UV’CHEIN TZADIKIM — REDEMPTION: Uv’chein tzadikim yir’u v’yis’machu, visharim ya’alozu, vachasidim b’rinah yagilu, v’olatah tik’potzpiya, v’chol harish’ah kulah k’ashan tichleh, ki ta’avir memshelet zadon min ha’aretz. Therefore, may the righteous see this and rejoice, and may the upright exalt, and the faithful sing in joy. Iniquity will shut its mouth, wickedness will vanish like smoke, and You will abolish the rule of tyranny on earth.

UV’CHEIN TZADIKIM — REDEMPTION: Uv’chein tzadikim yir’u v’yis’machu, visharim ya’alozu, vachasidim b’rinah yagilu, v’olatah tik’potzpiya, v’chol harish’ah kulah k’ashan tichleh, ki ta’avir memshelet zadon min ha’aretz.

Therefore, may the righteous see this and rejoice, and may the upright exalt, and the faithful sing in joy. Iniquity will shut its mouth, wickedness will vanish like smoke, and You will abolish the rule of tyranny on earth.

In a normal year, this would just be another word of many that I read these holy days that I don’t fully grasp. Smoke is a figure of speech. It just means, well, gone.

This year, however, we’ll be standing and saying it on the evening of September 11.

Twenty-five years to the day. The names read aloud in downtown Manhattan, Washington DC, Shanksville, and then sundown, and candles, and a table set for a festival. We wish each other a happy new year. So, the smoke won’t be a figure of speech this year. It will be a photograph we’ve seen a thousand times, one that no matter how many times we see it, sends a chill down our spines. Two towers against a September sky of that particular blue, and the column going up and up and refusing to disperse for anybody.

There’s something else about Friday night. When Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat, we don’t blow the shofar. The one anniversary in twenty-five years when you might want a hundred blasts of raw noise, and our tradition silences the blasts and gives us words instead.

I suppose, while we’re at it, the honey is strange too. Twenty-five years since the worst morning of my generation’s adolescence or “awakening” and we mark the day by dipping sweet fruit in even sweeter honey and ask for a sweet year.

But hey, this is what we’ve always done. At the Seder we recline like free people and spend the evening talking about our slavery, and we spill wine from a full cup for Egyptians who drowned. That table was built by people who understood something confusing: a catastrophe you can’t eat dinner beside is a catastrophe that won’t survive being handed down. “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” Grief that refuses company dies with the people carrying it. So we stick it on the calendar.

We even give Rosh Hashanah a second name: Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. Before anyone........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)