It's The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the September 11th Attacks and It's Erev Rosh Hashanah

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. It is also Erev Rosh Hashanah. A day that it is important to memorialize and the beginning for Jews of what is supposed to be a season of introspection, repentance, and growth. When I was writing my union’s blog—I was the secretary—it fell to me in 2021 to compose the executive committee’s message to our membership on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I think what I wrote then captures much of what I would say today, these paragraphs in particular:

We have, all of us, even those who were not yet born at the time, been living for the past two decades, in big ways and small, with the impact of those two attacks, the one against the United States on September 11th and the one ordered in retaliation against Afghanistan on October 7th. While we may today remember especially those we lost in the Twin Towers, or at the Pentagon, or on Flight 93, we also should not forget those who have perished since in the many battles that can be traced back to September 11, 2001; nor should we forget those whose lives were permanently changed by health problems and other injuries sustained in the immediate aftermath of September 11th or as a result of those battles.

There is something else, too, that we should not forget. In the weeks, months, and years following the September 11th attacks, the transcendent solidarity so many of us felt as Americans was not extended to all who call this country home. I remember the racist graffiti on the storefronts of Indian restaurants in my neighborhood because someone assumed the businesses were owned by Muslims. I also remember reading about Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American who was murdered on September 15, 2001 because Frank Silva Roque decided that Sodhi was in fact an Arab Muslim. It’s easy to think of acts like these as isolated incidents, but a quick google search will reveal just how fraught the years following 2001 have been for Muslims and others in our country whom far too many are all-too-quick to place in the same category as the men who engineered and carried out the attacks of September 11th.

I raise this last point because I know there are members of the NCCFT who have experienced that racism and Islamophobia, either directly or because they and their loved ones have had to live with the anxiety it provokes; and I raise it as well because, as a union of higher education professionals, we need to remember that we work every day with students many of whom have experienced racism and Islamophobia as well, who bring the impact of that experience into our offices and classrooms, and therefore also into our lives. For us as a union, in other words, September 11th should be a day of committed memorializing, a day on which we honor the memory of those we’ve lost and on which we commit ourselves to a solidarity from which no one who calls this country home should be excluded.

Last year on September 11th, the NCCFT Executive Committee posted Billy Collins’ poem “The Names” It is a powerfully moving tribute and I encourage you to read it. This year, as a complement to that poem, I’d like to offer you Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since,” which is also a moving tribute, but from a very different perspective. To respond adequately to what this day calls us to, both of these perspectives are necessary.

I think a lot these days about what this world calls us to and how the only way to do that calling justice is to hold space for multiple perspectives in the way I tried to do in that post. What we Jews call the “Yamim Noraim” (ימים נוראים), or Days of Awe, seems to me the perfect time to do that work.

If you are celebrating, Shana Tovah! I hope we get the sweet and fulfilling and meaningful and just and peaceful year that every single one of us deserves.