I am such a caricature of a native New Yorker that my first date, at age of 12, was at the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I thought there was nothing more romantic than showing someone a full view of the place that was simultaneously my shtetl and the greatest city in the world. I said a shechechiyanu when we walked up to the glass, because the beauty of the moment called for a blessing.

Years later I was a freshman in college in September of 2001, and when I came home for a long weekend that October, the air across Manhattan still smelled unholy, like burning wires, melted concrete, and mass organic decay. There were an unspeakable number of lives, whole universes unto themselves, lost that day, and their memories being a blessing remains a cold comfort. For many of us in the aftermath of that terrible day, we watched the national conversation shift to be entirely about who we should be afraid of—and too often, the answer was some of our fellow Americans.

This year, Rosh Hashanah begins on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The convergence is an opportunity and a gift. Together, Jews in New York and around the country will experience several hours of extraordinary potency: one part of our hearts focused on the opening of the book of life, and the other on the day the towers fell, and everything that came after.

This is an opportunity to understand what Jewish tradition offers us, as well as what it demands.

The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.

Judaism teaches us that there is no pathway to atonement with God until you have first atoned with the people you harmed; the gateway to divine repair is closed until interpersonal repair is complete. Crucially, Jewish theology holds it as an impossibility rather than a preference: You cannot approach God while your neighbor still bears the wound you gave them.

There is no such thing as atonement without honest accounting. There is no repair without looking the harm in the eye.

This is the fundamental spiritual nature of the High Holidays. The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did in the aftermath. But we must also simultaneously account for the acute political crisis unfolding around us. The multiracial democracy that has kept Jews safer in this country than anywhere else in the history of the world is under attack.

A legal fact that must be part of our accounting: It was in the increased pressure to target American Muslim and American Arab communities that Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed post-9/11. There is a direct line from that targeting in the early 2000s to ICE’s attacks these past years in places like Portland, Washington, DC and Minneapolis. Immigrants have been terrorized—surveilled and made to fear their own government when leaving their homes. Immigrants and innocent bystanders alike have been shot and killed, and families have yet again lost loved........

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