How many of us remember where we were 25 years ago today? Twenty-five years is long enough that some of you weren’t even born yet, and long enough that some of us have to reach back through a quarter century of mornings to find that one morning again — but find it we do, don’t we, every single year around this time. The sky that day was almost absurdly blue. A September blue, crisp and clean, the kind of blue that makes you think nothing bad could possibly happen underneath it.

And then the towers came down.

Not all at once. It took time. Nearly two hours between the first plane and the second collapse. Long enough for coffee to go cold on a hundred thousand desks. Long enough for phone calls to be made, voicemails to be left, some of them the last words a husband or a wife or a child would ever hear from someone they loved. Steel does not fall like a stone. It groans first. It bends. And then — a hundred and ten stories of glass and steel and human ambition folding downward into itself, into a cloud that swallowed lower Manhattan whole.

I still think of this 25 years on: while the towers were falling, there were people running the other direction – toward the towers. Up the stairwells while everyone else came down. Into buildings that structural engineers would later say had no earthly business still being enterable. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters. Sixty police officers. Paramedics, EMTs, chaplains, port authority officers — human beings who woke up that morning, kissed someone goodbye probably without even really noticing they were doing it, the way we all do on ordinary Tuesdays, and then ran toward the one place every instinct in the human body says: run away from this.

Our sages have a word for this, and it is not “heroism,” though heroism is not wrong. The word is chesed. Lovingkindness. But not the soft, greeting-card version of chesed — chesed as it actually appears in Torah, which is almost always chesed shel emet, a lovingkindness of truth, offered with nothing expected in return, often offered to those who cannot even thank you for it.

So let me speak directly, for a moment, to those among us this day who serve or who have served — police, fire, EMS, chaplains, all who still, twenty-five years later, put on a uniform and walk toward what the rest of us walk away from:

May the One who blessed our ancestors bless you. May you be strengthened in body and unshaken in spirit. May the chesed you carry be recognized not only in moments of catastrophe but on the ten thousand ordinary days in between, when no one is watching and the sky is, once again, absurdly blue. Thank God for all for you.

But here is the uncomfortable turn, the one our tradition never lets us skip past. Because if chesed were only for the uniformed, only for the extraordinary few who run into burning buildings, then the rest of us would be off the hook, wouldn’t we? We could admire from a comfortable distance and go home feeling appropriately moved.

Pirkei Avot won’t let us off that easily. “In a place where there are no menschen,” Hillel says, “strive to be a mensch.” Not: wait for a menschen to show up. Strive to be one. Yourself. Today on this eve of the New Year.

So I ask you — and I ask myself right alongside you — where in your own life is there a small stairwell you’ve been avoiding? Not a burning building, God forbid, nothing so dramatic. Maybe it’s a phone call you owe someone who’s grieving and you don’t know what to say, so you say nothing at all. Maybe it’s a neighbor who could use a knock on the door. Maybe it’s simply choosing, in a culture that often runs away from discomfort, to run — just a little — toward it instead.

Every family in this room carries some loss. Not all of them from that particular Tuesday, but loss all the same — a parent, a spouse, a friend, a version of the world we thought we’d always have. We hold that today, all of it, openly, without needing to name every name, because grief does not require a guest list. It only requires room.

And so we come, as we always eventually come, to Kaddish. You’ll notice — those of you who know the prayer well — that Kaddish never once mentions death. Not one word. It is, strangely, entirely about magnifying and sanctifying God’s name, yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba, in this world that God created according to God’s will.

Twenty-five years. A quarter century. Yitgadal — let it be made great. Not the tragedy — never the tragedy — but the meaning we insist on building in its aftermath. Yitkadash — let it be made holy. Not the collapse of steel, but the courage that ran up the stairs while the steel came down.

There is a teaching from the Kotzker Rebbe that I return to every year around this time: he asks, where is God? And he answers — wherever we let God in. Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of unimaginable collapse, God was let in through a thousand small doors — a firefighter’s decision, a stranger’s outstretched hand, a phone call made from a doomed plane simply to say “I love you” one more time. That is where the holy lived that day. Perhaps that is where it still lives.

So let us close the way Kaddish itself closes — not with more mourning, but with a small flame of peace kindled at the very end, almost as an afterthought, and yet it is the whole point: Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu — May the One who makes peace in the heavens above make peace for us, for all Israel, and let us say: for the whole aching, striving, still-hoping world.

Twenty-five years ago the towers fell. Today, in their place, something rises still — not steel this time, but a kind of stubborn, quiet chesed, carried by those who serve and by every one of us willing, in our own small stairwell, to walk toward instead of away.

May their memory be a blessing. May our service be their monument. And may the sky above us — that same absurd, impossible blue — watch over us all in peace.

Amen.