2026 Rosh Hashanah Evening

Sometimes, the Torah’s teaching is not just what the words say, but what they look like in the scroll.

The best example of this is in Exodus during the singing of Miriam’s song, when the Israelites are crossing the Red Sea. Even if you know absolutely no Hebrew at all, you can find that section in a Torah scroll because the words of the poem and Mi Chamocha are written so that they look like waves on a page.

Another example is the Sh’ma. The Sh’ma is one of our few prayers that talks about God, rather than talking to God. It is a statement of faith. In fact, it’s often called the watchword of our faith.

But if we look at the letters of the Sh’ma in a Torah, there’s something else.

The ayin at the end of the word, Sh’ma and the dalet at the end of echad are oversized.

If we take these two letters and put them together, we get the word, Eid, which means witness. The shape of these letters makes a theological statement. The Sh’ma is not only a statement about belief. We don’t just say that God is one. We are meant to live it, and we do through our actions being a witness for God.

Later in the Torah, this is made explicit. The prophet Isaiah tells us: God says, you are my witnesses.¹

Judaism talks a lot about bearing witness. At its most basic, we have the obligation to speak truthfully and refuse falsehood, but it goes much deeper. Bearing witness is an intentional action that remembers and ritualizes tragedy, whether it be the Holocaust, October 7th, or 9/11. Ultimately, bearing witness reminds us of our values, and it is meant to transform our pain into a certain kind of moral obligation, and then, we pray, into holiness.

But humans aren’t the only living things that bear witness.

Have you ever heard of a witness tree?

A witness tree is a tree that was alive in a specific place during a significant moment in history. Many of our homes probably have witness trees for the first moments of our marriage, the birth of a child, a major job promotion, a death in the family, a graduation, a retirement … and so much more.

There is a sycamore at Antietam that stood after the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. There is a tree in Oklahoma City that witnessed the blast of the 1995 bombing. And until a storm brought it down this past June, there was a tree at Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, alive since before 1844, that stood in that same yard while Lincoln himself walked past it.

Every year, Europe holds the European Tree of the Year contest. This competition is not about finding the biggest tree, or the most beautiful, or the oldest. Instead, it celebrates trees that have borne witness. If these trees could talk …

Of course a tree cannot really bear witness. It has no eyes. It keeps no memory. It cannot gather to cry or mourn. But, nonetheless, something in us feels a connection with a tree that was there during a pivotal moment or event in our lives. If you’ve ever traveled somewhere and made it a point to visit your childhood home or elementary school, you know what I’m talking about.

In October of 2001, in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, rescue workers found a Callery pear tree. Its roots were snapped, and its branches were burned and broken. They pulled it out of the ruins and gave it to the city’s gardeners. They were able to nurse it slowly back to life.

Nine years later, they replanted it at the 9/11 memorial. Out of the old, blackened, gnarled stumps, smooth new limbs grew straight up. Tourists today can visit the tree and see exactly where the burned wood ends and the living wood begins. The tree does not hide what happened to it. Maybe it really did bear witness.

It is called the Survivor Tree. Starting in 2013, seedlings have been taken from this tree and sent to other towns and communities that have experienced tragedies, reminding them - and bearing witness - that we too can be nursed back to life. Here are some places that received descendants of the Survivor Tree:

• Uvalde, Texas, after the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.
• Orlando, Florida, after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub.
• Newtown, Connecticut, after Sandy Hook.
• Parkland, Florida, after Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Tonight is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. A quarter of a century has passed since that Tuesday morning in September. Some of you in this room were not yet born. Most of us remember exactly where we were, what we were doing, and how we reacted. We bear witness.

25 years ago, I was a 3rd year rabbinical student, preparing to lead High Holiday services at a small synagogue in Decatur, Illinois. The tragedy of 9/11 occurred 7 days prior to Rosh Hashanah, and all of us struggled to find something meaningful to share with our student pulpits. Here are some of the words I said 25 years ago during the High Holidays:

The Torah says: Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum v’Chanun. The Eternal, compassionate and gracious. If God is these things, then why? Why was our country attacked? Why have so many sons and daughters perished? Just like everyone else, I have no answers. There is no heavenly reason why this happened. I refuse to believe this was part of some divine plan. There is no response to why. But there is a response to how.

Just yesterday on the news, my eyes welled with tears as I heard about a paralyzed man wheeling through the torn streets of New York, passing out sandwiches to volunteers from his lap, though both of his arms had been amputated. Businesses everywhere, from AOL to The Producers on Broadway, answered with support and love and a refusal to give up. Millions of candles were lit in homes across this country, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, creating a sense of connectedness I had never felt before. These are the how questions.

Tonight, twenty-five years later, there is still no answer to why. There is only an answer to how. We have the ability to respond like the Survivor Tree: snapped, burned, and hurt, but growing nonetheless.

Our High Holiday liturgy emphasizes this: Some will live and some will die. It recognizes that the wicked sometimes prosper and the righteous sometimes suffer. We know that no single year of life is promised to us, let alone a year of prosperity and peace.

But a witness tree only witnesses and observes.

The Jewish way of bearing witness is not passive. It’s not only to remember and to mourn. It’s to live and to act as God’s witnesses.

As Jews who bear witness, we become an eitz chaim, a living tree. We face our lives with hope and optimism, even when the world shows us otherwise.

Rosh Hashanah is not the holiday of people who are sure that everything will be fine. It is the holiday of people who suspect it might not be, and who choose life regardless. We show up on the eve of a new year, in a world that is still broken, and ask, out loud, to be written in for one more year, not just so that we can live, but so that we can improve the brokenness.

We are God’s witnesses. We perform acts of kindness, justice, and compassion. The best way to honor the memory of 9/11 is to be the people we were on September 12. We help one another. We show up. We grieve. We celebrate. We pray. We bear witness.

עֵץ־חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ וְתֹמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר

It is a tree of life to them that hold fast to it.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 43:10 ↩