Memory & Teshuva Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787 Sermon - Sept. 11, 2026
It was a clear crisp September morning. I had spent the summer of 2001 in Israel, studying Hebrew in ulpan during the second intifada. Now I was back in the states – to lead High Holiday services on a college campus, actually – but meanwhile, was headed from New York to Charleston, South Carolina to visit my family first.
From the runway at La Guardia airport, just before we took off, the captain came on the radio with an unusual announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, From the flight deck, it appears that there’s a fire at the World Trade Center. Our flight route will take us north and then west over the neck of Manhattan before we cut back down the Hudson to begin our trip down to Charleston. As we get closer, I’ll see if I can turn off the fasten seatbelt sign so that those of you on the right side of the plane can get up and take a closer look. I’m not quite sure what’s happening, but I’m certain it’ll be on the news tonight.” And we were off.
Looking back on it, I now know that I was in the airspace over lower Manhattan inside the 17 minutes between the first plane hitting the north tower and the second plane hitting the south tower. We didn’t know that at the time, though. About half an hour later, the pilot came back on the radio to tell us all that the fire we saw had been caused by a plane flying into the World Trade Center tower, and that all passengers were to remain seated for the duration of the flight. From there, things on board felt tense and chaotic. Our flight was going to be grounded by the FAA, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again, all of a sudden. Within minutes we were on the ground in Norfolk, Virginia. Needless to say, that day, which is 25 years ago today, will be with me forever.
Rosh Hashanah goes by several different names. As we sing in kiddush: Vatiten lanu adonai eloheinu b’ahava et yom ha-shabbat hazeh, v’et yom hazikaron hazeh. Yom HaZikaron is the most official liturgical name for this holiday. In the spring in Israel, the same words, Yom HaZikaron, have come to mean Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, but not in this context. Here, Yom HaZikaron means Memory Day. In the Zikhronot section of the Musaf service, we recount verses that highlight the incidents of God remembering our ancestors: Noah and his family inside the ark, the Israelites under the burden of slavery in Egypt, and so on. This kind of memory underscores one of the theological points of the day: that God remembers and judges all of creation on this day. We hope that just as God remembered our ancestors, God will also remember us with favor.
But there’s a second aspect of memory at play in this season, and that is how our remembering informs the process of teshuva. During this time of the year, we linger in the doorway between the year that’s drawing to a close and the one that’s about to open before us. From that doorway, we turn and gaze backwards, trying to understand where we’ve been and what’s happened to us, the choices we have made, and the changes we want to make as we move forward. By remembering and reflecting on the past, we aim to create a more intentional understanding of the present, and chart for ourselves a better future.
When we remember September 11th today, there’s so much we might choose to focus on. For those of you too young to remember it, I can’t overstate the sense of shock and horror at the terror attacks of that day, or the immense tragedy of the thousands of people whose days began as ordinary ones – going to work, or boarding a plane – and who never came home again. I encourage you to read some of the 9/11 stories published – they are tragic, and full of heroism – there’s so much worth remembering.
Switching gears, though, in an intensely personal direction, I can look back and see how that single day affected the trajectory of my entire life. Because of my feeling of having had such a near miss on board my flight, and because of the second intifada, I didn’t particularly want to return to Israel, where I had been there summer, nor did I want to return to New York City. Instead, I took off the 2001-2002 academic year from my rabbinical school program and moved to Palo Alto, California. At the end of our time there, Noam and I drove back to the east coast on an epic cross country trip, zig-zagging to hit lots of National Parks, including Olympic National Parks. As we headed back from the Olympic peninsula, we took a ferry across Puget Sound from Bainbridge. I remember looking around and remarking, “wouldn’t it be great to live in a place like this someday.” And two years later, as I finished rabbinical school, we chose to make Seattle our home, which possibly would never have happened were it not for 9/11. During these High Holidays, I invite you, too, to think back on some of the personal turning points in your life, the ones that got you to where you are today, even if you didn’t know it at the time.
Returning to 9/11 itself though, when I hold it in my memory now, one of the ideas I keep coming back to again and again is not only that day, but what happened in the aftermath of that day – how, on a collective response level, the attacks of 9/11 brought out some of the best and the worst aspects of our humanity.
It’s nice to recall the positives first. For example, that day, and in the day and weeks following 9/11, so many people came together in solidarity and selflessness, united by asense of purpose. When the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, Lower Manhattan was blanketed in dust and ash, and bridges, tunnels, and subways were shut down. In a spontaneous act of cooperation, civilian mariners – captaining ferries, tugboats, fishing vessels and yachts – rushed towards the smoke. This impromptu flotilla evacuated hundreds of thousands of people in less than nine hours – which remains the largest maritime evacuation in history. A second example that I’m sure many of you have seen portrayed in the musical theater production Come From Away happened when northeast Canada became the landing spot for many of the trans-Atlantic planes that had to be diverted when the U.S. airspace closed that day. The small town of Gander, Newfoundland, with a population of just 10,000, took in 38 planes and nearly 7,000 stranded passengers, with citizens stepping forward to build makeshift shelters, cook meals, and welcome total strangers into their homes. Back at Ground Zero, in New York, everyday citizens stepped up to support emergency responders. Bucket brigades of volunteers formed human chains to manually move heavy debris and search for survivors. Nearby restaurants, schools and churches were transformed into relief hubs. Many of my classmates from JTS headed downtown to join the volunteer chaplaincy efforts, as family members searched in vain for loved ones.
But, there are also many aspects of the September 11th aftermath that we’d rather not remember – the darker side of our society’s response. To be sure, we know what happened: that an Al Qaeda network operating out of Afghanistan and 19 Arabic-speaking terrorists (15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from United Arab Emirates, 1 each from Egypt and Lebanon) were responsible for the horrendous acts of terror that day. Americans were filled with fear, and vulnerability, and a sense of living under continued threat, and those feelings almost never bring out the best in us. But, most Muslim-Americans had had nothing to do with this and did not support these attacks in any way. Even though they shared the same grief as other Americans, they found themselves immediately living under suspicion and experiencing a severe wave of backlash against their communities. Anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. spiked dramatically – from roughly 31 incidents annually before 2001 to 546 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Sikh Americans were misidentified with extremists because of their turbans and beards, and I remember attacks on Sikh cab drivers and the murder of a Sikh-American gas station owner just two weeks later. The Islamophobia didn’t tamp down quickly either; instead, it hardened into systemic discrimination. As the U.S. declared a Global War on Terror, surveillance programs, special registration requirements for immigrants from Muslim-majority nations, and aggressive law enforcement profiling created a framework of structural Islamophobia. Nine years later, in 2010, plans for Park51 – an Islamic community center modeled after the Upper West Side JCC – stirred up national protests and political backlash for no good reason. The project was dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque,” and it was never completed due to the public outcry.
In tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, we will read about our matriarch Sarah. She and her husband Avraham are old; she is desperate to have a child. In the first two aliyot, it seems that things are going reasonably well for her – God makes things happen as promised, she becomes pregnant, the child is born and named (Isaac) and circumcised, Sarah marvels at having a child at this point in life, the child is weaned, and Abraham hosts a feast for Isaac. And yet, things turn on a dime: at the beginning of the third aliyah, Sarah sees the son of her rival, Hagar, and notes that he is laughing, metzachek – maybe mocking her son Yitzchak. We can only imagine that all of a sudden, she feels jealous, fearful, and threatened, and she immediately begins to act in awful ways. In the very next verse, she banishes Hagar and Ishmael from her household, dehumanizing them all the while: “Garesh et ha-amah hazot v’et b’nah” “Cast out this slave woman and her son.” At Sarah’s command, Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, with only a small amount of food and water, and we watch in horror as Hagar moves away from Ishmael so as not to have to look on as he dies. Reading this story every year stirs in me a sense of shame – how can Sarah – our matriarch – be so cruel and callous as to dehumanize another human being and to inflict pain in this way?
And yet, Sarah’s actions are not so different from what happened in this society in the wake of September 11th, when so many Americans turned against our Muslim neighbors. Lest we think “that wasn’t us,” I will point out that early polls showed that the vast majority – over 60% – of Americans held unfavorable views of Muslims, associating the faith with terms like terrorism and extremism – I know I heard that expressed regularly within the Jewish community. And, when it came to the Islamic community center I mentioned a moment ago, Jewish organizations were sadly among some of the fiercest opponents to its construction.
This time of year, on Yom HaZikaron – Rosh Hashanah as Memory Day – our central spiritual work is to engage in the process of teshuvah. We are supposed to examine our own past actions – remember them, roll them around in our minds – not just for fun, but to see what it is that we can learn from them. As I reflect on 9/11 at the distance of 25 years, my mind keeps returning to this dark side of the aftermath of those attacks. What could we have done differently? Are there lessons in our past that might help us make better decisions today?
Because although 25 years have gone by, some of these questions – of minority groups turning against one another from a place of fear, of xenophobia and Islamophobia – these are all very much at play today, in this year, in our America. It happens that right now, we find ourselves in the fight of our lifetime for our country, for democracy, for our core values and ideals. Minority groups are being pitted against one another in real time, for the benefit of those in power who want to keep control and protect their status. It is imperative that we learn from the missteps of our past, so that we don’t repeat them.
According to Maimonides, who laid this out in his Hilchot Teshuvah (the Laws of Repentance): teshuvah is a 4-step process. These steps are: 1. To recognize and discontinue the improper action – stop the behavior. 2. To verbally confess the action – to articulate what you’ve done wrong. 3. To regret the action, and evaluate the negative impact this action may have had on yourself or on others. But then, last but not least: 4. To determine never to repeat the action. True teshuva, Rambam says, is proven when you face a similar situation later and choose a different path. When Maimonides laid out this path of teshuva in the Mishneh Torah, he had in mind individual actions and individual teshuva, but I believe we can just as effectively map it onto a collective, societal process. Looking back, we should be able to recognize that – as with Sarah – fear and vulnerability got the better of us, and we lashed out against the nearest convenient targets. Like Hagar and Ishmael in the Genesis story, American Muslims, and Sikhs, and immigrants in general bore the brunt of our collective fear, anger, and sense of vulnerability in the wake of 9/11. They suffered disproportionately, and in hindsight, we should be able to see and name and acknowledge that.
Sarah’s story in tomorrow’s Torah reading is only a starting point, though. Between two different Torah readings and two different haftarahs, we will cover a lot of territory across the two days of Rosh Hashanah. We’ll jump from Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael and Isaac, to Hannah and the birth-story of Samuel, then back to the Akeidah, and then ahead again to the prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the biblical matriarch Rachel is also referenced.
My friend and teacher Beth Huppin and Rabbi Tali Adler, in this year’s Hadar reader, both independently reminded me of a famous rabbinic story about Rachel, a midrash from the book of Eicha Rabbah. In that text, in Tali’s Adler’s words: “the Temple is burning and the Jewish people are being led into exile. Patriarch after patriarch comes before God, calling out for their children to be saved on the strength of their merits. [And, by the way, this is a theme of the High Holidays – that we tell the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs so that we might benefit from their merits.] Each one... fails in turn... but finally Rachel succeeds in convincing God to have mercy on the Jewish people.”
How does she do it? What actions of Rachel’s does the rabbinic imagination hold up as being so worthy?
At that moment, Rachel imeinu (Rachel our mother) jumped before the Holy One and said, ‘Ruler of the World! You know that Yaakov your servant loved me very much and worked for my father for seven years. When those seven years were done and the time of my wedding approached, my father schemed to switch me with my sister (Leah), and it was very difficult for me when I found out. I told my husband-to-be and gave him signs by which he could distinguish between my sister and me so that my father could not switch us.
After, I regretted what I had done, and I overcame my desires and had mercy on my sister that she should not be shamed. That night, they switched me with my sister, and I gave my sister the signs that I had made with my husband, so that he would think that she was Rachel. And not only that, but I concealed myself under the bed in which my sister lay with my husband, and when he spoke to her he was silent and I would answer so that he would not recognize my sister’s voice. I did chesed for her, I was not jealous of her, and I did not allow her to be shamed.
It’s a wild midrash – kind of awful, actually, to see both Rachel and Leah caught up inside a patriarchal system where their father has manipulated them and where Rachel has to choose where her loyalties should lie. Ultimately, though, I see real beauty in the story the rabbis tell. Rachel – who has every reason to feel jealous and in competition with her sister – makes an active decision not to lash out but rather to act with chesed towards Leah. She considers her sister’s feelings, and acts to ensure that Leah won’t feel shamed or rejected. In doing so, she rejects the rivalry, and instead teams up with Leah so that the two of them can be on the same side. The rabbis hold Rachel up as the model – the only one of the patriarchs or matriarchs who can convince God to have mercy upon the Jewish people – because even after she herself has been victimized and harmed, she affirms through her actions that leading with chesed (kindness) and generosity is of utmost importance.
It occurred to me this year that perhaps the story of how Rachel collaborated with her sister Leah is a parallel to and a corrective for the Sarah and Hagar story, an example of teshuva. In both stories, two women vie for the love, attention and favor of a single husband. But whereas Sarah can’t really bring herself to share, Rachel puts her sister’s needs first. Maybe Rachel’s behavior towards Leah is an act of repair – a demonstration of Maimonides’ teshuva step #4, just two generations later. In addition, without that moment – the one in which Rachel is showing Leah the secret signs and lending her her voice, Leah’s children wouldn’t have been born – including the leadership tribes of Reuben (firstborn), Levi (the tribe of Moses and Aaron and Miriam), and Judah (the ultimate namesakes of the Jewish people). The 12 tribes as a whole wouldn’t have come into existence. In other words, looking back, we can see that as a people, we (B’nai Yisrael) really wouldn’t be here were it not for Rachel’s decision to act with chesed.
Returning to our present day, as we move into this Yom HaZikaron on the 25th anniversary since September 11, 2001, it feels clear to me that we haven’t yet fully reconciled with this event, nor internalized the many lessons that might be gleaned from engaging in a real process of teshuvah around what happened in the wake of that day. Of course, the “global war on terror,” started soon after September 11th, has led to one intractable war in the Middle East after another; it’s crazy that 25 years later, we are once again at war. (In that regard, we haven’t even reached Maimonides’ step #1 of teshuva!) Islamophobia and xenophobia are every bit as much an issue in 2026 as they were in 2001. I’m thinking here of the cruelty and immorality of ICE kidnapping people out of their lives and separating families; of the way the Federal government is weaponizing antisemitism to drive a wedge between minority groups; of the hateful social media posts that come out of the White House in the wee hours of morning; our growing list of “full travel ban” countries; and more.
On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, as we enter into this Day of Memory, I hope that we will take time to remember where we’ve been and to really examine our memories through the lens of teshuva. This anniversary asks something of us now: to acknowledge the cost of fear and to understand its impact. Like the matriarchs, it may take us decades or generations, but it’s not too late to revisit our memories and do teshuva, choose a new path, before cruelty hardens into our way of being.
True memory demands action of us. I don’t need to tell this community that quite a lot is at stake this year, and especially in the coming weeks, here in America. There is an urgency to this message: that we will need to work hard – with moral clarity and persistence – to hold leaders accountable for inflammatory rhetoric, to reject divisive policies, to refuse to be pitted against immigrants and other minority groups, and to actively invest in community care and building bridges. As we read the stories of our matriarchs and patriarchs this holiday, it is my hope that we will strive to channel the spirit of Rachel – and seek to channel chesed rather than allow ourselves to be driven to cruelty by our fear or insecurity, even from within a complicated and traumatic reality.
On my flight on that crisp September morning, as soon as it became clear that we were witnessing an emergency in real time, the passengers turned towards one another and started talking. I learned that a group of 6 older gentlemen sitting around me had traveled together from Charleston to New York and were now headed home. One knew my grandfather. They took me under their wing, and within just a couple hours of our plane touching down in Norfolk, Virginia, I found myself in the middle of the back row of a 7-passenger rental van, headed towards home. I have never forgotten the kindness of those strangers that day – and what it felt like to have their chesed trump our collective fear.
In this season of teshuva and memory, may we hold up the events of our past such that we might learn from our mistakes. May this 25th anniversary of 9/11 help us remember who we are and who we want to be. Together, may we chart a better course for ourselves, for our Jewish community, and for our American society.
Shana tova,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
