Who were we in the aftermath?

Rabbi Jodie Gordon

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787 || September 11, 2026

Even on that day, I think I imagined this one. 

Not exactly this one. But some distant day in the future when I would remember where I was on that day.

I was twenty years old on September 11, 2001, just a few weeks into my senior year at Brandeis. And I was intoxicated by how much I thought I knew about how the world worked. I had it all figured out. The future seemed like a series of decisions waiting for me to make them.

And then, one morning, the phone started ringing. It was my mother calling. "Are you watching this!?"

Over the course of that beautiful sunny morning, we sat outside in the open quad, making food and bringing it outside. It felt, somehow, like sitting shiva. We didn't know what else to do. So we fed one another. Eventually, we drifted back inside, toward the televisions, and watched the news that wouldn't stop.

Less than a week later, I went home to Long Island for Rosh Hashanah. I will never forget the image of coming up the escalator at Penn Station and seeing hundreds of posters of missing people. Handwritten, photocopied, taped-up pages of frantic hope.

On the drive back to school after the holiday, I stopped to see my friend Molly, whose birthday had been on the 11th. Her mother told us to go out. To go to the diner. To be twenty. So we went. We ordered cheese fries and sat there in stunned silence.

I have thought about that diner many times over the years. Not because anything happened there — nothing happened. We ate cheese fries. We sat together. We were twenty. But maybe that is exactly why I remember it.

When something enormous happens, 

we imagine that the important thing is what happened in the moment itself: 

The planes crashed, the towers fell. 

The world changed. 

But most of us didn't know what to do with any of that. So we did whatever came next. We made food. We went to the diner. We hugged our children. We went to synagogue. We sat with one another.

Over the last few weeks, I've had the privilege of reading some of your stories. And even in the incredible diversity of experiences that you shared with me, I couldn't help but see the common thread. Most of you didn't tell me stories about September 11. Most of you shared stories about what happened afterward. About September 12.

So tonight we'll consider a slightly different question.

Not just: Where were you on September 11? 

But: Who were we on September 12? 

Because sometimes the aftermath tells us something that the catastrophe itself cannot. It tells us who we become when we don't know what to do.

A story

You had two little boys who were absolutely fascinated by tall buildings. 

And so in August 2001, you took them to the World Trade Center. The ferry from Staten Island, an elevator ride to the very top, a movie about the towers. You looked out over NY and NJ and were thrilled.

A little more than a month later, you picked up the photographs from that trip on a sunny Tuesday morning. And on that day, as you remarked, your 6- and 8-year-old sons lost their innocence.

I've been thinking about that word. Innocence is not simply a lack of knowledge. It is also a kind of trust. A trust that the building we visited last month will still be standing. That the parent who left for work will come home. That the ordinary Tuesday morning will remain an ordinary Tuesday morning.

September 11 shattered that trust for millions of people. 

And once it is shattered, you cannot simply put it back together. 

The question becomes: What do you build instead?

Another story

You told me that in the aftermath of 9/11, Hevreh became an important place for you. You described the sanctuary, and the words coming from the bimah, as feeling like "a warm blanket gently holding" you.

A warm blanket. What a beautiful description of what a community can be. Not an answer or an explanation. Just something that holds you while you are hurting.

I think we sometimes ask too much of religion in moments of catastrophe. We want it to explain why something happened. But sometimes the most religious thing we can do is simpler. We can gather, sit together. Say the prayers we know, and feel held. 

And perhaps that is one answer to the question: Who were we on September 12? 

We were people who gathered.

You told me about a bat mitzvah that took place at Hevreh that week. There was every reason to postpone it. But Sheli decided to go ahead. And the sanctuary filled. Members came. Non-members came. People came because they needed to be together. There wasn't enough food prepared for the celebration because nobody had expected so many people. And somehow there was enough.

Years later, the family remembered Sheli's instinct at the time: We have to keep going on. Not moving on, but going on. There is an important difference. Moving on can sound like leaving something behind. Going on means carrying something with you. You take the grief with you. You take the changed world with you. And you continue.

Maybe that is what ritual is for. We do the next thing. We light the candles. We say the blessing. We eat. We celebrate. Not because the world has been repaired. But because we are still here.

One of you told me about a man who was a thirteen-year veteran of the FDNY and also a security guard at your synagogue, treated like family. He did not come home that day. Every year, on the Shabbat closest to September 11th, his firehouse still sends someone to your sanctuary. They play bagpipes. Twenty-five years of bagpipes.

That, too, is going on.

Who were you on September 11?

You were mid-workout, watching the towers fall on a gym television. You were on a hillside with your dog, looking out at a column of smoke where two towers used to be. You were stranded in Atlanta, unable to reach your wife or your sons. You were kept from your own street for a week by National Guard roadblocks, breathing air that was thick and foul.

And still, in the middle of it, you remember something else. Generosity. Responders who had driven a thousand miles just to be kind. Neighbors with food and water.

And then there is a story that may be the elemental of all. 

A frightened mother runs to her daughter's elementary school. When she finally reachesthe kindergarten classroom, the teacher sees her face and understands. And she gives the little girl a big hug.

The mother wrote: "I have never forgotten who was taking care of my daughter on September 11th."

Who were we? We were people who took care of one another.

And sometimes, that care turned into something none of us could have predicted.

Another story.

You were twenty-five years old that week, a new teacher, living four blocks from the towers. You couldn't get back to your aparment for weeks. The only person you knew in the city with a spare room, took you in. In exchange, you bought him a television, so the two of you would have something to watch the news on.

Twenty-five years later, tonight is an anniversary for you. You wrote to me that while the rest of the world spends this day mourning, a piece of you quietly celebrates. A phoenix that rose from the ashes, you called it. A little miracle. Nearly twenty-five years married. Twenty-five years since the towers fell. The very same twenty-five years, folded into one another.

That, too, is what we did in the aftermath. We built something out of what we were given. Even a marriage. Even joy.

Mercy 

As I read your stories, the word that came to mind over and over was mercy. Not heroism. Not patriotism. Not unity, exactly. 

Mercy. The instinct to recognize another person's vulnerability and move toward them.

Sometimes mercy looked enormous. People traveling across the country to help. Doctors driving through the night to volunteer.

Sometimes it looked very small.  A couple driving up and down an empty highway every morning that fall, delivering mac and cheese to the crews working at Ground Zero — one of them eight months pregnant, still making deliveries the week before she gave birth. 

Perhaps this is why these stories have stayed with me. Mercy does not require us to know what comes next. It doesn't require a plan. It asks something much simpler: Can you see the person in front of you? And if you can: Will you move closer?

This is where I think Rosh Hashanah enters the story. This is, in some ways, a holiday about the aftermath. We look backward. And then we turn.

That is the essential movement of teshuvah. The word is usually translated as repentance, but its more literal meaning is return. And I've always found that a little complicated. Return to what? To who we were before we made the mistake? To the world before it was broken?

We know we cannot do that. There is no going back to September 10, 2001. There is no going back to the person we were before the phone rang.

So perhaps teshuvah is not really about going backward. It’s about turning toward what comes next with greater honesty about what has happened. We cannot return to the old world. But we can return to our values and our commitments. We can return to the parts of ourselves that we lose when we become afraid.

And that is why I keep thinking about September 12.

We should not romanticize it. The unity did not last. The generosity of spirit faded. We know what came afterward: the wars, the fear, the Islamophobia and xenophobia, the ways grief and fear can harden into something else. Catastrophe does not automatically make us better people. Sometimes it does the opposite.

And perhaps even in those first days, the unity was never as simple as we sometimes remember it.

A chaplain who served at Ground Zero in the months after September 11 told me about a group of Sikh men who gathered in the hall where families came for information and where chaplains and mental-health workers offered support. They were crying. They were grieving. And people were hesitant to approach them.

Some people saw them and assumed they were Muslim. And some, in the fear and confusion of those days, saw Muslim as synonymous with enemy.

But they were Sikh. And they were grieving human beings who needed someone to sit with them. 

So the chaplain made their table her first stop. She sat with them. She listened. And over time, those people became part of her community.

There was so much goodwill after September 11, she told me. And there was so much hidden sorrow.

That story complicates the word mercy for me. Because mercy is not only something we offer when everyone around us agrees that someone deserves it. Mercy becomes most necessary when fear tells us who is dangerous. When fear tells us who is other. When we stop seeing the person in front of us.

But I don’t think we can dismiss what happened in those first days. The fact that something doesn't last does not mean it wasn't real. September 12 and the days that followed were evidence that another way of being was possible. For a moment, people who did not know what to do knew one thing: We need one another.

That may be one of the deepest lessons of teshuvah. We know that we don't remain our best selves. 

We become impatient. We become afraid. 

We become tribal. We turn inward. We forget. 

And then, once a year, Judaism asks us to remember. To return. Not because we have never failed. But because failure does not have to be the end of the story.

The High Holy Days are not a fantasy that we can become perfect people. They are an insistence that we can become different people. That we can notice where we have gone astray. That we can turn. That we can try again.

So perhaps the question for us this Rosh Hashanah is not: How do we get back to September 12, 2001? We can't. And maybe we shouldn't.

But we can remember. We can remember the instinct to gather. The instinct to care. The instinct to pray. The instinct to feed one another. The instinct to say: You are frightened. I am frightened too. Let's stay together.

That is part of why we remember. Not so that we will live frightened. But so that we will live aware that life is fragile. That the people we love are here now. Aware that we don't know what the next minute brings.

I think about my twenty-year-old self. She thought she knew how the world worked. She had a plan. She would graduate. Maybe join the Peace Corps. Move home to New York. Figure it out. September 11 taught me that we do not get to know how the story will unfold.

We cannot choose the morning we wake up to. We cannot choose the phone call. We cannot choose the loss or the catastrophe. We cannot choose what the world will ask of us.

But we do get to choose something.

We get to choose who we will be to one another in the aftermath.

There is one story I want to return to. Those two little boys who loved tall buildings. Twenty years after their mother took them to the World Trade Center, the boys — by then young men — recreated that day. They took the ferry. They went back to the new World Trade Center. They went to the top.

They couldn't go back to August 5, 2001. They couldn't restore the world their six- and eight-year-old selves had known. They couldn't undo what happened.

But they could take the ferry. They could cross the harbor. They could go back up.

That, to me, is not forgetting. It is not moving on. It is going on.

And I believe that is what we are asked to do tonight. Not to pretend the world is safe. Not to pretend that we know what the coming year will bring. Not to pretend that grief disappears.

But to remember. To remember that we have been frightened before. That we have been broken before. That we have not always known what to do.

And still — we gathered. We cared for one another. We made food. We prayed. We celebrated. We showed mercy. And then we kept going.

Twenty-five years ago, we woke up on September 11 in a world we did not recognize. Tomorrow, we will wake up on the first day of 5787. We do not know what this year will bring.

I wish I could tell you that it will be a year of peace. I cannot. I wish I could tell you that none of us will experience loss. 

I cannot. I wish I could tell you that we will always know how to meet whatever comes. I cannot.

But perhaps I can offer something smaller.

Whatever comes, let us try to meet it as people who know how to turn toward one another. Let us bring the food. Let us open the doors. Let us hold the frightened child. Let us sit beside the person who is grieving. Let us make room at the table. Let us pray. Let us celebrate. Let us remember.

And when we don't know what else to do — let us stay.

Let us keep going.

Because we cannot choose the world we wake up to. But we can choose who we will be to one another in the aftermath.