What I remember most about September 11th, 2001, is the sound. Not the images, which I saw on a television like everyone else, but the sirens. Ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, a wail that started that morning and did not stop for days. Every siren meant someone was running toward destruction, or another body had been found, or a family was waiting for news that would never come. It was the sound of human fragility, panic, and raw grief.
I was in a graduate program at Stern College, YU’s women’s division, on 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan. The first report came from a woman who had just walked in off the Long Island Railroad. A plane had hit one of the towers. She had seen it. At first none of us knew what it meant, but as the day went on and the news trickled in, we started to get a sense of the enormity of what had happened.
Eventually we made our way home to Washington Heights. The streets of Midtown were eerily quiet. The Empire State Building was cordoned off out of fear that there could be another attack. On the train, two women sat there in a daze. They had been downtown, at the World Trade Center site. They didn’t say much. They didn’t have to.
In the Jewish calendar that year, September 11th fell in the last week of Elul, the month of spiritual preparation leading into the High Holidays. Elul is meant to be a time of quiet introspection, a period when we assess our lives and prepare for the Day of Judgment. But that year, judgment felt like it had arrived early, descending in a cloud of ash over Lower Manhattan.
When Rosh Hashanah arrived a week later, the city was still reeling. The traditional liturgy of the holiday takes on a terrifying relevance in times of crisis. One of the central prayers of the High Holidays, Unetanneh Tokef (“Let us speak of the awesomeness of the day”), confronts human vulnerability directly: Who shall live and who shall die? Who by fire and who by water? Who by sword and who by beast? On any other year, those words can feel poetic or abstract. That year, standing in Manhattan, they felt like the evening news.
Yet the core ritual of Rosh Hashanah is not a prayer written on paper. It is a sound.
In fact, the Bible names the entire day for that sound but does not explain it.
Yom Teruah, the day when the horn is sounded. That is the whole instruction, the Bible tells us nothing more about the day.
The silence is strange, because the Bible normally tells us why we celebrate a holiday. Passover recalls the Exodus and comes with a script for explaining it to your children (Exodus 12:26-27). Sukkot comes with its reason attached, so that future generations will know that God settled Israel in booths after the exodus (Leviticus 23:43). The Day of Sounding comes with nothing at all.
The Sages had to determine what the sound should actually be, since the Bible gives only the word, teruah. They concluded that it is a crying sound, and they anchored it in the Song of Deborah, in the mother of Sisera standing at her window waiting for a son who is never coming home, and weeping (Judges 5:28). But since they didn’t know which crying sound it is, we blow two: the shevarim, three short, sobbing notes, and the teruah, nine rapid, staccato bursts.
Of every sound in Scripture, that is the one chosen as the model for the central commandment of the Day of Judgment. A woman at a window, waiting for someone who will not walk through the door.
But the Sages did not leave the cry standing alone. Every shevarim and every teruah is bracketed by a tekiah, one straight, unbroken note held on a single breath. It does not sob and it does not stutter. It simply holds. The cry sits inside it, surrounded on both sides by something that does not break.
For days, New Yorkers had been living inside a relentless teruah. But the siren can only warn us of danger. It cannot heal us. It signals panic, but it offers no comfort.
My father is a ba’al tokeiah, the person who blows the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, and that year he was blowing the shofar in a synagogue on 34th Street as he had done for years. A couple of servicemen showed up for the evening prayers. They had been stationed at the Javits Center, which had been transformed almost overnight from a space for trade shows into a massive military and emergency staging ground, and wanted to say the traditional holiday prayers. But they would not be able to come back in the morning to hear the sounding of the shofar. So the next morning we took the shofar to them. Walking into the Javits Center with my father brought the contrast of those two sounds, the siren and the horn, into sharp relief.
Amidst the machinery of emergency response, my father stepped forward with a simple, unadorned ram’s horn.
He lifted the shofar to his lips and, surrounded by men and women tasked with holding a shattered city together, the sound cut through.
Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiah.
It was the same sound that had echoed through crowded synagogues for thousands of years. But that morning it felt radically different. The broken, sobbing notes of the teruah met the grief in the room, giving voice to what words could not carry. And then, unlike the sirens outside, the blasts did not end on alarm. They ended on the tekiah gedolah, the great blast, one long unbroken note held until the breath runs out.
The prophets understood that the horn would have the last word.
Rosh Hashanah is not a memorial of something that happened in the past. Rosh Hashanah faces forward. It is the head of the year, the opening of what has not happened yet, and the sound at its center is a cry, a summons, and a promise in a single breath.
A siren tells you that something has broken. The shofar sounds the break out loud, and then refuses to leave it there.
Standing there with my father and those servicemen, I understood that the shofar is not only a call to remember. It is a call to endure. The sirens over Manhattan eventually quieted, but the horn did not. It comes back every year, on schedule, insisting that the story is not finished insisting that the story is not finished, and that when the last note finally sounds, it will be held until everyone has come home: the exiles to Jerusalem, and each of us to God.
