New York Jewish Week via JTA — “Today is the birthday of the world. It is also the end of shiva. Sept. 11 + 7.” That’s how Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Connecticut, began his Rosh Hashanah sermon on September 18, 2001 — 1 Tishrei 5762.
When I’d left New York City for Stamford the day before, Grand Central Terminal was covered in missing-person posters. All around were photos of those who went to work on a cloudless Tuesday morning and never made it home. Downtown, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning. They wouldn’t be fully extinguished for another three months.
While many of us had been sitting in front of the TV, rabbis were comforting grieving and fearful congregants and scrambling to rewrite their High Holiday sermons. Before 9/11, many of them had planned to speak about the violence that had engulfed Israel over the previous year. Just a month earlier, a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up in a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, killing 16 people and injuring more than 100. But then, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported at the time, attacks closer to home “forced an abrupt shift in tack and created new, pressing questions: How do you comfort a nation in mourning and bring in the New Year in the shadow of the worst terror attack in United States history? How do you discuss God, forgiveness and repentance in the face of evil?”
