September 11 has become a fixed point in modern memory. For Americans, it is the day of horror when the Twin Towers collapsed, when it marked the beginning of an age of uncertainty, terror, and shifting power.

In 2025 the date carries an added resonance. September 11 coincides with 18 Elul, a day of enormous significance in Jewish tradition. It is the birthday of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, and of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first rebbe of Chabad. It is also the memorial day of the Maharal of Prague, whose mystical teaching nourished later Hasidic thought. Hasidic lore calls 18 Elul “the day that gave life to Chassidus.”

The juxtaposition is striking: a day of terror and collapse in the modern world alongside a day of mystical birth and renewal in Jewish memory. To hold them together is not to force connections, but to ask how destruction and creation, martyrdom and renewal, coexist in human history.

A Witness in Jerusalem

On September 11, 2001, I was traveling by bus from Ramot to Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. News came over the radio: a plane had struck one of the towers in New York. The bus fell silent. Many passengers were American-born Israelis, listening in disbelief. By the time I reached the Old City, televisions showed the impossible: towers aflame, then collapsing in clouds of smoke and dust.

At the coffee shop by Jaffa Gate, Arabs stood staring at the screen, transfixed. The images repeated endlessly: steel and concrete decapitated, a skyline suddenly headless. It felt like a beheading of the towers, a symbolic severing of America’s pride.

The Beheading of John the Baptist

The coincidence with John the Baptist’s martyrdom is equally unsettling. According to the Julian calendar, the commemoration of his beheading falls on what in the Gregorian reckoning is often September 11. John’s death was the result of corruption and betrayal, sealed by Salome’s dance and Herod’s weakness. A prophet’s head delivered on a platter: the triumph of spectacle over conscience.

Beheading is more than murder. It is a cutting off of conscience, the destruction of the seat of mind and spirit. In Semitic languages, the word cherev/חרב (sword) shares a root with churban/חורבן (ruin, devastation). To wield the sword is to invite eradication.

Beheading Then and Now

Since 2001, the world has witnessed a grim return of this ancient cruelty. During the short but savage reign of ISIS, countless Christians and others were beheaded – on beaches, in deserts, in public squares – their deaths filmed and broadcast. These were new martyrs, like those of Rome and Antioch in the early centuries, slain because they refused to deny their faith.

But the terror did not end with ISIS’ fall. Across the Sahara, in Iraq and Syria, in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and even parts of Indonesia, the sword continues its grim work. For the Assyrian Christians, the very word sayfo/ܤܝܦܐ – “the sword” – recalls the genocide of 1915, when hundreds of thousands were slain in Ottoman lands. That sword has not rested. Its shadow extends across our century, cutting down lives and communities, continuing the process of eradication.

The spectacle is as important as the act. Just as Salome danced before Herod before the prophet’s head was demanded, so modern terrorists stage their murders before cameras. The screen has become the new platter. Violence is choreographed for global audiences, making terror not only an act of cruelty but also a theater of humiliation.

Hasidic Beginnings on Elul 18

Yet the same date, in 2025, is also 18 Elul, when Hasidism came into the world. The Baal Shem Tov, in 18th-century Podolia, proclaimed a vision of joy, simplicity, and divine presence in every act. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad, gave this vision intellectual structure in his Tanya, uniting mystical fervor with rational clarity. The Maharal of Prague, who died on this date in 1609, had already laid philosophical foundations that shaped Jewish mystical thought.

Hasidism was born in the Slavic lands, often in proximity to Eastern Christianity. Churches and synagogues stood not far apart. Mystical chants and liturgies, icons and niggunim, saints and rebbes, all coexisted in a world of rivalry and occasional resonance. Dialogue was rare, but contact was real, somehow spiritual influence strangely common in many ways. Both traditions wrestled with sanctifying life, resisting oppression, and finding God in suffering.

Today, Hasidism is global. Chabad houses dot the continents. Breslov songs echo in Tel Aviv, Brooklyn, Johannesburg. The mystical movement that began in the forests of Ukraine has become a worldwide network, splitting into branches, still seeking to impact souls. On this September 11/18 Elul, we are reminded that mystical renewal and catastrophic violence can occupy the same calendar, the same human horizon.

East and West

The attackers of 9/11 came from the East. They were not Christian, nor did they pretend to be. But the act sharpened the old divide between East and West. In Jerusalem, we know by instinct that the West often advances with a kind of arrogance — covering fragility with strength’s mask. Western Christianity has sometimes placed a “head-cover” of pride over itself, rushing toward goals without the inner depth to sustain them.

By contrast, the East accepts that life and death are harsh, sudden, unpredictable. Violence is not an anomaly, but a shadow that can reappear at any time. The Orthodox liturgy constantly reminds us that each day could be the last.

Hasidism, though rooted in the East, introduced joy into suffering, song into exile, hope into despair. Where Western arrogance risks blindness, Hasidism risked excess — but it insisted on the sanctity of the ordinary. That too belongs to the paradox of 18 Elul standing beside 9/11: destruction and renewal on the same human map.

The True Head

Jesus of Nazareth is normally confessed as the Head of the risen Body, the Church. His crucifixion took place on the Golgotha, the “place of the skull.” Yet in Aramaic, Golgotha does not mean something stiff and lifeless; it carries the sense of movement, of rolling, like galgalim/גלגלים, the wheels of life. The skull is not only a reminder of death but of dynamism, the living stone that rolls and continuously transfigures.

Here lies the paradox: the creed proclaims Jesus as Messiah and Head, but action often lags behind. Too often, believers confess the Head yet live as if cut off, faith severed from deeds. This distance between creed and action is itself a kind of beheading – a fracture of the Body from its Head. It is the wound that history repeats and that our age, too, must repair.

Jesus at Golgotha shows that history is not stiff or predictable. It remains unexpectedly dynamic, rolling beyond the boundaries we try to impose. Redemption arrives like the stone rolled away from the tomb, overturning expectation. Christ as Head shows that even when conscience seems severed, even when the sword falls, life is not extinguished. The Head of the Body remains alive, carrying history forward in ways we – as the living in our generation – cannot script.

America After 9/11

Has America ever truly recovered? The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drained lives, resources, and moral authority. Institutions frayed. Trust weakened. Two decades later, America remains polarized and uncertain of its role, weakened in its federal structures.

Meanwhile, the Middle East has shifted. Arab powers have grown in influence, Israel has pursued new alliances, and the region’s map is constantly redrawn. Yet the gains often come at the cost of exclusion, frenzy for wealth, capture of land and identity.

At the same time, global leadership tilts eastward. China, India, and others claim growing influence once reserved for the Atlantic world. Democracy, once the confident export of the West, appears fragile — more dream than reality.

Memory as Responsibility

How then do we remember September 11 and 18 Elul together? Not as a puzzle to decode, but as a summons. The beheaded towers, the prophet slain, the martyrs of Rome and Antioch, the martyrs of ISIS, the sword of Sayfo, all testify that conscience is always at risk of being severed.

In Orthodox burial, the body faces East, awaiting the rising sun of resurrection. Even in death, the head turns toward hope. On 18 Elul–September 11, we are asked: will we live headless, driven by greed, violence, and arrogance? Or will we repair the fracture – uniting creed and action, body and head – so that life may flow again?

What will be

September 11 is not only an American date, nor is 18 Elul only a Hasidic one. Both belong now to the global story. The towers that fell, the martyrs who perished throughout the world, the movement that rose, the crucified and risen Head – they share the same calendar, a paradox that invites reflection.

In a world of towers collapsing, martyrs dying, and mystical movements expanding, the task is the same: to keep the head — mind, conscience, spirit — alive. To repair the fracture between creed and action. To guard respect, to nurture love, and to remember that the true Head is not for display on a platter, nor for the sword to sever, but for turning toward the rising sun of redemption.