Twenty-five years ago today, on a clear September morning, two aircraft flew into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. By lunchtime, it felt as though the world we knew had gone. Twenty-five years later, we know that in important ways it had.
Most of us can still remember where we were. What I remember is the feeling that something of magnitude had happened before our eyes, that something had ended and something else, ominous and beyond any description, had begun.
The post-9/11 world has become a more anxious place: more security and less trust, more surveillance and perhaps less confidence in the liberal democracy we thought was our natural habitat. Wars were fought in response to that day. A whole generation has grown up knowing only the world that followed 1945.
There is a word for what an event like that can do to individuals and societies: trauma. Trauma overwhelms our capacity to make sense of what has happened, and its consequences shape how we experience what comes afterwards. Perhaps that is something we have carried with us for twenty-five years: the knowledge that the world can change suddenly, that what seemed permanent may not be permanent at all.
And perhaps that helps explain something about the way we experienced this summer.
This summer was scorching hot. We had heatwave after heatwave here, and in parts of Europe the thermometer reached forty degrees. Fields turned yellow, reservoirs dropped, and fires burned across the continent. Many people said, in one form or another: this is it. This is the tipping point. From now on the world will be different. Some said it with dread, some almost with a strange relief, as if the waiting were finally over. I heard it in conversations, I read it in the papers, and I saw the effects of the heat with my own eyes, in the French countryside and in the hills of Crete.
So the question I want to ask tonight is this: was this summer such a moment? Was this the moment when the world shifted? And what does Rosh Hashanah say to us when the world feels as if it is tipping again?
The question is harder than it sounds. A tipping point means passing from one state to another, as water becomes ice, or peace becomes war. To know that you have crossed one, you need to be able to say what you have left and what you have entered.
For quite some time, we described ourselves as living in a post-modern age. The great stories that had once organised people’s lives, progress, nation, faith, and class had lost some of their power. We learned to live with competing truths and different ways of understanding the world. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. Difference hardened into division. Competing truths became competing camps, and increasingly we seemed unable even to hear one another.
Frightened people understandably look for certainty, and complicated problems often call for simple answers. That is part of the appeal of populism, which we see growing across Europe, including in France with the presidential election ahead, and here in Britain too. For our own community, the past few years have added their own weight to all of this, internally as well as externally.
And when people no longer know where they are, despair becomes tempting. Despair is the feeling that the story is already over, that the ending has somehow been written before we have reached it.
Over the summer I came across an article by George Monbiot in The Guardian, published on 11 August. It began by describing the parched land and then said something that caught my attention. There are many reasons to despair, he argued, and yet there are more reasons not to. Despair feeds itself. The more we believe that nothing can be done, the less we do, and eventually the belief risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despair takes away our agency.
And above all, he argues, despair claims to know too much.
A society, Monbiot says, is a complex system, like the climate or a forest. You cannot predict everything it will do simply by studying each of its parts. And social change has a strange characteristic: what eventually happens can appear impossible until remarkably close to the moment when it happens.
He gives the example of Ireland, where the grip of the Catholic Church looked unbreakable for much of the twentieth century and then weakened with extraordinary speed. History contains many such moments: political rights once dismissed as impossible, empires that seemed permanent, regimes that appeared immovable. Afterwards, we tell ourselves that the change was inevitable. Beforehand, almost nobody could see when it would come.
And that is the point that matters tonight. You cannot necessarily see a tipping point in advance. Often you recognise it only afterwards. We can look back at 9/11 and see a historical turning point. But no one standing inside this present moment can know with the same certainty which way history is moving.
Which means that despair claims a knowledge we do not possess. It claims to know how the story ends.
But so, for that matter, does complacency. The belief that nothing much will change and that somehow everything will be fine is also a prediction. Both despair and complacency pretend to know the future.
So the honest answer to my question, was this summer the tipping point, is that we cannot know.
But if we cannot know, how should we live?
I think the answer is this: attend to the hour you are in. The past has happened. The future is yet to be written. That is a deeply Jewish answer, and Rosh Hashanah is built around it.
We can see it in one well-known story, the traditional Torah reading for the first day of the festival, the story of Hagar and Ishmael.
Hagar has borne Abraham a son, Ishmael. Then Isaac is born, and the structure of Abraham’s household changes. Sarah is worried about inheritance and about Isaac’s future. Pressed by Sarah, Abraham sends Hagar and the boy away with bread and a skin of water.
In the desert the water runs out. Hagar leaves the boy under a bush, walks away about a bowshot, and says: “Let me not look on as the child dies” (Genesis 21:16). She sits at a distance and weeps.
And then the text says: “God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water” (Genesis 21:19).
Hear what the verse says. It does not say that God created a well. She opens her eyes and sees one.
A Midrash – a Rabbinic legend – draws attention to exactly this. Rabbi Binyamin teaches that everyone is presumed blind until the Holy One opens their eyes, deriving the teaching from this very verse, “God opened her eyes” (Bereshit Rabbah 53:14).
Hagar believes she knows how the story ends: the boy will die. And in that moment she cannot see the water that is already there. Despair has narrowed the horizon of what seems possible. Then God opens her eyes. Monbiot gives us a modern language for something this ancient story already understands: when we believe the ending has already been written, we may cease to see what is still possible.
And the same Midrash adds something else, something that goes to the heart of Rosh Hashanah.
The ministering angels object to saving Ishmael because of what, in the Midrash’s imagination, his descendants will one day do to Israel. But the Holy One refuses to judge Ishmael by a future that has not yet happened. God asks what the boy is now, righteous or wicked. The angels answer: righteous. And God responds that a person is judged according to the present moment (Bereshit Rabbah 53:14).
The Talmud draws precisely the same lesson from the words of Genesis, ba’asher hu sham, “where he is”: “A person is judged only according to their deeds at that hour” (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 16b).
And perhaps that is the extraordinary claim of Rosh Hashanah. The Judge of the Universe may see the whole story, but judges us ba’asher anachnu sham, as we are here, in this hour.
The future does not condemn us in advance. Nor does it save us in advance. We are responsible for the hour that has actually been given to us.
Of course, we are here tonight as the result of our past actions. We carry the consequences of choices already made. But the future is yet to be written, and no forecast, however clever, can write it for us.
Whether or not the world is tipping, our task tonight is therefore the same.
So how do we learn to live faithfully in the hour that has actually been given to us? Rosh Hashanah does not give us a forecast. It gives us practices: ways of creating time, gaining distance, recovering our agency and choosing hope.
Begin with time itself.
In 2001, Erev Rosh Hashanah fell only days after the 9/11 attacks. Jews gathered in synagogues, still in shock, and said the same prayers they had said the year before. Everything had changed, but the prayers had not. Every year we meet at the appointed time, we say words that generations before us have said, and every year the world in which we say them is different.
That is part of the gift of a calendar. It does not stop when the world is in turmoil. When the ground moves beneath our feet, the calendar carries us into an appointed time that is older than the crisis and older than any of us. Rosh Hashanah arrives and gives us somewhere to stand, a space in which to look again at our lives.
And then there is distance.
Hagar walks a bowshot away because she cannot bear to see. The Days of Awe ask us to create a different kind of distance: not distance in order to look away, but distance in order to see more clearly. For ten days, from tonight until the end of Yom Kippur, we step outside the ordinary rhythm of our lives and try to see the wider picture.
Isaiah says: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quiet and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). The distance our calendar gives us is not an escape from life. It is a place from which to contemplate it. Hagar’s rescue begins when her eyes are opened. Perhaps some of our own turning begins in the same way.
Then comes agency.
Tomorrow we will encounter Unetaneh Tokef, with its terrifying litany of human vulnerability: fire and water, hunger and thirst, life and death. After this summer, some of those words have a particular echo.
Unetaneh Tokef does something remarkable. It names what we cannot control. It does not pretend that we are masters of what comes next. And then it turns towards what remains within our reach: teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah, return, prayer and acts of justice and generosity.
We cannot determine everything that will happen to us. But we are not powerless either.
Maimonides hears the same summons in the shofar: “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep, and you slumberers, arise from your slumber; examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator” (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 3:4).
We examine. We adjust. We begin again.
And finally there is hope.
After the sounding of the shofar we will say, Hayom harat olam, today the world is conceived. Our liturgy insists that the world is unfinished, that Rosh Hashanah is a beginning.
And teshuvah, return, carries something of the same insight into a single human life. Change can look impossible until someone begins to change. Sometimes the turning begins before anyone else can see it, perhaps even before we can see it ourselves.
That is why Rosh Hashanah refuses to declare any human story finished.
Hope is not the conviction that everything will be all right. Hope is the refusal to declare the story finished before it is finished.
And communities are made of the same fabric. Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16).
Our parents and grandparents did their part of the work and handed it to us. Our task is to hand something sound to those who come after us. That is how a community works. No generation finishes the work. Each receives something from those who came before, tends it for a while, changes what needs to change, and hands it on to those who come after.
There is something comforting in that. We are responsible, but we are not responsible for everything.
Monbiot ends by distinguishing between two kinds of tipping point. There are environmental tipping points, moments when parts of the natural world cross thresholds from which they may not easily return. And there are social tipping points, moments when a society that had regarded change as impossible suddenly discovers that it has become possible.
The question is whether we can reach the social tipping points we need before environmental change passes beyond our capacity to respond.
Our tradition has long understood what is at stake. In Kohelet Rabbah, the Holy One shows the first human being the Garden and says: “See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13).
None of us can change the climate alone. But neither are we merely spectators. We can change how we live, what we support, what we demand of those with power, and what kind of society we help to create. Social tipping points are made from countless human choices, until something that seemed impossible begins to become possible.
This is what Rosh Hashanah gives us: time in which to stand, distance from which to see, the recovery of our agency, and hope that refuses to declare the future closed.
None of these tells us what will happen next. They help us decide how we will meet it.
So, was this summer a tipping point?
We cannot know, because tipping points are recognised most clearly from the other side. But perhaps Rosh Hashanah asks a different question. Not: can we predict what comes next? But: with our eyes open to the hour we are living in, what part will we play in what comes next?
May we enter this new year with our eyes open. May we see, like Hagar, the wells of living water that may already be there. And may we, together, do our part of the work, so that 5787 may be remembered, in our own lives and in the life of our community, as a year in which something that once looked impossible began.
Shanah tovah.