Friday, September 11, 2026
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Sept. 11, 2026 and Rosh Hashanah 5787: A time for reawakening
In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook
Sept. 11, 2026 and Rosh Hashanah 5787: A time for reawakening
We have passed the time for fasting, of immediate shock and grief; it is now the time for vigilence, recollection, and awakening.
Here is audio of the sermon that I gave on Rosh Hashanah 2001, just one week after 9/11 (there are some gaps, but you can fill them in by reading the transcript). These were very different times, but history often rhymes, and it is doing so now.
“And so too if a plague rages in a city or [its buildings] collapse then that city fasts and sounds the alarm, but the people [in the places] around it fast but do not sound the alarm.” R. Akiba says: they sound the alarm but do not fast. (Talmud, Ta’anith: 19a)
Here’s how I interpret that passage from the Talmud in relation to Sept. 11 observance a quarter of a century later:
We have passed the time for fasting, of immediate shock and grief; it is now the time for vigilance, recollection, and awakening.
This auspicious anniversary of Sept. 11 occurs at the dawn of the new Jewish year, a time of introspection and outreach. Each of these commemorations is a profoundly personal and solitary endeavor. Yet they also require tapping into communal remembrance and collective engagement. They both lead, of necessity, to a place between extremes and the acknowledgment of differences. They both acknowledge the bright lines that distinguish Jew from Christian from Muslim, and Jew from Jew, and American from American - but also the bright light we all yearn to shine together. And they both can lead to a rediscovery of trust in the future and of the role each of us plays in promoting a better world than the one we know.
As we recall 9/11, a paroxysm of unfathomable violence, pain and death, and other such massacres, we are reminded that, as the poet Marcia Falk put it, death is not a destination, it is a journey back to life. It is - and somehow needs to be - regenerative.
Somehow, we need to find the path to see how even 9/11 can be regenerative. We need to make sense of what is otherwise senseless, of what appears irredeemably tragic.
We need to get beyond the shock of sudden, unbounded grief and find the path that leads to a reawakening.
Shortly after it opened, I first made pilgrimage to the 9/11 Memorial Museum to re-live that tragic day. Part of the museum is dedicated to tracing the roots of the hatred that would drive normal human beings to such rabid insanity as to murder thousands of innocents in cold blood.
As Elie Wiesel reminded us regarding the Holocaust, we are all witnesses to such infamous events, and the passage of time should only intensify our resolve to keep alive the memory of those who perished.
And Wiesel also said, “Hatred is like a cancer. It spreads from cell to cell, from organ to organ, from person to person, from group to group.”
That is the message that we must remember now, and it must drive our resolve and vigilence moving forward during these perilous months leading up to fateful elections.
To stand at that subterranean spot, deep within the footprint of the Towers, inhaling the sacred dust (which we now know was toxic) bearing the pulverized bones of 2,753 victims, is a shattering experience. But it is only the beginning of the journey.
After visiting the memorial, I ascended to the top of the Freedom Tower, and there took in a view that I hadn’t seen since a year before 9/11, when I performed a wedding at “Windows on the World,” the swanky restaurant that stood atop the North Tower. There was no view like it back then, but now we’ve reclaimed our corner of the sky.
As I looked out from my Freedom Tower perch (see photos below), it occurred to me that the heavens were as deep-blue as on that fateful September day, 15 years ago. Or at least as I recall it. An entire wall of the 9/11 Museum is filled with ceramic tiles in various shades of blue, the color of that sky as conjured through the dusty memory of those who saw it. No one can recall the exact shade, and shade itself shifted, but it is simply remembered as the bluest blue people had ever seen; a blue that was soon eclipsed by billows of black smoke and ash funneling through the canyons.
The rabbinic collection entitled Sifrei Numbers, in describing the elusive blue fringe designed to help Jews remember the commandments, explains the symbolism of that color: “A thread of blue: blue like the sky, blue like the sea, blue like the divine throne (Sifrei Bamidbar 115)”
Centuries ago, Jews stopped trying to recall that exact shade and abandoned the blue thread altogether — though now some have revived the custom — but for 9/11 survivors, which to a degree all of us are, that deep blue sky remains an important touchstone, something to help us raise our eyes heavenward again, to hope, to climb and to envision the kind of harmony that only God can imagine, something to remind us of the peacefulness and order that existed at the dawn of that day.
As I looked out, a hundred floors above the pulverized dust of memory, death and reconstruction, it occurred to me that the blue has returned.
The city lay there before me, a unified patchwork of neighborhoods and jagged skyscrapers, nurtured by bridges and waterways, this enormous living organism, guarded by a lady with a lamp. It took my breath away. The city as one organic, unified whole, greater than the sum of its extraordinary and unique parts.
"Hatred is like a cancer. It spreads from cell to cell, from organ to organ, from person to person, from group to group. - Elie Wiesel
In his novel Winter’s Tale, which describes similar vistas as viewed from the back of a magical, flying horse, Mark Helprin writes, “In the eyes of God, all things are interlinked.” This view from the Freedom Tower, as the one from the departed Twin Towers, is truly a God’s eye view. While we see the same view all the time on TV, courtesy of helicopters and blimps and some planes descending to JFK and La Guardia, it had been 25 years since I was able to stand on that elevated terra firma and, with my own eyes, look out from the tallest building in a city of towers, standing in the spot where the city began and where it nearly ended, from where you can look north and take in the entirety of this enchanted island.
A quarter century later, we’ve dared to climb again. And we’ve reclaimed our corner of the sky.
A plane flies innocently past the Freedom Tower
This final photo brings to mind verses from Isaiah:
O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will set thy stones in fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy pinnacles of rubies, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy border of precious stones. And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children. – Isaiah 54:13
And now, 25 years after the senseless carnage of that fateful September morning, to repeat that we have passed the time for fasting, but it is still the time of alarm, of recollection, and of awakening.
The grief has led to that awakening. We see it in the skies and on the streets of lower Manhattan. We see it in the somber yet resonant memorials and reflections. We feel it in our remembrances of who we were back then, how unified we felt, and how our lives were imbued with purpose amidst the grief, though renewal of faith would have to wait quite some time as our questions were sorting.
There were many questions filling the air in my overflowing sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah the following week, and plenty of doubt, but never was the room so filled with voluminous prayer as we joined voices and tapped into one another’s pain, beginning the process of transcending it.
Click here to read and listen to all the sermons I gave on those High Holidays, 2001, as we began to rise from shiva, one week after 9/11.
Join me for a Substack Live at 9:30 AM ET on Monday, Sept. 14, with Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), as part of the Jewish Dem Download, a weekly video series.
Wishing you a meaningful 9/11 observance, and for those observing. a sweet new year!
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