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THE FIRST regular preaching occasions after the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington of Tuesday, 11 September 2001 came on the following sabbath and then on Rosh Hashanah, which began the following Monday night. This timing presented a classic challenge for the preacher. Most rabbis already had Rosh Hashanah sermons prepared by 11 September: should they change them in order to articulate their response to the events before a large congregation? By the first time their congregations gathered after those events, a great deal had already been written and said, and people were soaking up every new piece of information and every new slant from the pundits and experts interviewed on the non-stop news coverage. What new insight could a rabbi add? What Jewish texts were relevant to the atrocity? Should the message emphasize the need to recognize the power of evil and to mobilize our strength to defeat it, or the need to re-examine how national policy and behaviour might have motivated educated and sophisticated young men to become suicide bombers, or the need to restrain the natural impulse towards vengeance? No matter how uncertain the rabbis may have felt, no matter how emotionally and intellectually paralysed by shock and outrage, it was clear that they could not avoid addressing the subject from the pulpit.
Fortunately, there is abundant material readily available to document the response to 9/11 from the Jewish pulpit. In the United States a website was established to solicit, preserve, and make accessible the texts of these sermons, given the name ‘Torah from Terror: The Rabbinic Response to 9/11’. In Britain a fine review of sermons preached on the High Holy Days by Liberal, Reform, and Masorti UK rabbis, containing both full sermon texts and a thematic overview with short passages from other sermons, was published in the journal European Judaism the following spring. In contrast to the paucity of records for the nineteenth-century wars, here we have an abundance of raw material for the historian or student of religion, waiting to be mined and processed.
Any selection from this wealth of textual data is bound to be subjective.
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