Rosh HaShanah and Osama’s Missing Letter — ב

9/11, Rosh Hashanah and our home on earth

Osama bin Laden’s assault on September 11 brought down buildings and shattered homes far beyond Manhattan. Behind every person murdered stood a family, relationships, hopes and obligations. Twenty-five years later, the destruction still confronts us with a spiritual question: what becomes of religious conviction when it authorises the destruction of the lives through which holiness must enter the world?

An unusual numerical relationship in the Torah’s opening word offers a way to examine that question.

The Torah begins with בראשית — B’reishit, “In the beginning.” In gematria, the calculation of Hebrew letters’ numerical values, this word totals 913. Remove its opening letter, ב — beit, whose value is two, and the remaining ראשית — reishit, “beginning,” totals 911.

The resemblance to the American notation for September 11 supplies a metaphor for reflection; it does not establish why bin Laden chose that date. Its significance lies in what has been removed. The letter’s name, written בית, also spells bayit: a house or home. Symbolically, removing the beit takes the home out of creation’s beginning.

That missing home brings us to the spiritual failure embodied by 9/11.

In Chassidic teaching, creation has a purpose: to make this physical world a dwelling for G-d. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi develops this idea in Tanya, chapter 36. Our world, with its concealment, difficulty and moral freedom, is where divine purpose must be realised. Human action matters because holiness must become present here. (Tanya, chapter 36⁠)

A home gives that teaching concrete meaning. It is where another can belong, where strength creates security and responsibility sustains life. Making a home for G-d requires us to examine what our convictions produce in the lives of others. Learning, charity, justice, restraint and the protection of life give belief its earthly expression.

Rosh Hashanah brings this responsibility back to humanity’s beginning. The first of Tishrei commemorates the creation of Adam and Eve on the sixth day of Creation, entering a world prepared to sustain them. Each year, we acknowledge G-d’s sovereignty and answer for the lives we lead within His creation. Earth is our home, entrusted to us to become a dwelling for His presence. (Rosh Hashanah and Creation⁠)

The letters of בראשית — B’reishit can also be rearranged as א׳ בתשרי — the first of Tishrei. The Torah’s opening word thus offers another symbolic connection between creation, Rosh Hashanah and the beit, our home. This year, that connection is especially poignant: Rosh Hashanah begins at sunset on September 11, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. A day of mourning gives way to a renewed reckoning with the purpose of human life. (2026 dates⁠)

That reckoning must begin with the people who were killed. The attacks murdered 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Each death reached into a home whose future was changed forever. The scale of the crime must never obscure the individual human beings within it. (9/11 Memorial & Museum⁠)

Bin Laden’s project can be judged precisely here. Whatever religious authority he claimed, the method he authorised made human beings instruments of terror. His followers used their own deaths to inflict death on strangers, turning conviction into permission to destroy. The language of sacred purpose could not make those acts holy.

The missing beit therefore represents a profound religious distortion: claiming to serve the Creator while treating His creatures as expendable. Rosh Hashanah places the believer under judgment; fanaticism grants the believer authority to dispose of others. One demands accountability for our conduct. The other exempts its violence from moral scrutiny.

The response that morning revealed another use of conviction. Rescuers entered danger to bring people out. Colleagues helped one another escape. Strangers assumed responsibility for lives to which they had no previous connection. In the language of this interpretation, their actions expressed the beit: preserving a place for another human being in the world.

Remembering 9/11 carries that responsibility forward. It means defending people against those who would repeat it, supporting families who still carry its losses, and teaching a moral clarity that refuses to confuse religious intensity with holiness. Every claim made in G-d’s name remains answerable for what it asks people to do.

The numerical movement from 911 to 913 restores one letter. The human task it symbolises asks us to restore belonging, security and the possibility of a future wherever terror has broken them.

Osama’s missing letter was beit, the home. As remembrance of 9/11 meets Rosh Hashanah, we return to the work his violence violated: protecting life, rebuilding what hatred destroys, and making our home on earth worthy of the divine presence we ask to dwell among us.

From Nuremberg To Sukkot!

Image and article details courtesy

Certain dates do not merely record events, they seal eras. The 16th of October 1946 (21 Tishrei 5707) was one such  fateful day, October 7 2023, (22 Tishrei 5784) the other.

That October morning, ten men convicted at Nuremberg were hanged. The day was Hoshana Rabbah when, according to the Zohar and midrashic tradition, the judgments of the year are completed and the heavenly decree is sealed. As Julius Streicher, the most notorious antisemitic propagandist of the Nazi regime, approached the scaffold, he suddenly cried out: “Purim Fest 1946!”

The cry was not planned. It rose from the man himself at the moment of his own judgment. In that instant, the ancient Purim festival of reversal when the plot to destroy the Jews was turned back Streicher screamed it out aloud over the gallows of the Third Reich.

2500 years prior, the Book (Megillah) of Esther prophetically prepared the pattern. It records that Haman had ten sons. After Haman's threat to destroy the Jews was overturned, Esther specifically requested that those ten sons be hanged on the gallows (Esther 9:13). The text lists their ten names, and within those names three letters are written smaller than the rest:

ת (tav) in Parshandata

ש (shin) in Parmashta

ז (zayin) in Vayzata

These letters together form תש״ז, whose numerical value is 707 comply with the long held practice identifying the century, decade and year. The Hebrew year 5707 had just begun, it corresponds to October 1946. A large vav appears in the same passage, read by some as marking the completion of the sixth millennium. Through the millennia small letters had been written in every scroll, silent witnesses waiting for their moment.

On Hoshana Rabbah 5707, a day before the Jewish festival of Sukkot the alignment was complete: ten sons, ten gallows, the exact method of execution the Megillah had specified, the precise year encoded in the miniature script, and the day of sealed judgment. Even the man who had spent years twisting the story of Purim into Nazi propaganda became, at the end, the one who named the day “Purimfest.”

In the wider realm of Jewish memory, 16 October 1946 carried an additional weight. It symbolically marked the close of the greatest war ever waged against the Jewish people, the war that sought not only their defeat but their total eradication. The hanging of the ten principal perpetrators at Nuremberg, on the day tradition associates with the finalizing of divine judgment, felt to many like a terrible but fitting punctuation mark at the end of that chapter. Yet the ancient conflict was not sealed.

77 years later on 7 October 2023, a new war against the Jews began with sudden and deliberate violence. This fateful day was 22 Tishrei, Simchat Torah a holiday for Jewish people following Sukkot. Once again the intent was articulated in language that echoed the ancient decree: to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate. Once again Jewish communities around the world felt the ground shift beneath them as antisemitism surged in its wake.

The Megillah does not speak only of one Purim. It speaks of a recurring pattern, a war against the Jews that rises in different generations under different names, yet carries the same essential character. Haman -Hitler becomes the archetype; Amalek-Nazi's the recurring memory; the command to “remember what Amalek did” (Deuteronomy 25:17) a perpetual vigilance rather than a closed historical file.

The small letters that spelled 5707 did not promise that the pattern would never recur. They marked a particular moment of judgment within that larger story. The text continues to accompany the people it was given to, through endings and through new beginnings of the same ancient struggle.

The Megillah ends with a charge that has proven more prophetic than anyone could have imagined: “These days of Purim shall not pass away from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed” (Esther 9:28). In 1946 that memorial did not merely survive in the synagogue. It reappeared on a scaffold in Nuremberg, spoken by one of the architects of the attempt to erase it.

In 2023 the same memorial was invoked again, this time not from a place of judgment over the perpetrators, but from within a new chapter of threat. The scroll does not grow old. Its patterns continue to surface when the conditions that gave rise to them reappear.

Sixteen October 1946, Hoshana Raba and seven October 2023, Simchat Torah now stand as markers on either side of a long arc: one date sealing, in the eyes of many, the close of the greatest war against the Jews in history; the other marking the violent opening of a new phase in that same enduring conflict. Between them lies the living text with its small letters, its specific demand for hanging evil, its insistence that the days of Purim be remembered crowned by Sukkot, the annual Jewish festival that continues to honor nations of the world since Israel emerged from its first antisemitic encounter in Egypt 3300 years before.

The Infinite Hug!

In the hushed theater of existence, where the veil between the boundless and the bounded thins to a whisper, The Infinite hugs the finite within the quantum expanse of every atom. Picture the atom, that primordial seed of reality: a nucleus orbited by electrons in probabilistic clouds, not fixed paths but smeared possibilities. Here, in this subatomic ballet, The Infinite manifests as wave functions stretching eternally, collapsing only when observed into discrete points. The electron, defying classical confinement, tunnels through barriers it should not, borrowing energy from the vacuum's infinite fluctuations—zero-point energy, where nothingness teems with virtual particles winking in and out of being. Thus, The Infinite enables the finite, infusing the atom's core with echoes of eternity, a cosmic intimacy where boundless potential cradles the particle's singular form.

Ascending the ladder of complexity, this dance permeates every molecule, those intricate alliances of atoms bound by shared electrons. In water's humble H2O, hydrogen and oxygen entwine in quantum entanglement, their bonds vibrating with infinite harmonic oscillations—frequencies that, in theory, extend without end, yet resolve into finite energies that sustain life. The molecule's shape, dictated by quantum mechanics, emerges from infinite superpositions: electrons delocalized across space, choosing configurations from an unending array of probabilities. Even in the air we breathe, nitrogen molecules hum with this proximity, their triple bonds a testament to quantum tunneling allowing reactions that classical physics forbids. The Infinite whispers through these unions, approaching the finite not as an intruder but as the architect, sculpting stability from chaos.

In the sacred script of life, nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA embody this convergence. Each adenine, thymine, guanine, or cytosine is a molecular poem where quantum effects dictate base pairing. The hydrogen bonds linking them flicker with delocalized protons, quantum entities that exist in multiple states simultaneously, bridging infinite possibilities to finite sequences that encode our very essence. In the double helix's twist, quantum coherence allows electrons to flow like rivers of probability, enabling the molecule's stability amid thermal noise. Here, The Infinite nears the finite in the nucleotide's phosphate backbone, where vibrational modes resonate with the universe's underlying relationship with The Infinite, ensuring the fidelity of genetic information across generations.

From nucleotides arise proteins, those versatile machines of biology, folded into exquisite forms by quantum-guided interactions. In the amino acid chains, quantum van der Waals forces—arising from infinite vacuum polarizations—draw distant atoms close, while disulfide bridges form through electron sharing that defies locality. Enzymes, the catalysts of life, harness quantum tunneling to accelerate reactions by factors of trillions, protons leaping barriers as if The Infinite lent them wings. The protein's active site, a pocket of precision, emerges from infinite conformational landscapes explored in femtoseconds, settling into finite structures that bind substrates with unerring accuracy. Thus, in every fold and crevice, The Infinite hugs the finite, animating the protein's function with transcendent subtlety.

This pattern cascades into every structure of every cell: membranes riddled with ion channels where quantum gates open and close, allowing signals to propagate; mitochondria, powerhouses where electron transport chains exploit quantum coherence for efficient energy transfer; cytoskeletons of microtubules vibrating in quantum modes, perhaps even underpinning consciousness. In the cell's nucleus, chromatin dances with quantum randomness, influencing gene expression from infinite probabilistic outcomes. And beyond the cell, this truth envelops all matter—from the crystalline lattice of a diamond, where quantum delocalization binds carbon atoms, to the swirling plasmas of stars, where infinite quantum fields birth finite particles in fusion's fire. In rocks, rivers, and atmospheres, The Infinite hugs the finite, weaving the fabric of the natural world with threads of boundless potential.

Yet, the energy animating these realms springs not merely from within quantum space but from an infinite transcendence enveloping physics itself. Beyond the measurable quanta lies the unmanifest source—a metaphysical wellspring, the vacuum's infinite sea of potential energy, or perhaps the implicate order where all possibilities reside. This transcendence supplies the zero-point fluctuations powering atomic stability, the quantum vacuum energy fueling molecular bonds, the entangled fields enabling cellular harmony. It surrounds physics like an ocean cradling islands, infusing every particle, molecule, and structure with vitality drawn from eternity. In this grand symphony, The Infinite does not merely approach the finite; it embraces it, revealing that all matter, all life, is a fleeting expression of the boundless, forever touched by the transcendent beyond.

Birthday of Man

5782 years have passed since Torah's events of creation. The New Year is an introspect, a birthday celebration of speaking man who preceded the Bible and Jewish religion by 2448 years. The deep, mystical language inspires scholars and confounds wayward philosophers. 

Hidden in Torah's rich-grammar, something from nothing! Its Author moved toward His supra-rational 'Will' to create; soul's, time, space, worlds and speaking man. Similarly, mans desire and intellect would be powerful enough to perceive independence and obtain free choice. 

Here we glimpse the Ultimate Creator restraining the infinite and enabling the finite to accommodate uninhibited self-perception. And, beyond any logic, His desire for self-subjugation to restore perception of the soul's will.   

You are free to decide...

Happy New Year!