Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon – Erev Rosh Hashanah sermon 29th Elul 5786

On the anniversary of Sept 11 

Twenty-five years is a long time. A quarter of a century. And yet, I can still remember that day: 11 September 2001.

Those days Internet was not so common. News still reached us mainly through television. So the first indication that something extraordinary had happened appeared on my computer screen, as a breaking news pop up while I was trying to connect to a library catalogue.

I remember the University of Milan suddenly emptying. Like many others, I began walking home, as you do when you feel in danger. What I remember most vividly was the Galleria. It was surreal. Almost deserted, except for little groups of people gathered outside a shop window where several television screens were showing the images from New York, over and over again.

I found myself having to explain to a group of bewildered American tourists what had happened. I said: “Do you remember the Twin Towers? They’re gone.” I still distinctly remember their faces. They were from New York.

During those hours, two narratives began to take shape — two narratives with which we are still struggling today, twenty-five years later.

The first was the narrative of the clash of civilizations: the idea that the Christian West — or, as someone used to say, the “Judeo-Christian Civilization” — was at war with Islam. Not with Islamism, nor with terrorism. With the whole Islamic world.

George W. Bush made a point of rejecting this narrative. On 17 September 2001, Erev Rosh Hashanah, he went to the Islamic Centre of Washington. Arab Americans were facing hostility, and Bush — George W. Bush, the Republican President, the conservative President — visited a mosque to say clearly and publicly that Islam was not terrorism, that terrorism was not Islam. He used words which, heard today, might surprise us coming from a Republican president: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

Say what you wish about George W. Bush, but in that he was right, and brave. He insisted that the people responsible for a crime were the people who had committed it, not an entire religion, ethnicity, or civilization.

At almost the same moment, another narrative was beginning to emerge.

According to this second narrative, September 11 was our fault: the fault of America, certainly, but also of Europe and of the West as a whole. The consequence of American imperialism. The result of American support for Arab unholy dictatorships. The outcome of colonialism, of imperialism. In those days, “imperialism” was a buzzword, much as “settler colonialism” is today.

In other words, according to that narrative, we had brought this upon ourselves. Terrorism was “the weapon of the weak”, and people resorted to terrorism because they had no other means to resist.

Therefore, if we really wanted to understand the tragedy that happened on September 11, we should look not primarily at the ideology of the murderers, no. We have to look but at ourselves: at our original sin. Colonialism, imperialism, military power and on and on. Especially how we, being on the side of America, were complicit in the humiliation of Muslims.

American foreign policy is not beyond criticism. And colonialism is hardly the best part of European history. But this narrative blamed, and still blames today, all the Western civilization as a whole, every aspect of the Judeo-Christian civilization, for the horror of terrorism.

And by doing so, it confuses explanation with exculpation.

First, regarding September 11, it is inappropriate to describe terrorism as simply “the weapon of the poor”. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. Several had received higher education. Mohamed Atta came from a middle-class Egyptian family and had studied architecture.

They were not poor. They acted out of their ideology. They made choices.

It was, and it is wrong to treat them merely as the passive products of Western behaviour.

Then Israel entered the story. According to that narrative, Israel is the most concentrated contemporary expression of Western imperialism: a colonial project planted in the Middle East, protected by the United States. Therefore, the existence of a Jewish State, and the whole Zionist project was the ultimate reason for the horrors of September 11.

On the Left, and on the Right, there were those who accused Israel of being the main puppet master of American foreign policy. They were the lunatic fringe, at the beginning. Now, Left and Right, they have become mainstream. Thanks to social media.

So within days of an Islamist terrorist organization murdering thousands of people in America, we began to hear “explanations” that blamed Israel first, and then the Zionist lobby, then the supposed over-representation of Jewish “neocons” in the American administration and, in the end, the Jews themselves.

That narrative has remained with us too. For twenty-five years. And we realized where it has led on 8 October 2023, the day after the largest massacre of Jews since the end of the Second World War.

On that day, the first instinct of too many people was not to look first at the perpetrators, at their ideology, but to point their fingers against Israel, implying, telling out loud that Israel had brought this upon itself.

Once again, explanation blurred into justification. Mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and the targeting of civilians were placed inside a story in which Hamas ultimately became the weak, the oppressed, who had no alternative.

Even before mourning the victims of the largest massacre of Jews after WWII we were expected to contextualize terrorism, to understand Islamism, and ultimately to repent for the sin of feeling a connection with Israel and its people.

And the accusations continue. And we are still demanded, every day, to apologize, to repent, to confess the sin of being Zionist (or “too Zionist”, as those sanctimonious who support the boycott say).

Sorry, I am a Zionist because, as a Sephardi Jew, I know many Jews who are alive because Israel exist. There is not such a thing as too Zionist. Is there such a thing as too alive?

Anyway, can you see how disturbing it is?

When a society cannot clearly distinguish between perpetrator and victim, between grievance and justification, then we have a problem. A huge problem. That society is lost.

We have seen it in our own city. Here, on 8 October 2023, supporters of Hamas were planning to march, to celebrate the massacre. And shamefully someone begged the antisemitic supporters of terrorism not to march. Because you know, on October 8, after the largest pogrom in 21st century, when the bodies of the victims still had to be identified, we were expecting empathize with the murderers, the supporters of Hamas who live comfortably in this Country and organize students activities at the University. Of course the demonstrators did not pay any attention to that shameful display of non Zionism. The pro-Hamas demonstration went ahead. But that shameful self-humiliation — pleading with supporters of terrorism, — was precisely the result of the now shared belief that blames Israel for terrorism and confuses perpetrators with victims.

And it is a lethal narrative. By now we have become horribly familiar with the sequence.

First comes the language: terms such as occupation, colonialism, genocide are routinely used referred and make circulate in social media first, and in the news channel.

Then comes the insistence that there are dark motivation behind whatever Israel is doing, even surrendering territory, as during the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. According to this motif everything Israel does is wrong, or not enough, or done in the wrong way, or done with wrong motivation because Israel itself is evil because the problem is not what Israel does, it is the fact that Israel exists.

And then antisemitic violence is increasingly described as resistance, sanitized with reference to violence allegedly perpetrated by settlers (some of which are really horrible people, but you know what? I don’t believe that the main occupation of a Orthodox Jew on Shabbat is burning olive trees…)

And on and on. The script goes on. It starts on social media, it is echoed on mainstream media and from them returns of the social and on and on.

So eventually somebody decides that it is time not merely to speak, but to do something.

And what is this something?

Consider what has happened in the years since October 7.

On 6 December 2024, the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was set on fire in an attack subsequently treated by Australian authorities as an act of terrorism.

On 10 and 11 January 2025, synagogues in Allawah and Newtown, Sydney, were defaced with swastikas and antisemitic graffiti.

On Yom Kippur, 2 October 2025, a terrorist attacked the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester. The British government subsequently described it explicitly as an act of antisemitic terrorism committed by a man who had pledged allegiance to an Islamist ideology.

Then, on 14 December 2025, Jews gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate the first night of Chanukkah were attacked by two gunmen. Fifteen innocent people were murdered.

And here in Britain, in the early hours of 23 March 2026, four Hatzola ambulances serving the Jewish community in Golders Green were deliberately set on fire in the car park of a synagogue. Oxygen cylinders inside the vehicles exploded and nearby residents had to be evacuated.

Synagogues burned and covered in swastikas. Jews attacked while praying on Yom Kippur. Jews murdered while celebrating Chanukkah. Jewish ambulances set on fire.

And every time Jews are attacked, what is the reaction? “Of course I condemn, but Israel…”

Ah, that extraordinary little word: but.

It has not only the power to change the subject, but to turn antisemitic criminals into victims.

It normalises the antisemitic prejudice. It is so beloved by respectable, enlightened observers.

It always has been.

Of course the pogroms in Eastern Europe were wrong and barbaric. But — so went the reasoning at the time — don’t you see the horrible conditions of Russian and Polish peasants? Don’t you know that many of the innkeepers and moneylenders in Eastern Europe are Jewish? It is not medieval antisemitism. There is exploitation there! People are rebelling!

And of course the antisemitic legislation of Nazi Germany was excessive. But, as a leader of the German Communist Party said in 1923 German proletarians were oppressed by “Jewish capital”.

You need only say: of course the violence is wrong; of course innocent people should not suffer; of course you condemn Hamas and the pogrom of October 7. And then you add a but, That magic word But — but surely there must be some legitimate reason why people are so angry with the Jews.

This is how the but works. It diminishes responsibility. We are seeing it at work every day on our screens, It makes feel people so intellectual, so cultivated, so able to understand “complexity”, Just say but and point the finger to the Jewish State.

But this is not what we Jews believe and act, This is not what Jewish morality teaches. Because, yes, Judaism has a great deal to say about guilt. We built an entire mental health theory based on guilt. It’s called psychoanalysis.

But the cornerstone of Jewish ethics is not guilt. It is responsibility. And if we take responsibility seriously, there can be no but.

We Jews believe in moral agency. Human beings are responsible for what they choose to do. This means that the terrorist is responsible for terrorism. That the murderer is responsible for murder. That the person who chooses hatred is responsible for hatred.

Our reaction following an act of terror cannot be What did the victim do to deserve this?

Rather, the question that the season of the High Holidays is: What will each of us do with the freedom God has given us?

Consider the difference The Mishnah [Rosh Hashanah 1:2] teaches that on Rosh Hashanah all the inhabitants of the world pass before God in judgement. All of us. That is an extraordinarily demanding idea, because it allows none of us to outsource our own responsibility. I cannot point to society, history, my parents, my enemies or my circumstances and pretend that they erase my moral agency.

It is true: our confession is deliberately collective. We say Ashamnu, bagadnu — we have sinned, we have betrayed.

Because we know that none exists in complete isolation from the community around us. Still, the work of teshuvah remains intensely personal. It is a personal work. I must ask what I have done. Which failures are mine. Whom I have hurt. What I can repair.

Teshuvah, repentance is a personal, intimate process.

This is also why feel so unsettled by the sound of the shofar is so unsettling. The shofar does not give us an argument. It does not offer us a theory of history. It does not divide humanity into oppressors and oppressed. It does not allow us to blame others for our own wrongdoing. It is personal. It is deeply, intensely personal. It calls us back to the uncomfortable fact that each human being stands before God as a moral subject, as a responsible human being.

The sound of the shofar does not leave room of intellectualisation excusation, rationalisation. When you hear the sound of the shofar you cannot say “yes, but other made me to do it” “yes but my class, my gender, my family…” the shofar demands us to resist the temptation either to transfer our guilt to somebody else or to make ourselves responsible for the whole disorder of history.

There is something profoundly noble in Jewish morality, because it takes freedom seriously. It takes sin seriously, and it takes repentance seriously.

Rosh Hashanah gives us another way of thinking about moral responsibility. Every human being enters judgement as a moral agent, carrying his or her own failures and responsibilities.

Each of us has an history, shaped by family, society, politics, memory …. yet Rosh Hashanah insists that within all those forces there remains a human being capable of choosing, capable of answering, capable of changing.

This Jewish wisdom is particularly important today, Twenty-five years after September 11, and after years in which we have watched people explain violence by transferring responsibility from perpetrators to victims.

We have been living in a world where antisemitic violence is explained by transferring responsibility from perpetrators to victims. And we have allowed this way of thinking to influence us, to make Jewish morality less demanding. Because it is far more comfortable to live in a world where personal responsibility does not exist, where so much can be excused by invoking class, gender or education.

Jewish tradition has a very uncomfortable demand: to recognise that every human being remains accountable for what he or she chooses to do.

On Rosh Hashanah we come before God, each of us, as a human being capable of choice.

On Rosh Hashanah, we all pass before God. We are all called to account.

And we are all called to choose what we will become.

FURTHER READING

As one might imagine, I have read a great deal about the narratives that developed around 9/11. More recently, I have found particularly interesting Pascal Bruckner’s reflections in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

For a  critique of the “clash of civilizations” thesis, see Jonathan Fox, “Ethnic Minorities and the Clash of Civilizations: A Quantitative Analysis of Huntington’s Thesis,” British Journal of Political Science 32, no. 3 (July 2002): 415–434.  Also worth reading is Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003)

On the history of Jewish communities in Muslim countries and their tragic disappearance, see Victor Magiar, E venne la notte: Ebrei in un paese arabo (Florence: Giuntina, 2003), a book which I very much hope will one day be translated into English.

On contemporary antisemitism in the United States, see Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden, “Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum,” Political Research Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2023): 697–711  and Jakob Guhl, “Far-Left Antisemitism,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 12 July 2023. On attempts to explain anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire in terms of economic conflict see John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

On similar attempt by German Communists  see Olaf Kistenmacher, “From ‘Judas’ to ‘Jewish Capital’: Antisemitic Forms of Thought in the German Communist Party (KPD) in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933,” Engage Journal, no. 2 (May 2006).