This is going to be a very short note. Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It’s also, by coincidence, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. (It’s also the day my film, Resentment, becomes available on AVOD platforms like Plex, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of an intense period of introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Its hallmark is the shofar, the ram’s horn which is blown 100 times on the morning of each day of the holiday, a blast intended variously to announce God’s presence, to call for God’s assistance, to rouse us from our own spiritual slumber, and to herald the coming of the Messiah. So I’ve been thinking about how the conjunction of the anniversary and the holiday is likely to color what I hear in the shofar blast this year.
I remember well the first Rosh Hashanah post-9/11. It was only a week after the attacks. We could still see the smoke rising from the ruins from my dining room window and hear fighter jets circling in the skies above our synagogue. I remember as well the sensation that the attacks themselves were a kind of dark shofar blast, the announcement of a new and ominous presence, a wakeup call to a slumbering nation. I count it to President Bush’s credit that he was able to channel that feeling into some kind of purposive action, but to his eternal infamy that the action that he channeled it into proved so catastrophic (and predictably so, though I myself at the time refused to heed those predictions).
What I fear that wakeup call has turned out to be instead is something like the alarm that goes off in your dream. I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a dream like that, where your alarm goes off in real life but you don’t wake up, and instead the alarm goes off inside the dream, and in the dream you run around frantically trying to find what’s making the noise, banging on clocks and pulling books off the shelves and pots out of cabinets searching for the hidden source of the awful sound, until finally, at some point, you wake up and turn off the alarm. But we don’t wake up.
That’s what it feels like political life has increasingly become in the quarter century since 9/11. I count it to President Obama’s great credit that he tried to lead the country into something more like productive introspection, and thereby turn off the alarm. But he wasn’t able to achieve that goal: because the GOP noise machine wouldn’t let him, because his own base wouldn’t let him (Woke 1 was indeed craaaazy, and it started in the middle in Obama’s second term), and because reality wouldn’t let him. Then Donald Trump, of course, not only rode the alarm all the way to the White House, but sounded a new and terrifying alarm of his own that continues to clang louder and more insistently with every passing day.
We can blame technology for the change in our mentality, and I do. We can blame the sorting of our population into politically monocultural silos, and I do. We can blame the reality of at least some of the things that are raising alarms—climate change, demographic change, the rise of China, the rise of A.I.—and I do. But notwithstanding that this sense of perpetual crisis is not limited to the United States, I cannot help but also blame that terrible and permanently disorienting day.
Perhaps the problem is that we’re desperately trying to turn off the alarm so that we can go back to sleep, when that is not an option. There’s value in a wakeup call. There’s value in moments that bring clarity, whether that clarity leads you to turn inward, to cry out, to gird for battle or to anticipate redemption. But there’s a reason Rosh Hashanah only comes around once a year. You can’t actually live with a shofar blaring in your ears day and night all year round. Without some degree of serenity, you can’t think. And I hope we’re not at the point where we have consciously decided to stop thinking, as opposed to simply having gotten out of the habit.
A couple of years after the attacks, there was an explosive release of steam from the pipes under the street right by the office building where I worked. The boom was ferociously loud, and we could see plumes of what could easily have been smoke rising rapidly from below. We all made our way dutifully down the stairs and out of the building, following the drill that we had learned after 9/11. But I remember distinctly not feeling panicked. And I remember also feeling that the fact that I wasn’t panicked was a very good sign.
So that’s what I’m thinking about this year as I approach the holiday. The horn is blaring constantly, rousing us to alarm. Tomorrow I’m going to try to hear the real shofar in the midst of cacophony. But between now and Yom Kippur, I’m going to try to hear the small voice of stillness, the kol d’mamah dakah, that is supposed to follow, wherein the spirit of God truly resides. And, if I can hear it, I’m going to try to remember how to listen for that, no matter what other noise I hear. If that leaves me less prepared for whatever catastrophe strikes next, that’s a small price to pay for being able to think.
Noah, only you could write a "very short note" that's nine paragraphs long. Shanah tovah.
Funny, I signed up for Plex a few nights ago, just so I could watch an old James Bond movie. I will get to Resentment this week! (Your movie is also listed on Fandango.)