Rabbi Frankel’s Sermon for Yom Kippur 5786/2025
October 6, 2025
Rabbi Sirkman’s Sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5787/2026
September 12, 2026
Remember and Rebuild: Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787 on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11
Rabbi Leora Frankel, Larchmont Temple
I’m guessing most of us in this room know exactly where we were when we first heard the news that Tuesday morning 25 years ago. I was starting Sophomore year at Barnard College, in an 8:20 science lab, as the murmuring began that something had happened downtown. I remember racing back to my dorm after class, scores of Barnard sisters crowded around the common room television, watching those surreal clips of the planes hitting the towers on a loop. I tried to call home, to tell my parents I was safe and seek their reassurance, but cell service was all down. Eventually, I made my way up to an adjacent roof to try to see with my own eyes what my mind could simply not compute, the thickening smoke wafting all the way up to 116th street.
Nearly 3,000 souls lost, a number that remains unfathomable to many of the million young Americans who have been born since that tragic morning, yet whose day-to-day lives have been quietly shaped by it. As one anniversary article strikingly puts it, “Today, history teachers in their first year at a middle school might have learned about Sept. 11 as history themselves. The youngest candidates for Congress never knew airports without security lines.” For so many of us, it was just a degree or two of separation from a world that was shattered that morning for a neighbor, a colleague, a friend, a sibling.
I also vividly recall those early days in the city right after 9/11, when even the gruffest New Yorkers greeted one another with tenderness. Coming from a family of Mets fans, I distinctly remember the first Yankees home game when the stadium erupted with applause as four emergency workers threw out ceremonial pitches in memory of all those first responders who died, and in honor of those still searching the rubble. Most of all, I remember the countless quiet acts of kindness.
Delivering a meal to a family in mourning or to the local fire department. Communities rallying around grieving widows, like Jennifer Brennan Waterhouse who had moved to Scarsdale with her husband Tom only two weeks before he was killed in the towers. They’d arrived with a 17-month-old and Jennifer was pregnant carrying their second child, who bears his name. Now living up in Chappaqua, Waterhouse describes not just the enduring pain of those early days but also the gratitude–for new neighbors whom she’d scarcely met organizing meal trains, childcare, and fundraisers, never leaving her or her young daughter’s side.
Though she could never recover what was lost, because people kept showing up for her, again and again, Jennifer was able to begin rebuilding. Through those Scarsdale community connections, Waterhouse eventually found love again, her now blended family honoring Tom’s memory through a foundation that subsidizes students to attend his alma mater, Boston College. It’s one of so many funds and non-profits founded in the wake of 9/11, like Tuesday’s Promise, which were born of devastation, and for 25 years since have helped families build better futures.
This dual imperative is at the very heart of what it means to be a Jew. We are a people who, for thousands of years, have responded to pain, destruction, or loss with a two-part spiritual strategy that has sustained us through it all: First we remember and then, together, we rebuild.
What’s the most iconic part of a Jewish wedding? The last thing we do under the chuppah before we serenade a new couple with Siman Tov U’Mazal Tov? In this moment of unparalleled celebration, we meshugenah Jews smash a glass to remember the destruction of the ancient Temple. We do so not alone to recall that devastating historic event or even just to underscore the fragility of our own lives, but also as a reminder of our responsibility to repair brokenness all around us, to help heal with the love and joy we feel on that day. Our tradition sees the creation of a new Jewish family and home, in Hebrew “bayit,”, as the ultimate response to churban habayit– the destruction of God’s house.
In the final sugya of Talmud’s tractate Makkot, we read about a group of rabbis ascending to Jerusalem some years after the destruction of the Second Temple. Approaching the sacred site where their ancestors had for ages made pilgrimage, now a pile of strewn stones with a fox skulking among them, the Sages rent their garments and begin to loudly weep. All except Rabbi Akiva, who starts to laugh. “How can you be you laughing?” the other men challenge him. “How can you be crying?” Akiva retorts. And then he explains: the prophets foretold Jerusalem’s destruction, but also its rebuilding. Seeing the first prophecy fulfilled so completely, he could now also believe in the second one. Where there is destruction there can be rebuilding.
The Talmudic tractate concludes with his colleagues’ thanking him: “Akiva, you have comforted us. Akiva, you have comforted us.” Akiva’s counterintuitive response to our historic tragedy echoes still today. It is not a naive optimism he expresses. After all, he is standing right there, looking directly at the ruins. His hope is neither denial nor a delusion that nothing bad happened, but rather a conviction, a commitment that destruction does not get the last word. Judaism insists: If there can be wreckage, there can also be repair.
Yet one can never know in the immediate wake of tragedy–in that initial moment of personal or communal breakage–what new life might one day emerge. After the Romans torched the second Temple in 70 CE, the early rabbis, Akiva’s teachers, had to somehow radically reimagine how they’d keep the covenant without an altar upon which to make sacrifices. Spoiler alert for my Yom Kippur morning sermon: thanks to one man named Yochanan Ben Zakkai who dared to dream about the future even in the depths of their despair, we are all here today. Clearly no third temple has been constructed, but the flame of Jewish life has been brightly burning for 2,000 years since Tisha B’Av or the 9th of Av, that fateful day on which changed everything for our ancestors.
The words of comfort from Jeremiah that conclude the Scroll of Lamentations we traditionally read on Tisha B’Av, also happen to be the very ones we plead over and over again on these High Holy Days: Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah, chadesh yameinu k’kedem – Return us to You, Adonai, and we shall return. Renew our days as of old.” Help us God, we beseech, not to forget what we have lost or to ignore what is shattered. But help us God, over these Days of Awe, to rebuild and renew, that which is broken in our world and in ourselves.
The shofar summons us to “Wake up!” and start doing Teshuvah, often translated as “repentance,” but more aptly described as that work of personal, spiritual rebuilding we all so sorely need to enter the New Year with a whole heart. Rabbi Harold Schulweis describes, “More than a static being, the human being is a constant becoming. Teshuvah celebrates the competence and capacity and courage to overcome, to change, to grow, to begin and begin again.” And Schulweis reminds us that the rebuilding we do deep inside ourselves can also ripple out and help heal others too. He explains, “Teshuvah begins with the self but it must not end there; it would only be a half prayer. What begins as the solitary search within the self evolves into sanctification of our world.”
This past summer, America lost two tremendous women who surprisingly embodied Schulweis’s message: Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem. A seemingly odd couple in death, and admittedly on the surface too in life, the more I read about their origin stories, the more moved I am by how particularly painful aspects of their respective early years became fuel to positively transform harsh realities for so many others.
.The portrait of a cosmopolitan New Yorker, I’d been unaware that Gloria Steinem spent her early years in a mobile trailer in Toledo, Ohio, which also doubled as her father’s antiques shop as a traveling salesman. With an older sister who had left the house before her parents divorced, and her dad abandoning them out West when she was only 10, the burden of her mother’s crippling mental illness largely fell on Gloria. Steinem’s work on behalf of women’s rights was very much rooted in her own pain– the experience of trying to navigate her mother’s psychological treatment, and then needing to have a still-illegal abortion in England, at age 22, on her way to an academic fellowship in India following her graduation from Smith. Steinem spent the rest of her life tirelessly fighting to ensure that other women had fuller agency over their bodies and their futures.
Dolly Parton, I’d already known, was raised in rural Tennessee, her early wardrobe comprised of rags her mom stitched together as she describes in her hit “Coat of Many Colors.” Parton’s father, a struggling sharecropper who couldn’t read or write, is famously said to have paid the doctor who delivered Dolly in 1946 with a bag of cornmeal. So what did Dolly do with her fame and fortune as she began to make it big? In ‘88 she started the Dollywood Foundation in her hometown, financially incentivizing local teens to finish high school, something not all of her 11 siblings managed. Through the foundation, Dolly singlehandedly reduced the county’s dropout rate from 35 to 6 percent. Then in ‘95, in memory of her father, Parton established the Imagination Library, sending monthly free books to kids across the world who might otherwise miss out on the joy of being read to. To date, the organization has gifted over 300 million books to children, and was the inspiration for Harold Grinspoon’s Jewish version we all now know and love, PJ Library.
Neither of these women had children. Both of them changed the world for an entire next generation, uniquely reshaping the trajectories of their own life stories, and in so doing, our world. Steinem’s social justice work and Parton’s philanthropy also prove one of the most poignant biblical building tips from the Book of Psalms: “Even masu habonim hayta l’Rosh Pina- The stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone.” Not only that we capable of rebuilding after destruction, but that sometimes, it just so happens, that the very stone deemed least appealing by others, or the one that was a real pain point, becomes the most structurally essential or visible part of a new edifice we construct.
Just a few years ago, Andrew and I finally made it down to see the stunning architectural spaces that now inhabit the neighborhood where 25 years ago the Twin Towers stood. The memorial and museum at Ground Zero, the new skyscrapers, some still in development, including of course the rebuilt One World Trade Center. Once again the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, its roof matches the exact height of the original North Tower but to the very tip of its spire, the Freedom Tower now stretches up a patriotic 1,776 feet.
For me though, the most breathtaking part of the new landscape was the Oculus, the bustling shopping center and transportation hub that was designed by architect Santiago Calatrava to symbolize a white dove being released from a child’s hands. Through its position and alignment with the sun’s solar angles, the orientation of the Oculus serves as a temporal tribute to the towers, much like our facing eastward toward where the ancient Temples stood when we pray. Perhaps you paused this morning between making matzah balls and chopping apples and saw the pictures streaming from inside the Oculus this morning. A central skylight was built and precisely calibrated so that two natural columns of sunlight pour through the large floor each year on September 11 from 8:46am when the first plane struck, until 10:28 when the second tower collapsed. This “Wedge of Light” installation is our spiritual answer to the thick, ashy air on that dark day, to the hate that sought to harm us. We remember and we rebuild.
On Rosh Hashanah, the shofar calls to awaken each of us with a question: how will YOU help rebuild this year? Maybe like many of our congregants did this summer, you’ll find a way back to our historic homeland, where some of those very same stones Rabbi Akiva smiled upon still welcome us. As we’re all so painfully aware, Israel’s continued rebuilding in an urgent and ongoing need, not just for the Gaza Envelope’s kibbutzim like our beloved Be’eri, but for the whole of society. Among my own most ardent prayers for this New Year is that our brothers and sisters there will be able to finally rebuild their government so that we can at last pave a pathway to peace for Israelis and Palestinians to both live in dignity.
Maybe you’ll consider joining one of our holy construction crews focused closer to home. Working with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism’s non-partisan “Protect the Vote Campaign,” our Social Justice leaders like Linda, Amy, Lynn are ensuring that the scaffolding of America’s democracy is strong as we head into an election season; details are on the RAC postcards they will hand you on your way out tonight and I hope you’ll join them in these efforts.
We don’t just build at dramatic moments or when an edifice is in danger of collapsing though. Everything we do here at Temple is an act of building covenantal community. I’m especially reminded of this every other Thursday as the Jacobson chapel fills up for our L’chaim lunch and learn series. This post-pandemic program was our response to the intense isolation of so many seniors in early COVID. Going strong in its fourth year now, thanks to Simon, Juli, Carolyn, Claudine and so many others of you here, 22 times a year L’chaim offers intellectual and spiritual nourishment to all of us who seek connection. (You remember that old line commercial about “Wednesdays are Sundays at Carvel”? Well I’m here to tell you Thursdays are fundays at LT!) And don’t forget–our Small Groups registration rolls out on Monday morning, with dozens of opportunities to help build smaller circles of community across our growing congregation.
Of course, all this talk of rebuilding is not just a liturgical metaphor this fall. As you’ve surely seen by now and our staff team’s been hearing all summer, our own exciting construction project has officially begun thanks to the overwhelming generosity of so many of you. Temporary walls moving around the Willow hallway classrooms, deep bedrock drilled down in the back to start laying foundation for a whole beautiful new wing of Temple that will be filled with Jewish life we have only just begun to dream of together.
And I’m not sure if architects have discussed this, but I hope tucked away in some corner of that new stunning structure will be one stone symbolically left unpolished or plastered. Like smashing the glass at a wedding, this Jewish construction custom of leaving one unhewn stone both hearkens yet again back to the destroyed Beit HaMikdash. It’s there to ensure that every time we enter our new, more local spiritual home, we keep remembering and keep rebuilding.
We cannot change our past–the scars we might carry from the past or more recent loss, the mistakes we’ve made or the pain we’ve both experienced and regrettably caused those we love. But this season comes to remind us that our worst chapters, our greatest flaws or the heaviest burdens we carry, need not define us in the New Year ahead. These next 10 Days invite us to remember not only past suffering or ways we’ve missed the mark, but even more importantly, the highest values we hold and the unique gifts we possess that can help us re-create ourselves and our world, on this, its birthday.
L’Shanah Tovah U’metukah. May it be a New Year of sweetness, good health, and much meaningful building.
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/nyregion/born-after-9-11-young-adults.html
2 https://patch.com/new-york/scarsdale/we-never-get-over-it-but-we-get-on-with-it-former-sca446deb54a3
4 https://www.tuesdayspromise.org/impact
5 Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 24b
6 Lamentations 5:21
8 https://imaginationlibrary.com/letter-from-dolly/
9 https://pjlibrary.org/about/become-a-pj-partner/proof/articles/2023/december/parting-thoughts
10 Psalm 118:22
11 https://www.som.com/projects/one-world-trade-center/
12 https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/oculus-the-new-world-trade-center-transportation-hub/
13 https://www.explorewtc.com/en/local/learn-about-wtc/oculus-transportation-hub/Wedge-of-Light.html
