offered at the Garden of Reflection in Lower Makefield Township, PA, September 11, 2026

Invocation for 25th Commemoration of the Attacks on September 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001, the attacks occurred on a Tuesday. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began the evening of September 17, 2001, six days later.  So Jews around the world entered the Jewish New Year in the immediate aftermath of an event that had profoundly shattered our sense of safety and predictability.  This year, we commemorate 25 years since that terrible day, and tonight, Rosh Hashanah begins. That creates a striking juxtaposition:

Rosh Hashanah asks us to confront the preciousness and the fragility of life.  September 11 made that fragility impossible to ignore.  The High Holiday liturgy suddenly sounded different, in particular the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, which asks “Who shall live and who shall die?”  It continues by imagining all the different ways a person’s fate might unfold.  Leonard Cohen made this central High Holiday prayer known beyond Jewish circles in his song “Who by Fire?”

Normally, Jews encounter those words as ancient liturgy—perhaps moving, perhaps frightening, but somewhat abstract. After September 11, they were anything but abstract.

Nearly 3,000 people had died suddenly and catastrophically. People who had gone to work that morning did not come home. Families were waiting for phone calls that would never come. First responders entered buildings from which they would never emerge.

Today we stand, humbled and awed by the enormity of our losses.  The course of our lives have been forever changed, shaped by grief and memory. And as a nation, we will never be the same.  25 years, and it seems like it was just yesterday.

But 25 years is also a lifetime.   An entire generation has grown up since those attacks.  So its confluence with Rosh haShanah this year brings us back to another central piece of wisdom, which is to hold, with love and honor and grief, the preciousness of each and every life that we lost that day.  The Unetaneh Tokef prayer says, “You number, and count, and determine the life, one by one, of all who have lifebreath within.

We should not let the awfulness of what happened eclipse the beauty and unique spirit of any of the 3000 individual souls we lost, each of them someone’s child, each one a child of God, created in the Divine image.  

May our remembrance today honor their lives and make us more acutely aware of the preciousness of life and exquisite fragility of being alive.

Amen.