9/11, 25 Years: Before and Since
Rosh HaShanah Eve Sermon 5787
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
Shabbat Shalom, and L’Shana Tovah. The wonderful Jewish author, the late Grace Paley, wrote a book of extraordinary short stories called, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.” In that collection she wrote, “plot [is] the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” I often think of the beginning of a Jewish New Year in those words: the open destiny of life. Tonight we have begun a journey, an exploration, a voyage into the unknown. A fresh year, without advance notes or GPS directions. Who knows where it will lead? Who really knows what will happen in 5787?
What is it John Lennon said about expectations? “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Or, in the Yiddish aphorism, Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht: we plan, and God laughs.
I love Paley’s title: “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.” So often that’s exactly what we experience in life—and that has regularly proven to be a simple factual statement around the time of the High Holy Days. Mind you, I have rabbinic colleagues who believe it is best to write Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur sermons in June or July, so they can be prepared long before the High Holy Days arrive and enjoy their summer vacations. This get-it-done-early approach to the Days of Awe baffles me. Because the world doesn’t stop in August and September, and powerful, important events can occur right before Rosh HaShanah and change the whole way we are thinking. You know: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
Never was this truer than 25 years ago, when Rosh HaShanah began September 17th, 2001. That was six days after the shock of 9/11, before we knew most of what was going to change in the world—but we knew there would be profound changes. My original sermons for Rosh HaShanah that year never got delivered. Our world was suddenly different, dramatically, shockingly, and it was clear that every congregation needed to hear different messages entirely than the ones their rabbis originally planned to deliver.
Tonight is the beginning of 5787, but it is also the 25th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center tower buildings in Manhattan, on the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and on the jet targeting the Capitol building whose heroic passengers forced it down in Pennsylvania. While that day is indelibly burned into the memories of many of us, some of you are too young even to remember 9/11. My older children, now in their 20s and 30s, were little children at the time of 9/11. Ayelet was born more than two decades later. For all of them 9/11 is history, something they learned or will learn about from books, teachers and documentaries. It is the way of the world that signal events that seem, in the moment, so shocking and terrible that they can never leave our consciousness do, over time, fade, and move from the immediacy of tragedy and trauma to the dimmer recesses of memory.
In the quarter century that has passed since 2001 other shocking dates have forced their ways into our consciousness—January 6, 2021, for example, and certainly October 7, 2023, a terrible day indeed for Jews in Israel and everywhere in the world, the Simchat Torah massacres and kidnappings in Israel three years ago.
Yet 9/11 remains unique. The truth is that there was a world before 9/11, and there has been a different world since that time. The sense of security we felt in America prior to that day, misguided or not, disappeared in the horrific collapse of the twin towers, in the jet smashing into the Pentagon, and during the seemingly endless war on terror that followed.
You may remember that before 9/11, anyone could walk all the way to an airport gate to say goodbye to a departing family member, friend or romantic partner. You didn’t need to show a boarding pass or an ID—real or otherwise—to go through security into the terminal. You could carry a Swiss army knife in your backpack on planes, and certainly a can of soda or bottle of water. It really wasn’t security at all; and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 there were suddenly extremely long, slow-moving lines at airport security… which has never completely changed, although this week TSA announced a new plan to allow some people to go to the gate to say goodbye to relatives, for the first time since 2001.
You know, 25 years can seem like ancient history. One small fact illustrates that: there are only three videos, just three photographic images of the jets striking the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Three, total. According to some calculations, those three lonely images have been viewed by two-thirds of the population of the world.
That there would only be three video images of anything is unfathomable today. 2001 was before cellphone cameras were even sold in the United States, and five years before digital images became ubiquitous. Today, everything is immediately photographed and videoed by everyone. But that wasn’t true back then.
The man who took one of the most famous of the photos of the plane hitting the second, South Tower, was a Jewish photographer named Robert Cumins. Without realizing a second plane was heading toward Lower Manhattan through his viewfinder, he snapped two quick frames from his apartment in New Jersey. He did not see the plane in his frame until he developed the film an hour later. Cumins said that image captured, "the final split second of innocence" because it freezes the exact 17-minute window between the first and second impacts, when people still hoped the initial crash was a tragic accident rather than a deliberate terrorist attack.
In 2001, there were no smartphones, just flip phones, and many people—nearly half the American adult population—did not yet have them. Huge paper phone books were still part of our lives. There was no social media yet: Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and the iPhone only came out in 2007. The internet ran at what today would seem like glacially slow speed, and for almost everyone it ran on unreliable dial-up modems. 9/11 happened before the world was connected so directly and so instantly.
At the time 9/11 happened, we read newspapers, watched the evening news, and listened to the radio to find out what was going on in the world. We mostly agreed on the basic facts of what was reported by Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.
Today's information environment of constant connectivity, social media-driven politics, and algorithm-controlled content simply didn't exist. The fragmentation and division of information and belief in our society that resulted from this technological transformation all happened since then. It has reshaped everything from how we get news to how movements organize to how misinformation, and conspiracy theories, spread. We live in a different world.
And yet, some things seem not to have changed at all. I looked back at what I said 25 years ago, less than a week after the 9/11 attacks. In that Erev Rosh HaShanah sermon, I said:
“[This week] Our nation was profoundly offended by scenes of Palestinians dancing in the streets of Jenin and Jerusalem and Ramallah, rejoicing in the atrocities at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those photos of celebration at the death of Americans and the destruction of international landmarks, the singing and dancing and the tossing of candy to children, should have seared themselves into our brains on that terrible Tuesday. And while we were revolted by this open display, it made explicit a fact of the terrorist mindset that has been true as long as acts directed against the public have been committed. It is that terrorists make no distinction whatsoever between armed men in uniform and civilians, between tanks and jets and stockbrokers and janitors—or woman tourists, or little children. And that terrorists are just as capable of teaching small children to hate as they are willing to kill the small children of others.
‘The true goal of all humanity ought to be peace. But Judaism, while strongly favoring peace and working for peace, has never been a fully pacifistic faith. As the Talmud tell us, if someone comes to kill you, rise earlier and kill him first. In the case of terrorism, pacifism is neither intelligent nor morally appropriate. In the prophet Jeremiah's words, Shalom shalom v'ein shalom—we should not speak of peace when there is no peace. What we should seek is a restoration of justice. On this day of judgment, this Yom haDin, we need to accept the need to address the mindset of terrorism not as revenge, but as a means to creating justice in our world.
‘In the face of this mindset, we should seek justice. God grant us the consistency, persistence, and patience to truly succeed in eliminating terrorism from our world. And while we pray for justice and work to find the perpetrators and their hosts, we know that ultimately there is no triumph over such a loss through revenge or violence. For what these suicide bombers and hijackers wish to convey is their utter contempt for the sanctity of life, even their own lives. And only through our own efforts to exalt the holiness of life, to confirm the presence of kedushah through our acts and our character, only then will we triumph over bestiality.’
That was naïve, wasn’t it, the idea of “eliminating terrorism from our world”? Of course, in the moment, you don’t know what you don’t know. A dark thought: terrorism, in one form or another, has been around forever, literally for thousands of years. And while we managed to avert another 9/11 from occurring on our own shores—thank God, and the US government—we know that after 25 years of concerted efforts the ideal of eliminating terrorism from the world might be as far from fulfillment as it has ever been.
The war on terror America initiated after 9/11 included the US military, with partner nations, invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq for the better part of 20 years. It saw the rise and fall of ISIS, a horrific Islamist terrorist state and “caliphate” that decimated large swaths of the Middle East. It is an effort that continues now in our current intermittent war against Iran, a sponsoring nation of terrorism and terrorist states.
I’m pretty certain we haven’t yet won; frankly, we are probably not winning.
We have even come to see the same Palestinians—or their now grown-up children—who cheered 9/11, and passed out candy celebrating it, idolized here in America for comparable acts of contemporary terrorism. You have heard the popular chant on campuses in America, “globalize the Intifada”; that is, sow terrorism everywhere. In the aftermath of 9/11, who would have thought Americans would encourage that?
And some other things haven’t changed, either. Antisemitic conspiracy theories surfaced within days of 9/11. One of the most widespread libels was that Jews or Israelis were behind the attacks. Another lie claimed thousands of Jews skipped work at the World Trade Center that morning. In fact, many Jews, including Israelis, died on 9/11. These accusations were as false then just as they are now. But they are still around, and they are no longer confined to the lunatic fringe.
Tucker Carlson recently spread several 9/11 conspiracies, including that Israel had advance knowledge of the attacks. Another far right anti-Semite, Candace Owens, told her millions of followers that the Mossad was to blame for 9/11.
Conspiracy theories are also prevalent on the left. Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a far-left antisemite, is headlining a 9/11 ‘truth’ conference at a NYC-owned museum promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, falsely linking Israel to the Sept. 11 attack. The New Jersey branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently was forced to remove a curriculum link in its back-to-school guide blaming the 9/11 attacks on U.S. support for Israel.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories are timeless perennials. But 9/11beyond question changed the way we felt about our safety in the world. There were, of course, terrorist attacks in America prior to that September. In fact, that wasn’t even the first time the World Trade Center was targeted by Islamist bombs; that happened in 1993, and the terrorist behind that attack, Ramzi Yousef, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the evil al-Quaeda mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. It turned out the 1993 bombing was a murderous dress rehearsal for 9/11, but of course we didn’t realize it at the time. For that matter, the Oklahoma City bombing, worst act of domestic terrorism ever, was perpetrated in 1995, fully six years prior to 9/11, and by men enamored of conspiracy theories and motivated by anti-government and white supremacist ideologies, concepts familiar to us today a quarter of century later. America had experienced horrible terrorist attacks and mass death events quite recently prior to September 11, 2001. For that matter, the Columbine school massacre was in 1999, just two years earlier.
But somehow, until 9/11, we didn’t really believe that terrorism could happen here, not in the same way that had become nearly commonplace in the Intifadas in Israel, in bombings in Western Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, in India, around the world. We believed terrorism and violent attacks were things that happened far away, in distant, troubled lands. They couldn’t happen here.
Then 9/11. We now knew that it could indeed happen here, because it had happened here: nearly 3,000 people died in one day, thousands more were injured, air travel stopped, there were fears of attacks on bridges and military bases, the whole American world seemed to be at immediate risk. First responders—many were killed when the second tower collapsed—who survived suffered negative, sometimes fatal, health impacts for years. PTSD was everywhere. You had only to look at the New York skyline to see visible evidence of the hole in our society.
In response, an elaborate governmental and military anti-terrorism infrastructure was created, with new names and functions, many of which had quite different rules than traditional law enforcement agencies had previously followed. Super prisons were created or utilized uniquely, like Guantanamo. Torture became a part of the unofficial M.O. of some interrogators. Some of our American norms of decency were also victims of the war on terror.
Encouragingly, it was not all negativity and loss. We might not remember this part of the immediate post-9/11 world, but we should. In the aftermath of that awful day, our country pulled together in ways that were affirming and truly surprising. There was a shared understanding that we were all in this together, that we all had a connection to someone who lost someone in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania. As one minister said in a 9/11 commemoration I chaired a month after the attacks, “We all came to this country in different boats; but we are all in the same boat now.” We came together across religious, racial, and political lines, and for a while, we treated each other very differently than we had in more normal times.
People—including me—even went out to protect mosques from the possibility of misguided revenge attacks the next few weeks. There was a sense of societal solidarity, of coming together and uniting as one country. Support for then-President George W. Bush skyrocketed: In the weeks following the attacks, Bush's approval rating skyrocketed from 50% to 90%, the highest ever recorded in Gallup polling history.
Those changes were not permanent, but they lasted for a while. I vividly recall taking my then three very young children on their first visit to New York City. I had visited New York many times before and found New Yorkers much as you would stereotype them: energetic, in a hurry, somewhat rude, and not at all warm or fuzzy. But when I schlepped three kids ten and under with me on that visit, a couple of years after 9/11, I found a totally different city: people were extraordinarily kind, helpful, and gentle in ways I’d never experienced in New York. Guards opened subway gates to let us through with a smile. Passersby helped when we dropped something on the street; no one pushed past us on the sidewalks, or stole the cab we had haled. It was a revelation. New Yorkers were universally nice, even kind.
Unlike the words a Senate candidate for office this year said, it did not prove that “hurt people hurt people”; the effect of 9/11 was quite the opposite. Those who had been wounded—and every New Yorker felt that wound, and really, all of America felt that wound—became sensitized to the need to be kinder to our fellow Americans in place of being hostile or indifferent.
Sadly, this proved to be a temporary change. In the long run, that societal near-unanimity, that empathy and respect did not, probably could not, endure. Looking back from the perspective of a quarter century, we can see that the events of 9/11 and after, from the terrorist attacks to the invasion of Afghanistan and—unconnected to 9/11—the invasion of Iraq, began a process that unraveled that sense of solidarity in ways that have been corrosive and destructive.
In the fall of 2000 America had survived a contentious presidential election—a much closer election than, for example, the 2020 election—without violence, uprisings, or insurrection. Hanging chads and Supreme Court cases devolved into a peaceful transition of presidential power from one party to another and a normal presidential inauguration, as US elections had always done before—and, until this decade, since.
But something fractured following 9/11. As Israel knew then, and has had to rediscover recently, terrorism isn’t something you fight and defeat permanently. The wars that arose after 9/11 proved to be the longest in American history, and some of the least fulfilling. The Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden and the training of the 9/11 terrorists, eventually returned to power in Afghanistan. Iraq did not become a liberal democracy. Our final withdrawals from both countries proved not to be a triumphant return home with mission accomplished, but a recognition that there wasn’t much being achieved, in spite of all the casualties and all the expenditures and all the suffering. When we finally withdrew and brought the last troops home, the fact was the American public had not supported those wars for many years.
It turned out you could remove the Taliban from Afghanistan, which US forces did in short order; you could overthrow an evil regime in Iraq rapidly, which a US-led coalition did. But you cannot eliminate the ideologies that believe murdering innocents is the surest way to effectuate change in situations in which power is asymmetrical. And you cannot eliminate the political dysfunction in an entire region through short, explosive conflicts.
There is debate as to whether in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks Al Qaeda unleashed forces that ultimately helped fracture our society today, or whether those attacks merely exposed the latent divisions that have come to polarize America since then. There is no debate that the terrorist, extreme Islamist ideology that motivated the 9/11 attacks has reached across the world since then, from the Middle East to Africa, to Asia, to the Americas, to Europe, even to Australia, motivating radicalized individuals and groups to perpetrate atrocities, often, but by no means always, against Jews.
We would have hoped, 25 years on, to have learned more about how to respond to this threat as a society. Terrorism is not, in spite of the rhetoric, a truly existential threat to our society or civilization. The horrors and heroism of 9/11 have not been repeated here—nor did they destroy America then, and we are vastly more aware and better protected institutionally than we were a quarter of a century ago. Terrorism doesn’t end civilizations, or decency, or society. But it can cause it to come apart at seams that already are fraying.
What I would have wished us to learn from 9/11 was that non-terrorist human beings can unite without the terrible motivation of massive attacks. That we, as a nation, as human beings, are much stronger together than divided. That reaching across boundaries of race, religion and heritage to recognize the innate humanity of others makes us a healthier, better, more robust nation and world. It is strange that these ideas have become less popular now, that demonizing those we disagree with has become a societal—and social media—norm. That outreach to those who are different should be our standard; because it is the principle Judaism has always espoused, and that our own nation has long sought to emulate.
There is a beautiful story in the Babylonian Talmud. I first learned it from an Episcopal rector; it is based on a passage in the Tractate of Blessings, Masechet Brachot, concerning when Jews are supposed to say Shma in the morning. The Shma, affirming the oneness of God, must be said after sunrise, when night has ended, dawn arrives, and morning has come. Being the Talmud, there is an elaborate argument about what that means, just exactly when night has ended and morning has come. One rabbi says morning comes when a person can tell a black thread from a white thread—which doesn’t take much light. Another rabbi argues this is too lenient, and night is over and dawn has arrived when a person can tell a blue thread from a green thread, which is much harder to see and requires more light.
Finally, the correct answer is given: the dark night is over, dawn has arrived and morning has come when we can look upon the face of another human being - and see there the image of God, the tzelem Elohim.
The dark night is over and morning begins when we can look on the face of another human being and see there the image of God. Whatever color, denomination, nationality, race, gender, height, shape, ability. Each human being is created in the image—if only we are enlightened enough to see it. We are all created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Those who engage in terrorism seek to obliterate that essential concept. But when we look at others and find there the presence of God, we overcome the superficial differences that separate us.
The greatest lesson we can learn from 9/11, 25 years later, is that we are all one people, one humanity, and that we can always rise above our differnces and unite in support of one another. And that if we wish to create a world that values life and good, we must choose to follow that course. May we do so in this new year of 5787. L’Shana Tova.