Excerpted from ‘Renewing Our Souls,’ the sermon delivered by Rabbi Zemel on Erev Rosh Hashanah, September 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Read the entire sermon here.
There are times in our lives when there are no words. Last week was one of those times. There are still no words.
Like every other American, I watched the television in horror on Tuesday and Wednesday. Daniel Pinkwater expressed it so well when he said on NPR that he couldn’t stand watching it, but at the same time he couldn’t move from his television. On Thursday morning, I commented to Louise that I felt emotionally traumatized, numb. I still feel numb. It is the same sort of feeling I remember having in the days surrounding my mother’s death: the feeling of strain, pain, loss of strength. We are all carrying a burden. Some of us suffered the loss of family members. Some of us lost friends. Each one of us knows stories of near misses: unusual decisions to simply not go to work, taking a child to kindergarten and arriving at work late, missing a bus…
I am not ashamed to say that I want the feeling to go away. I want to be able to tell a joke. I want to be able to laugh. I want to go back to my old way of reading the newspaper, sports page first. I want to feel normal again. I don’t know when that will return, although I know that it will.
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How will we recover?
People do the most remarkable things. The Arab-American owner of the small deli right near the Word Trade Center who stayed open all night working with his son, giving away everything in the store to the rescue workers— food, bottled water, juice, sandwiches. He wouldn’t take a dime.
One member of our community expressed it to me this way: “This week we looked into our television sets and saw ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
This is the beginning of hope. We take hope from each other. That is a source of great strength. Our mere coming here is a sign of hope.
In many ways the major theme of Rosh Hashanah is the story of hope: hope challenged and hope recovered. This is revealed in the stories we read. For our ancestors, as for us, hopelessness is no future.
The prayer book itself wrestles with the motif of hope and human destiny. Nowhere does that come through more strongly than in the Unetaneh Tokef blessing we will be reading tomorrow morning and again on Yom Kippur:
Who shall pass on, who shall come to be;
Who shall live and who shall die;
Who shall see ripe age and who shall not;
Who shall perish by fire and who by water . . .
The poet who wrote this prayer couches our fate as the result of God inscribing each one of our destinies in a book. Some of us will flourish, while some of us will suffer.
“Repentance, prayer and charity overcome the evil of the decree.” What does this mean? We are all going to suffer at some points in our lives. Disappointments, tragic deaths of loved ones, illness, loneliness, financial ruin—you name it. No one goes through life untouched. We can either give in to it, or, says the poet, Judaism, these very days, offers us the resources to overcome the evil in the decree. The evil in the decree means losing our hope.
So, what do we do? How do we respond? We are offered three words: Teshuvah: here it means heal. We need time to start to turn around. Prayer: we look for inspiration beyond ourselves, we look to connect to something more. Tzedakah: we begin to do for others.
The firefighters out there—who rushed into blazing buildings, who gave their lives to aid others—are models of tzedakah. There is a lot of hope right there. Their courage and sacrifice are holy and awe-inspiring. That is what this prayer says to me. We need not lose our hope. We have resources. We have stories. We have prayers. We have each other. We can have faith.
I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to do good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live.
We enter this new year bowed in sorrow, but may we be renewed in strength. For this we pray.
L’shanah tovah.
—Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel