning from 9/11’s first victim

On September 11, 2001, Danny Lewin, 31, my best friend, was working away on his laptop in seat 9B aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when he saw the two men sitting right in front of him — they would later be identified as Mohammad Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari — getting up and making their way to the cockpit.

A veteran of the Israeli army’s most elite commando unit, Danny tried to stop them, as the 9/11 Commission report indicated, but the man seated right behind him, Satam al-Suqami, drew his knife and slit Danny’s throat, making him, as the report would eventually confirm, the first victim of the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil.

Danny, of course, would hate that word, victim. He had spent his entire life proving he was anything but. When arrogant Israeli machos told him that there was no way a stocky American immigrant like himself, raised in the comfort of suburbia, would ever make it to the IDF’s most sought-after outfit, he trained hard and proved them wrong.

Later, he swept the floors of the graduate dorms at MIT, where he was a PhD student on scholarship, and when his peers doubted his new idea for a start-up that would speed up traffic online, he silenced them by turning his company, Akamai, into what has become a juggernaut that now facilitates a huge chunk of data delivery on the internet.

He believed in hard work, setting a personal example, and daring ingenuity; if you asked him, he’d tell you these are the values that have made America great.

I miss Danny every day, but lately, when I think about him, I find myself feeling a little comforted by one thought: At least Danny didn’t need to witness how silly and sad our national political debate had become.

Danny was a complicated guy, with strong opinions that easily spanned the partisan spectrum and were never obvious or unreasoned, but I know he’d be outraged by seeing how rampant xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism and anti-Semitism have become in our nation, and I suspect he’d be baffled by the tendency, on the left and the right alike, to focus on the accidents of our birth instead of on our infinite human potential.

Identity politics, irrational prejudice, victimization, talk of trigger warnings and safe spaces — all those would seem ludicrous to a man who has spent his entire life engaging in vigorous debate, solving problems and proving there was no end to what we could do if we only put our minds to it.

Sadly, little of Danny’s spirit is captured by our commemoration of the attacks. Now more than a decade and a half removed from that grim morning, we speak of those who had lost their lives that day in the same respectful but removed tone we reserve for the distant past, as if their deaths belong to history now and have no fresh lesson to teach us.

But in Danny’s life, from its early years to its last moments, we have an urgent moral calling, one that Americans, and us New Yorkers, of all stripes and convictions would do well to heed: You are always in charge, always in command, always the author of your own destiny.

True, mighty and systemic forces may conspire to keep you down. You may fall victim to prejudices and bigotry that make your path steeper than needed. There may even be a man with a knife standing quite literally right behind you, ready to stab. And you may fail — success is never guaranteed. But in the choices that you make, in the spirit that you show, in the example that you set for others, you leave a legacy that will continue to inspire long after you’re gone.

This September 11, then, if you’re looking for something heartening to think about, don’t think about the attacks or the wars that followed, or the chasms that have been deepening in American civic life since that fateful day which may never be bridged.

Instead, think about a strong kid from Denver, an American-Israeli, relentless and more than a touch obstreperous, who believed every word he heard as a child and grew up convinced that you didn’t need anyone’s permission to make of your life whatever you wished.

Danny turned that conviction into storied military service. He turned it into a company now worth billions and developed technology that has made online video possible. And most importantly, he turned it into a life worth remembering and emulating. May we all be so fortunate as to follow his example.