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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good Morning.

I can’t help thinking of this day in 2001, which we’ve come to know simply as nine / eleven. I remember exactly how I learnt what was happening.

I answered the phone. ‘Have you spoken to my son,’ said my friend in a panicked voice.

‘Why, what’s up?’ I innocently asked.

‘He’s in New York. Haven’t you seen?’ Realising I’d no idea, she told me to switch on the television and hung up.

A lot of people alive that day knows precisely where they were when they heard about the twin towers. We watched, transfixed, in horror. When the second tower collapsed it felt as if the entire earth was trembling.

The graph of a shock flattens, but in some corner the nerves still hold the trauma of the first impact. Grief changes, reconfiguring the soul, but it doesn’t go away.

My heart goes out to those whose lives were shattered that day. I’ve stood at the memorial at Ground Zero, silent and overawed.

It doesn’t feel as if the wounds of which those appalling attacks were both symptom and cause have truly healed. Some notion, fictional perhaps, of a world largely at peace, perished that day.

But the vision hasn’t died. John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, with its famous line telling us that we may all be dreamers was a much played song in the aftermath of the terror and we still pray that the world will one day be as one.

In the Jewish year this is a season of reflection and reparation, leading up to the New Year. I hope that in some way, all of us can be healers amidst the world’s great wounds.

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