Never will I forget the jumpers.
Of all the images of September 11, 2001 – the planes disappearing into the towers, the orange fireballs erupting into a crystal-blue New York sky, the great buildings collapsing into mountains of dust – nothing has ever haunted me like the human beings standing at the windows of the World Trade Center and then falling through the air.
They had gone to work that morning.
They kissed spouses goodbye. They hugged children. They bought coffee. They boarded trains. They answered emails. They sat down at desks.
And suddenly, through no choice of their own, innocent men and women were confronted with a decision that no human being should ever have to make.
Behind them was an inferno.
Before them was the sky.
They could remain and be consumed by unbearable fire and smoke, or they could leap hundreds of meters toward certain death.
The jumpers of 9/11 did not choose death. Islamist terrorists chose death for them.
We sometimes call them “the jumpers.” But that language can obscure the truth.
They did not choose to die.
Their murderers chose death for them.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower, cutting through floors 93 to 99. The 9/11 Commission found that all three stairwells became impassable from the 92nd floor upward. Hundreds were killed immediately; hundreds more remained alive but trapped. At 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. Fifty-six minutes later, that tower was gone. At 10:28, the North Tower followed it into the earth.
Nearly 3,000 people were murdered that day.
And 25 years later, America must still summon the courage to remember not only what happened but why.
September 11 was not an earthquake. It was not a hurricane. It was not some inexplicable eruption of generic “extremism.”
It was an act of Islamist terrorism perpetrated by al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden.
Those words matter.
Indeed, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission was explicit. It described the catastrophic threat as “Islamist terrorism,” particularly al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its ideology. But it made an equally essential distinction: the enemy was not Islam, one of humanity’s religions, but an extremist ideological corruption of it.
Millions upon millions of Muslims reject terrorism. Muslims themselves have been slaughtered in enormous numbers by Islamist extremists.
But respecting Islam must never require us to pretend that Islamist terrorism does not exist.
Tolerance toward my Muslim brothers and sisters, who observe a world religion, and moral clarity about Islamist terrorism are not opposites. A civilized society must possess both.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, al-Qaeda has changed, but the jihadist ideology that animated it has not disappeared. Bin Laden is dead. Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead. Yet al-Qaeda affiliates and ideologically related movements have survived and metastasized across regions of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
For Jews, this lesson has acquired renewed urgency.
When I watched the horrors of October 7, I felt echoes of September 11 – not because the events were identical, but because the moral inversion that followed was so familiar.
Again innocent civilians were deliberately targeted.
Again terrorists sought not merely military victory but spectacle: terror as theater, murder designed to be remembered.
And again, astonishingly quickly, parts of the world began moving from mourning the victims to rationalizing the perpetrators.
That is why memory matters.
Never forget cannot mean merely remembering photographs once a year.
It means refusing to forget who murdered the victims and why.
It means remembering the firefighters who climbed while everyone else was descending.
It means remembering the police officers and emergency workers who ran toward catastrophe.
It means remembering the passengers of Flight 93 who, upon discovering what was happening, decided that they would not remain passive victims. Their resistance prevented the hijackers from reaching their intended target and turned an airplane filled with doomed passengers into one of the great stories of American courage.
And it means remembering those people at the windows.
Especially them.
Because those images expose terrorism in its purest moral form.
A human being clings to a window ledge perhaps 100 stories above Manhattan because remaining inside has become even more terrifying than falling.
Imagine the heat. Imagine the smoke. Imagine trying to breathe.
Imagine knowing that your children are somewhere below, perhaps watching television, and that you will never hold them again.
Imagine having seconds to decide how you will die.
There are subjects before which words become almost obscene.
This is one of them.
They were not falling from buildings. They were being murdered in the sky.
And yet we must speak.
Because forgetting begins with euphemism.
Terrorists become “militants.” Murder becomes “resistance.” Fanaticism becomes “grievance.” And eventually the murderer and the murdered are placed together in the same gray moral fog.
No.
Civilization depends upon distinctions.
There is a distinction between intentionally murdering civilians and defending civilians.
There is a distinction between faith and fanaticism.
There is a distinction between Muslims and Islamist extremists.
And there is a distinction between explaining the political circumstances in which terrorism develops and excusing terrorism.
The dead of September 11 deserve that elementary moral clarity.
We mark a quarter-century since that magnificent September morning became one of the darkest days in American history.
Children born after the attacks are now adults. For them, September 11 is history rather than memory. That makes our responsibility greater, not smaller.
We must tell them about the towers.
We must tell them about the firefighters.
We must tell them about Flight 93.
We must tell them about the nearly 3,000 souls whose ordinary Tuesday morning became their last.
And yes, painful as it is, we must tell them about the people at the windows.
Not to sensationalize their deaths.
To restore their humanity.
They were mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. They wanted desperately to live.
The monsters who attacked America robbed them of that choice.
Twenty-five years later, I still see them against that impossibly blue sky.
I still think about what they endured in their final moments.
And I still believe that the only worthy response is the simplest and most demanding one:
Remember their names. Remember their humanity. Remember the evil that murdered them.
Fight that evil without becoming evil ourselves.
And never – never – forget the jumpers.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international bestselling author of thirty-eight books, translated into more than twenty languages. He has been hailed as “the most famous rabbi in America” (The Washington Post, Newsweek), “arguably the most famous Orthodox Jew on earth” (The New York Observer), and named one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world (The Jerusalem Post). Rabbi Boteach is the only rabbi ever to receive the London Times Preacher of the Year Award, and remains the competition’s record-holder.He lives in New Jersey with his Australian wife, Debbie and family. Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.
