As we are well aware, this month marks the tenth anniversary of the horrifying events of September 11th, 2001. The anniversary presents us with a familiar but difficult challenge. How do we remember, honor and grieve for the losses of that terrible day even as we continue to move forward? What critical lessons do we salvage from the wreckage? How do we make certain that our acts of remembrance avoid the dangers of shallow or bellicose clichés on the one hand and despair or cynicism on the other? Of equal importance, how do we make sure that we don’t avoid this responsibility altogether and simply minimize or ignore the anniversary?
I describe this challenge as “familiar” because it reminds me of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). While there are enormous differences between the traumas that inspire these memorials, one senses similarities in many of the challenges we face when we struggle to find appropriate modes of remembrance.
Certainly, one lesson we’ve learned from the example of Yom Hashoah is that we may need more time—ten years may not be nearly enough. Almost 70 years later, it’s still not clear that we’ve been able to create a narrative for the Shoah that feels adequate to the profound physical, psychological, spiritual and moral trauma of that evil. Each year, paradoxically, the task becomes both easier and more difficult. The task becomes easier, because as the actual events recede in time and first-hand witnesses die, we may feel more freedom to attempt the task of creating forms that can help us remember. We also may feel compelled by a growing sense of urgency lest the memories be lost. But the task of remembering also becomes more difficult with the passage of time because as memory recedes, the temptation grows to minimize, avoid or distort the reality for our own purposes, now freed from the restraint of living memory or first-hand witnesses.
Faced with such a paradox, our response probably should be “bi-polar.” We ought to be patient and compassionate with ourselves as we continue to struggle with the challenge of remembering September 11th in a way that will be appropriate, honest, healing and perhaps, even sacred. This task is profoundly complex and painful and it may well take us decades to accomplish, including no small number of missed attempts. At the same time, knowing ourselves to be masters of self-imposed amnesia, avoidance and distortion, we ought to push ourselves to continue the work of remembering. If this task of memorializing September 11th is complicated and painful, it also is crucial to our physical, moral and spiritual survival. I dare to add that it also feels like a debt we owe to the victims of that terrible day.
Helpfully, for us as Jews, this work of “remembrance” already is a dominant theme of the season. As we know, Rosh Hashanah is also called, Yom Hazikaron—the Day of Remembrance. That holy day is intended to be the culmination of a full month of remembering and healing and beginning to transform ourselves. Rosh Hashanah teaches that we can only renew ourselves and the world if we do the difficult work of remembering, learning and changing. It’s a good lesson for the month of September or the month of Elul or for any time of our lives. It is also a crucial lesson for our troubled world.
-Rabbi Jonathan Kraus
