Why Is This Rosh Hashanah Different From All Others?

I know. Wrong holiday.

But as I sit here on the first full day of being 41, trying to make sense of the last 48 hours, it’s the question that keeps coming back to me.

Why is this Rosh Hashanah different from all others?

This year, Rosh Hashanah began as my birthday ended. September 11, 2026. The 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

I turned 16 on September 11, 2001.

For 25 years, I have tried to figure out how to remember one of the worst days in our history while also allowing myself to celebrate the fact that I’m here. How to hold pain and celebrate on the same day.

Usually, the pain wins.

I have never needed anyone to remind me what September 11 means. I know. I always know. But this year felt different.

With Rosh Hashanah beginning that evening, my office was closed. I realized I was going to spend the 25th anniversary alone, and that felt wrong. I needed to be somewhere the day was being remembered.

A few days earlier, I had seen on Facebook that my local City Hall was holding a September 11 ceremony and that anyone was welcome. So I went alone, knowing I’d be surrounded by people.

There were about 20 of us. I found a seat and sat quietly crying.

At some point, the mayor walked over carrying a box of tissues.

“You look like you could use some comfort.”

I thanked her and took a tissue. She asked if I had a personal connection to the day.

“Sort of,” I said quietly. “I’m a New Yorker, and today is my birthday.”

A little while later, a man named Tony began telling his story. He had been in the second tower on September 11. As I listened, I figured he had to be from the tri-state area.

Before the mayor left, I wished her a Shana Tova. She quietly wished me a happy birthday.

After Tony finished speaking, I walked over and introduced myself.

He was from Queens.

One on one, he shared so much more with me than he had shared with the room. He told me about friends who survived and those who didn’t. He told me about walking through Manhattan, trying to figure out how to get off the island. I don’t know why he shared so much with me, but there was a sense of understanding between us.

I shared more, too. I told him what it was like being in high school that day, when most of us didn’t have cell phones and even the ones we had barely worked because service was down. Friends had parents who worked in the city and were unaccounted for. There were mountains of unknowns.

We talked about how weird it felt, even 25 years later, to mark this milestone in Georgia instead of New York. We were sad there weren’t more people there, but grateful for those who came.

When we finished talking, two New Yorkers who had never met before gave each other a much-needed hug.

Slowly, everyone else filed out until it was just the two of us and a young woman who was working there. She approached Tony and told him it was almost time to record his story for the local preservation society.

Then she turned to me and asked if I wanted to record mine.

I don’t like talking about my September 11 experience. It’s mine.

It’s also not some harrowing story of survival. I wasn’t in the towers. I didn’t lose a parent. I wasn’t a first responder. I was a 16-year-old girl trying to rationalize pain and celebration at the same time.

I still don’t really know why I said yes. Maybe it was because no one there knew me or my story, so there wasn’t going to be the usual look of pity when someone realizes when I was born. Maybe it was because there was no camera, only my voice. Or maybe it was simply because it had been 25 years.

Whatever the reason, I said yes.

I waited for my turn and sat down with a young woman who told me she was 24. She wasn’t alive on September 11, 2001. She told me she feels a responsibility to capture the stories of an event she didn’t experience.

So I told her mine.

I told her about the birthday balloons. The DMV. The drive home. Going back to school. How little information we had. What it was like to be 16 and realize the adults around us didn’t know what was happening either.

But I also told her about what came after.

September 12.

The flags. They were everywhere. The blood drives. Clothing drives. Memorials. Fundraisers. Everyone was trying to figure out what role they could play in helping.

It didn’t matter how old or young you were. It didn’t matter your faith or ethnicity. In those days, weeks and months after September 11, a New Yorker was a New Yorker was a New Yorker.

There was something powerful about September 12. We were devastated, but we showed up for each other.

I told her how hard it is to look at the world 25 years later and see how much hate still drives us.

I told her about October 7 and how hard it is to wrap my head around being one degree removed from both the largest terrorist attack on American soil and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Different days. Different places. But the same hate.

When the recording stopped, we kept talking. I told her about my hopes for her generation and how much it scares me to see people become so passionate about things without always having all the information, or sometimes without caring about the facts at all.

When I finally walked out, I felt something I hadn’t expected.

Relief.

I had told my story. Not because someone asked what it was like to have thousands of people die on my birthday. Not because someone felt sorry for me.

Because I chose to.

For years, I’ve said that what I want on September 11 is to remember without being reminded. Maybe this year, for the first time, I understood the difference.

Eventually, the sun went down. My 41st birthday ended, and 5787 began. But September 11 was also a Friday this year. So as my birthday ended and Rosh Hashanah began, so did Shabbat.

I found myself thinking about a line from Lecha Dodi: shamor v’zachor.

Keep and remember.

I’ve spent 25 years remembering September 11. I don’t really have a choice. But what do we keep?

Twenty-five years later, I wonder how much of September 12 we’ve actually kept. And what I want to keep besides the pain.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to look back while also looking forward. To remember and reflect on where we’ve been while thinking about who we want to be in the year ahead.

Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t have a Jewish community to hold me up. Judaism is something I found, questioned, learned and chose as an adult. The 16-year-old girl with Sweet Sixteen balloons could never have imagined how central Judaism and Jewish community would become to the life she built.

And on the first day of 5787, I wasn’t headed to synagogue.

I was headed to a Southern Baptist memorial service.

Six days earlier, I had woken up to sirens and flashing lights outside my house. My neighbor Judy had died.

She was 84 and the first neighbor I met, before I even officially moved in. She welcomed me with a big smile and her walker and immediately started telling stories.

We bonded over the fact that she had MS, just like my mom. She loved the Atlanta Braves and was always surprised when I told her I had never been to a game.

Judy held onto her independence with pride. She found a reason to go out every day. She fed the deer in the woods next to our building, and I’d find celery, apples, bread, whatever she had decided to throw out for them. Sometimes I’d pull into my parking spot next to hers and find her sitting in her car watching the birds at the feeder she kept a few feet into the woods.

She was Judy. Or, as us neighbors called her, Juju. In the three and a half years I’ve lived here, my neighbors have become part of my family. They’ve been there through tears and joys. We celebrate holidays together. We take care of each other.

If the last thing I could do as Judy’s neighbor was be there as part of her family, I was going to be there.

Which is how, on the first full day of being 41 and the first day of 5787, I found myself sitting in a funeral home surrounded by devout Southern Baptists.

It was weird. I knew I was in the right place, but it also felt wrong.

There were plenty of “Praise Jesus Christs.” There were hymns and talk of “chewing the cud” and “picking and singing,” expressions I had never heard before. None of it was familiar to me, but I was there as part of a community that cared about Judy.

The religious language was jarring to me, but I could see the comfort it brought everyone around me.

As her family told stories about Judy, they described her as a bohemian. Not a hippie, they were very clear about that. A bohemian. I couldn’t help but smile at the distinction.

They laughed. They cried. They talked about the woman they loved and the life she lived.

And I sat there thinking about September 12.

Twenty-five years earlier, September 12 had taught me something about what people do in the face of loss. They show up.

On September 11, 2026, I walked into a room of strangers because being alone felt wrong. On September 12, I walked into another room full of mostly strangers because not showing up for Juju would have felt wrong.

The reasons those rooms came together were completely different. But there was something familiar about being there for one another.

At 16, I didn’t have a Jewish community to hold me up. At 41, I do. And yet, on the first day of 5787, being where I needed to be meant sitting in a room full of Southern Baptists saying goodbye to Juju.

For 25 years, I’ve tried to figure out how to remember September 11 while also allowing myself to celebrate the fact that I’m still here. I’m still figuring that out.

But this year, I chose how I wanted to remember. I told my story. The next morning, I showed up to hear people tell Juju’s.

Maybe that’s what I’m carrying with me into 5787.

Shamor v’zachor.

Shanah Tovah.