Shanah Tovah.
Tonight we stand on two thresholds at once. One is the threshold of a new year. In a few minutes we will say certain words from our tradition – let this year with its curses end, let this year with its blessings begin – and step across into 5787. Together, we begin a year none of us has ever seen. Holding onto each other, we step into the future.
But the calendar has arranged something quite poignant this year. Tonight is also the eleventh of September. Twenty-five years ago this very night, the world went to sleep in the wreckage of a morning that changed everything, and exactly one week later it was Rosh Hashanah. But the vagaries of the Jewish calendar being what they are, this year it is a bit different, and tonight we cross into the new year on this anniversary: two thresholds, a birth and a wound, folded into a single evening.
I think that overlap puts a quiet question to us as we come in the door. What happens to human beings when the ground gives way beneath them? Who do we become on the day after?
We’ve been told the answer our whole lives, in videos, films and broadcasts: when disaster strikes, the thin veneer of civilization peels away and reveals the animal underneath. Panic. Looting.
Every person for him or herself or themselves. Beneath our manners, says this common reading of humanity, we are just a mob waiting to happen.
But a writer named Rebecca Solnit went looking to find out whether that was actually true. She studied a century of catastrophes, natural and human made alike: the great San Francisco earthquake, the Blitz over London, the Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, and September 11th itself and she wrote a book with an astonishing title: A Paradise Built in Hell.
What she found was very nearly the opposite of the myth: when the worst happens, the overwhelming majority of people do not turn on one another. They turn toward one another. They rush in. They share what they have. They carry strangers on their backs. Out of the rubble, over and over, ordinary people build something extraordinary: a sudden, fierce, improvised community of exactly the kind we quietly long for our whole lives and so rarely find.
When the towers came down and hundreds of thousands of people were stranded at the tip of Manhattan with nowhere left to run, no one ordered a rescue. It simply happened.
Ferries and tugs and fishing boats and dinner cruisers, whoever had a water vessel turned toward the smoke on their own and carried nearly half a million people to safety in a single afternoon: the largest waterborne evacuation in human history, organized by no one and joined by everyone. In the stairwells, strangers carried strangers who could not walk.
For weeks afterward, a hard and hurried city became strangely, unaccountably, gentle with itself. That was the terrible day after. And it was, also, a glimpse of paradise in the very middle of hell.
Here is her deepest insight, and it is the one I want us to carry across the threshold tonight. The disaster did not create that goodness, it simply revealed that goodness. That capacity is in us the entire time, buried under our routines, our hurry, our careful curated identity. The disaster simply cleared away everything that had been hiding it.
Underneath, we are already the people we became on the day after. The only thing is: we forget, we get distracted, dispersed, convinced that we are alone – until something forces us to remember.
Our tradition has never once let us forget. Again and again the Torah bends us toward the widow, the orphan, the stranger — not as heroics saved up for an emergency, but as the ordinary shape of a decent life. כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲרֵבִים זֶה בָּזֶה — all of Israel, the Talmud teaches, are responsible, one for another. Solnit found in the ruins what the Torah has been asking of us all along: that we live, on the ordinary days, the way human beings instinctively live on the day after.
And so, tonight of all nights, on this doubled threshold. Our machzor says about this day Hayom Harat Olam — today the world is born. The world is born again tonight, on the anniversary of one of its deepest wounds. Birth and rupture in the very same breath. And that is Rosh Hashanah exactly.
We do not get to know what 5787 will bring. It will have its joys and its blessings and, let us be honest with one another, it will have its hells and its curses too, as every year does. The one thing we get to decide, tonight, before a single moment of it arrives, is who we intend to be when bad things come our way.
That is what teshuvah really is. Not waiting for the disaster to make us good. Choosing tonight, the very night the year is born, to be the ones who will turn toward each other. Who will steer the boat. Who will carry the stranger down the stairs. Who will give a hand. Who will be kind. Who will support. Who will bring a meal. Who will make that call. Who will show up for shiva. Who will show up after the shiva. Who will be the best version of themselves, without needing for the worst to happen to remind us who we already are.
May the year that begins tonight be gentle with us. And where it is not – may we be that paradise for one another, built with our own hands, with our own might, with our own heart in whatever comes. Shanah tovah umetukah – may we all have a good and sweet new year.