Remembering September 11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was a fifth-year rabbinic student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. It was a crystal-blue Tuesday, the kind of sky that makes sorrow feel impossible, until it wasn’t. Smoke rose into that perfect blue, and our city trembled. I remember the shock and disbelief, the paralysis that argued with the urgent need to act. Senior students were called without warning to steady communities that had been turned upside down. We showed up, we sang, we donated blood, we comforted, even as our own knees shook.

Amid terror, something extraordinary surfaced. Strangers became neighbors, neighbors became family. We didn’t ask for political affiliations or theological positions. We asked the only question that mattered: “Are you okay?” The violence of hatred met the stubborn insistence of care. That memory, the insistence of kindness, became a seed in me. It grew into the song that poured out of me in the months that followed, “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” a promise to our children that we would build and rebuild a world from love. Survival alone is not the goal. Rebuilding – purposefully, tenderly – remains our mandate, as New Yorkers, as Jews, as human beings.

Twenty-four years later, the lessons of that day remain urgent. Leadership is not measured only in calm times but revealed in crisis: in synagogues that opened doors, in schools that became sanctuaries, in volunteers who appeared with water, blankets, and presence. The Jewish community stood with everyone who needed comfort. Our values demanded nothing less. They still do, even in these deeply complicated times. We must love ourselves; we must love our neighbors.

Rebuilding has never been only about steel and glass. It is about relationships – networks of trust that hold when everything else seems to fall apart. It is about quiet actions that rarely make headlines: a phone call returned, a meal delivered, a hand held. In seasons when hatred feels loud, small human acts become the architecture of hope. That is how cities and societies endure. That is how souls act.

We who witnessed that terrible day must serve as models, as guardians of memory and conscience. We must name the pain, we must honor the dead, and we must demand that memory be translated into action. A communal spiritual fabric that reminded people to see each other was woven that day, and we must recommit today to nurture the courage to be gentle and caring in a world that sometimes rewards the opposite.

This year, the twenty-fourth since that day, New York still carries its grief. I carry mine as a New Yorker who remembers the smell of smoke in September air, the dust on shoes, the sirens that would not stop. And I carry something else: the way people looked up. Even in the hours when our eyes stung and our hearts broke, we lifted our eyes to the sky, searching for a sign that morning would come again.

That act – looking up – is the work of the Jewish High Holidays now approaching. On Rosh HaShannah, we sing “hayom harat olam,” today the world is born. Each year in turn we are invited to believe in rebirth after rupture, to hear the shofar as both alarm and lullaby: wake up to what is broken, step once again into the possibility that it can be made whole. Yom Kippur asks us to do “cheshbon hanefesh,” an accounting of the soul. We face our past failings, and we begin again. The liturgy calls us to remember and to renew, to grieve and to grow. Memory without renewal is despair. Renewal without memory is amnesia. The Holy Days insist on both, a healthy blend of reckoning and replenishment.

We remember: the names, the stories, the heroes, the ordinary people whose care turned strangers into neighbors. We renew: our commitments, our communities, our courage. If we learned anything on 9/11, it is that moral infrastructure matters as much as physical infrastructure. The bridges we build of compassion carry us when our hearts are heavy.

As another September 11 arrives, I grieve as a New Yorker and pray as a Jew. I am grateful for those who were spared, for those who ran toward danger (including my beloved sister, who served as a NYC paramedic at Ground Zero), for the communities that refused to let fear have the last word. I am humbled by the resilience that knitted this city back together, thread by thread, and by the stubborn hope that keeps us showing up for one another.

In this season leading to the Days of Awe, may our remembrance become resolve. May our grief deepen our gentleness. May we look up to the same sky that once held smoke and see, again, the possibility of morning. And may we keep building, brick by human brick, a world worthy of our children.

Olam chesed yibaneh. May we build a world of love, together.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar in Residence for UJA-Federation of New York.