Unetaneh Tokef and 9-11: When life becomes real – 1

This Rosh Hashanah, references to the 25th anniversary of September 11 were frequent. As I listened to them, I could not help putting what happened on September 11, 2001, alongside one of the most haunting prayers of the High Holy Days, Unetaneh Tokef. When I heard the words read, they became more than just the liturgy. September 11 became proof that the words reflected reality.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written,
and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
how many will pass away and how many will be born;
who will live and who will die;
who will reach the fullness of their days and who will not;
who by water and who by fire;
who by the sword and who by wild beast;
who by hunger and who by thirst;
who by earthquake and who by plague;
who by strangling and who by stoning;
who will rest and who will wander;
who will know tranquility and who turmoil;
who will know peace and who suffering;
who will become poor and who rich;
who will be brought low and who raised up.

But teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah—repentance or return, prayer, and righteousness—temper the severity of the decree.

The words are ancient, but on September 11 they became almost painfully concrete.

At 8:46 on an ordinary Tuesday morning, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 that had departed Boston, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, another Boeing 767, United Flight 175, also out of Boston, struck the South Tower. Nothing in the ordinary expectations of the people who went to work that morning could have prepared them for death by a commercial airliner deliberately flown into their office building.

That is part of what makes September 11 so difficult to comprehend even 25 years later. People working in the same building, sometimes only a few floors apart, experienced radically different outcomes because of location, decisions, minutes and even seconds.

After the North Tower was struck, an announcement in the South Tower at 8:55 told occupants that their building was secure and that people evacuating could return. At 8:59, Port Authority Police ordered the evacuation of both towers. At 9:02, another announcement encouraged people to evacuate where conditions warranted. At 9:03, United Flight 175 struck the South Tower between floors 77 and 85.

Some people had already started walking down the stairs. Others stayed. Some who had begun leaving turned around.

Linda Raisch-Lopez worked on the 97th floor of the South Tower. After seeing the North Tower burning, she decided to leave. By the time the second airplane struck her building, she had descended to around the 61st floor. She eventually escaped. Remarkably, 18 people survived after having been above the South Tower’s impact zone.

It is difficult to read those stories without hearing the ancient question: Who shall live and who shall die? Who shall reach the fullness of their days and who shall not?

Then there is the story of Firefighter Daniel Thomas Suhr of FDNY Engine Company 216. Suhr had gone toward the World Trade Center to save other people’s lives. He had not boarded one of the doomed airplanes. He was not trapped on an upper floor. He had not yet entered a tower that would later collapse. Yet while responding outside the World Trade Center, he suffered a fatal injury when he was struck by a person falling from one of the towers.

Consider the extraordinary convergence of circumstances required for that moment to occur. A commercial airplane had to be hijacked and deliberately flown into a skyscraper. A person trapped hundreds of feet above Manhattan had to fall from that building. At precisely that place and moment, a firefighter who had arrived to rescue others had to be standing below.

Who could possibly have imagined such a death when Daniel Suhr left home that morning?

Who shall live and who shall die?

Who by fire? Who by falling? Who by circumstances that no human being could possibly have anticipated?

September 11 gives those questions a terrible immediacy. Thousands of people entered the World Trade Center that morning. Many escaped. Others did not. Two people might have worked in the same building, entered through the same doors, ridden the same elevators and expected to return home to their families that evening. Yet one survived and another did not.

I had to reflect, like Daniel, that God causes nations to rise and fall, and that God knows the number of hairs on our heads. In the end, I had to realize, like the prophets and saints before me, that God is sovereign.

What the prayer does force us to confront is something that modern life encourages us to forget: we do not control nearly as much of life as we imagine we do.

We make appointments months in advance. We buy airline tickets assuming we will arrive at our destinations. We schedule meetings for next Tuesday. We tell someone we will call them tomorrow. We make retirement plans, five-year plans and plans for what we will do when we finally have enough time. Most mornings we leave home assuming that we will return that evening.

Usually we do.

On September 11, thousands of people discovered that an ordinary Tuesday was not going to be ordinary at all.

That is why the conclusion of Unetaneh Tokef matters as much as its terrifying questions. The prayer does not leave us standing helplessly before mortality. After reminding us of everything we cannot control, it directs our attention toward what remains within our reach: teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah—return, prayer and righteous action.

We cannot know how long we will live. We cannot know which morning will change our lives, which goodbye will turn out to have been our last, or which ordinary decision will prove consequential. Twenty-five years after September 11, we still know the names and stories of people who began that morning expecting nothing more unusual than another day at work.

Perhaps that is one reason Unetaneh Tokef remains so unsettling and so necessary.

The prayer asks us to face the uncertainty of life not so that we will become frightened of death, but so that we will become more serious about life.

If I cannot know how many days I have been given, I can still decide what I will do with the day before me. I can repair what needs repairing. I can say what needs saying. I can forgive. I can ask forgiveness. I can pray. I can give. I can act justly. I can love the people entrusted to me while I still have the opportunity to do so.

September 11 reminds us that we do not know who shall live and who shall die.

Unetaneh Tokef asks the more important question:

Knowing that, how shall we live?