Rabbi Perry's Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5787

The Final Tekiah Is Not the First

Tekiah — one clear, sustained sound.

Shevarim — three broken cries.

Teruah — nine short, almost wailing sounds.

And then, once again:

Tekiah — one clear, sustained sound.

For generations, Jewish teachers have heard in the sounds of the shofar the journey of the human soul: from wholeness — tekiah — to brokenness — shevarim, teruah — and then back toward wholeness — tekiah. On this Erev Rosh Hashanah, I find myself wondering about that final tekiah. After the broken cries of shevarim and the sobbing of teruah, can that final tekiah ever really be the same as the first?

The shofar blasts are a window into the human experience. All of us — every single one of us — have experienced brokenness. And tonight, on this day of new beginnings, the sounds of the shofar call to mind a question: Can we ever truly return to the people we were before we were broken?

Tonight that question feels especially poignant, because tonight is not only Erev Rosh Hashanah, tonight is September 11. Twenty-five years ago today, on a beautiful September morning, we experienced a rupture unlike any other in our lives. Our world changed.

Pearl Harbor. The assassination of President Kennedy. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. September 11. There are certain dates that divide history into before and after.

A quarter century has passed since September 11, 2001. Twenty-five years is a long time. Children born after 9/11 are now adults. And yet, for so many of us, the memories remain visceral and immediate: where we were when we first heard; the images we watched over and over; the confusion; the fear; the dawning realization of the enormity of what had happened.

And I am conscious tonight that we don't all carry this anniversary in the same way. For some of us, September 11 is primarily history — perhaps because you were too young to remember it or not yet born.

And I want to say something especially to the younger people who are here tonight. September 11 may not be part of your memory at all. It may be history that you learned about in school or heard about from your parents. But that does not mean you don't know something about a world changing. You remember when COVID suddenly closed your school and separated you from your friends. You have grown up practicing lockdown drills. You have watched the war in Israel and Gaza unfold on your phones, and many of you have encountered an antisemitism that perhaps you once thought belonged mostly to history books. And now technology is changing so quickly that sometimes it is difficult even to know what is real and what isn't.

Your before and after may not be September 11. But you, too, have watched the world change around you. And you, too, are being asked to figure out who you want to become within it. You are not simply inheriting this changed world. You will help decide what it becomes. For others, the memories of September 11 remain extraordinarily vivid. And for still others, September 11 is something much more personal. You knew someone who died. You lived in New York City, near the Pentagon, or near that field in Pennsylvania. Someone you loved was a first responder. Someone you knew volunteered to serve in the military in the years that followed.

For all of us, September 11, 2001 is a day in history. But for some, it is a gash in the heart that never completely fades. We don't all carry September 11 in the same way. We don't even carry the same amount of it. And yet, all of us know something about before and after. Because September 11 isn't the only date that can divide a life.

Most of us eventually acquire dates of our own. Perhaps, as I say that, a date has already come into your mind. The day someone you loved died. The day you received a diagnosis. The day a marriage ended. The day you lost a pregnancy you had longed for. The day a career ended, or a relationship broke apart, or something you had counted on suddenly disappeared. Or perhaps it wasn't a single day at all. Perhaps there was simply a period in your life when you gradually came to understand: Something has changed, and I am not going back to the life I had before.

It is part of the human experience to acquire these dividing lines. And I suspect that for at least some of you, as you sit here tonight, one of those moments has already come to mind.

When I was twenty years old, my brother Robert took his own life. Forty-five years have passed since the day my own life was divided into before and after. Forty-five years. Sometimes that feels like another lifetime. And sometimes that twenty-year-old woman feels very present within me. I would never say that Robert died for a reason. And I would never say that I am grateful for what his death taught me. I wish it had never happened. Forty-five years have not erased that loss, but life continued. There has been love, marriage, motherhood, becoming a rabbi, friendships, disappointments, laughter, celebrations, tremendous joy, deep gratitude. And my brother's memory came along with me, becoming part of the larger story of my life. But I did not return to the person I had been before he died. How could I?

The final tekiah is not the first tekiah. And neither are we.

Over the summer, I heard a cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar interviewed on the radio show Here & Now. She was speaking about her book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Shankar has spent years thinking about what happens to us when an experience disrupts the path we expected our lives to take. Her question is not simply: How do we get through it? Her question is: Who do we become on the other side of it?

Shankar and her husband had tried for years to become parents and eventually turned to a surrogate. The surrogate became pregnant twice. Both pregnancies ended in miscarriage, including the loss of identical twin girls. Shankar spoke of the devastation that she, her husband, and their surrogate experienced. But she described another kind of loss as well. Shankar had always believed that if you worked hard enough, if you were determined enough, you could find a way forward. But having her own biological children was not a problem she could solve by working harder. She was not in control of what happened next. And Shankar came to understand that it wasn't only the future she had imagined that had changed. She had changed as well.

One of Shankar's insights that especially stayed with me was this: when we imagine facing a crisis or profound loss, we tend to imagine the person we are today having to endure it. But as Shankar says: “We forget that we won’t be the same person on the other side of change.” We may discover abilities we didn't know we possessed. We may discover new vulnerabilities. Our values and priorities may shift.

The final tekiah is not the first tekiah.

But I want to be very clear about what I am not saying. I do not believe that suffering is good for us. And I definitely do not believe the cliché that “everything happens for a reason.” Change — especially traumatic change — does not necessarily make us wiser or stronger. Nor do we need to feel grateful for the losses and traumas that enter our lives. Shankar's story reminded me of an important distinction: We don't have to find meaning in crisis or tragedy in order to create meaning afterwards.

We are often taught that resilience means “bouncing back.” But sometimes there simply is no “back.” Sometimes there is only living forward. And on this twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, I find myself reflecting on what it has meant for us to live forward in the aftermath of that tragedy. There have been years of war and fear of terrorism, suspicion, Islamophobia, nativism and polarization. But there have also been extraordinary examples of courage, sacrifice, service, generosity, and compassion for strangers. I do not believe that on this twenty-fifth anniversary we should be asking how we “bounced back.” Because we didn't. We were changed.

And tonight, something unusual happens. Two moments overlap. September 11 asks us to look backward — to remember a day of terrible loss and all that followed. Rosh Hashanah asks us to look forward — toward a year we have not yet lived, toward possibility, hope, and renewal. Tonight we are asked to do both at once. And perhaps the night sky of Rosh Hashanah offers us an image of how that is possible.

Rosh Hashanah arrives with the new moon — the beginning of the month of Tishrei and the beginning of a new year, 5787. Soon, the first slender crescent will appear, just a sliver of light against a darkened sky. This year, that image feels different to me. Tonight, the darkness carries the memory of what happened twenty-five years ago. And yet Rosh Hashanah arrives nonetheless, asking us to look for that first glimmer of a year not yet lived. Darkness and light can occupy the same sky. Memory and hope can occupy the same heart. Grief and joy can co- exist within the same life. We do not honor what we have lost by refusing to see the light. And we do not betray our grief when we allow ourselves to experience joy. Perhaps that, too, is what it means to live forward.

Judaism has long understood this capacity of the human heart to hold seemingly contradictory emotions. At a wedding, we break a glass. At the moment of great joy, we remember the fractures that remain in our world. At the seder, we diminish the wine in our cups. Even as we celebrate our freedom, we remember the loss of Egyptian life. We make room for grief within celebration. But Jewish wisdom does not stop there. The Talmud, in tractate Ketubot 17a teaches that if a funeral procession and a wedding procession encounter one another, the wedding procession goes first.

Perhaps the other half of Jewish wisdom is to ask: Can we also make room for joy within grief? It isn't as though we finish grieving and then begin being joyful. Grief and joy do not take turns. The human heart has the capacity to hold both, sometimes at the very same moment.

The Kotzker Rebbe taught: “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” I have sometimes been puzzled by that teaching. At other times, I have resisted it altogether. It just didn't sit right with me. But thinking about Shankar's insights, and thinking about the sounds of the shofar, I hear it differently tonight. Perhaps a broken heart can become whole again. Not unbroken. Whole. Different from the heart it was before. Carrying the memory of what broke it — and still whole.

Tekiah — one clear, sustained sound.

Shevarim — three broken cries.

Teruah — nine short, almost wailing sounds.

And then again:

Tekiah — one clear, sustained sound.

The final tekiah does not erase the broken sounds that came before it. Somehow, it carries their memory within it. Maybe that is what wholeness actually means. We do not remain the people we were before. We have not forgotten. We do not pretend that we weren't broken. But we have the capacity to carry it all — the brokenness and the healing, the grief and the joy, the darkness and the light. Perhaps that is what it means to become whole.

The final tekiah is not the first.

Our Rosh Hashanah liturgy says: Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world is born. Notice what the prayer does not say. It does not say: Today the world is restored. We cannot go back to the world of September 10, 2001. I will never get back the world of my nineteen-year-old self, before my brother died. And none of us gets to return to the world before our own shevarim — whatever that moment of brokenness may have been.

Instead, Judaism offers us something different. A world can change forever. A life can change forever. And still, a world can begin again. Not the old world restored. Something new being born. Hayom Harat Olam. And isn't that what we are doing tonight? We have come here carrying everything that has happened to us — our losses and our celebrations, our disappointments and our gratitude. And still, we sing.

We gather with people we love. We wish one another Shanah Tovah. We dip apples into honey. Not because we believe that the year ahead will contain no shevarim. We know better than that. We dip the apple because, after everything we have lived through, we have not lost our desire for sweetness. And perhaps even more importantly, we still have the capacity to create sweetness for one another.

This is what I know about the year ahead. There will be brokenness. There will also be joy. There will be darkness. And there will be light. The brokenness does not have to be the final sound. Nor does it have to become our entire story.

Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiah.

The final tekiah is not the first tekiah. And neither are we.

Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world is born.

May 5787 be a year in which, whatever we carry from what has come before, we continue to find the courage to live forward — toward light, toward sweetness, toward one another.

Shanah Tovah.