Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787 Welcome

Sept 11, 2026

Rabbi David Edleson  | Temple Sinai | South Burlington, Vermont

WELCOME

Shana Tova.  May this be a sweet and not quite so dramatic new year. 

As Americans and as Jews, we’ve had a lot of drama these past few years, and wouldn’t it be nice just to have a low-key regular year this year!   From our mouths to God’s ear.   

But t’shuvah, repentance, requires us to reckon with the past and wrestle with its meaning in order to move forward on the right path.  

Today is the 25th Anniversary of the attacks on September 11th, 2001.  

It’s hard to believe. 

I, like many of you, will never forget where I was when I first heard about the planes flying into the World Trade Center. 

I was parking my car at Middlebury College just before nine, getting ready to meet with a bunch of new first-year students when the announcement came over NPR. 

Like so many of you, I had close friends who worked in or near those buildings, and so the day was a dizzying blur of comforting students from New York, turning off televisions so students wouldn’t just watch the plane crashing over and over on loop, and trying to get in touch with my own friends. 

Twenty-five years ago.   It was not the first time Islamic terrorism had hit our shores, but it was certainly the one that woke us up to just how dangerous and organized this hate movement was and is. 

For good reason, many of us focus on the problems that followed 9/11 with the “War on Terror”, such as the Patriot Act, the creation of Homeland Security, and the war on Iraq that wasn’t really involved in the events of that day.  

As Jews we are in the habit of reflecting on what we could do better in the future as individuals but also as a nation. That’s good, but to me, we seem too quickly to gloss over the worldview that motivated the attack:  radical Islamic jihadist fanaticism. 

It is the same religious fanaticism and violence that motivated the attacks in Israel on October 7, and more and more it is coalescing with anti-American and neo-Marxist extremism.    

On Yom Kippur I will be speaking about the epidemic of zealotry we are living in now, including Israeli settler violence, and political violence right here at home, but as we gather tonight and prepare to light the candles of a new year, it is important that we pause, reflect, and remember September 11. 

Remember the dangerous illiberal and anti-Enlightenment ideologies that motivated it.

Remember the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies of the reactions to it.

Remember and pay attention that such views are now celebrated as “resistance” by significant segments of the left in this country, Canada and Western Europe.  

This is a good time to reflect on how to respond without overreaching, and how to counter these ideologies without making them more entrenched.  

As is so often true, our hearts and our heads come into conflict, but in this, Judaism can guide us on:  how to rebuke and counter without humiliating, how to ask questions rather than expound certainties, reminding us that self-defense, no matter the reason someone is chasing to attack you, is not only allowed in our tradition:  it is morally required. 

So let us pause and remember that day and those we lost so that as we light candles for this new year, we do so as a prayer that the better angels of our nature are lifted up so we might see new unexpected possibilities for peace in the New Year.