Dave's Gone By

Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #213 (9/11/2026): 25 YEARS 

Subject: Rabbi Sol reflects on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

This Rabbinical Reflection first aired Sept. 12, 2026 on the “Dave’s Gone By” video podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz. 

Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflections air on the long-running Dave’s Gone By program (davesgoneby.com) and are also archived on the Rebbe’s blog, Shalomdammit.com.

Rabbi Sol is also the creator of the stage shows, “Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon” and “Hate Speech…With Love: Another Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon.”

© 2026 TotalTheater Productions. All Rights Reserved.

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #213 (9/11/2026): 25 Years

(c)2026 David Lefkowitz. airs September 11, 2026 on Dave’s Gone By.  

Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon, with a Rabbinical Reflection for September 11th, 2026.

Has it really been a quarter century since the attacks of 9/11? Twenty-five years gone since a handful of psycho terrorists brought New York to a cataclysmic reckoning with the Arab world.

It can’t be that long ago. It feels like it happened before Covid but after the last episode of Breaking Bad. Now, September 11th can seem recent because so many horrible side effects are still with us. You can never feel 100 percent safe in downtown New York. Only a year ago did we stop taking off our shoes to get on an airplane. And any time a bunch of people gather in a mall, or a sporting event, or a parade, and somebody screams “Allahu Akbar!”, you know that’s won’t be followed by a demonstration of God’s greatness. 

Watch any movie made in New York in the 30 years before 9/11, and there’s that moment, the establishing shot of the skyline:  you see two boring but really tall towers that tell the world, “Hey, this ain’t Wichita. This is Manhattan. And if you can make it here, you probably already have a trust fund.” Those towers have been rebuilt into a glassy obelisk thing, but I miss the rectangles. And the people who worked in them.

At the risk of sounding Islamophobic, 9/11 is the day that reminded us why we’re phobic about Islam in the first place. The savagery was so traumatic, any prompt sends us right back to where we were, what we were doing, what we should have been doing instead of what we were doing, and how we grieved in that moment. Yet we are also reminded that the invasion, which instantly took the lives of 3000 Americans and whose long-term effects are still killing us, did not occur last month. In fact, it’s so long ago that the current generation of college kids wasn’t born until five years after the planes hit Wall Street and the Pentagon. Which means that to these babies, September 11th might as well be the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It’s a lesson in the history books – except high schools are so bad they barely have time to get through World War II, let alone anything that happened in the 21st century. 

Therefore, young people have no memory of 9/11, no understanding of life beyond their own tattoos and noise-canceling headphones. This renders them perfect targets for the lies of social media and noise-making influencers. An influencer is someone who achieved fame for their looks, which gives them carte blanche to pontificate on everything they know nothing about. Even worse are the celebrities whose modicum of talent fools them into believing they’re political scientists who can win a Nobel peace prize by bashing Israel. Schmucklemore? Javier Boredom? Roger Warthog? These scumbags think they’re a think tank? 

Billie Foolish? Cynthia Toxin? Susan Sarandump? I don’t know where these putas learned poli sci, but I hope their bodies are polycystic – because left-wing college punks eat their garbage up. “9/11 was America’s fault.” “Bibi Netanyahu is Hitler.” “From the River to the Sea – It’s Team Hamas for Me!” Even the October 7th massacre is the Jews’ fault for oppressing the poor, poor Palestinians who have nowhere else to live — except 70 other countries in the Middle East and Africa . . . who won’t let them in. And that’s somehow the Jews’ fault, too.

Everything’s our fault again. Just like in the Middle Ages, like Papal Spain, like Weimar Germany. Only now the anti-Semitism is concealed behind blather like, “We just hate the Likud government. We just want the settlers out. We just prefer Jews not living near the Mediterranean but under it.” 

History has proven Hebrews need a safe place of our own to live, and that very idea puts the whole world out of joint. Muslims kill RFK, throw Leon Klinghoffer overboard, kidnap and kill an Olympic team, attack Israel on Yom Kippur, slaughter French cartoonists, butcher an Israeli music festival, blow up trains in Madrid and Mumbai, bomb airports in London, Munich, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Athens; shoot up an Australian beach, blast the Boston Marathon, and nuke the World Trade Center twice – yet somehow Arabs are the pitiful victims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Just ask any unwashed coed with a Free Gaza sign and a green tent – she’ll be happy to parrot back the hypocrisies she learned in her guilt-ridden, gender-dysmorphic, Marxist-mangling, vegan social-justice-warrior workshop. 

Worse, she can’t begin to conceive of the sunny Tuesday morning, 25 years ago, when a tornado of Muslim madness leveled downtown Manhattan. Or that same evening, when New Yorkers covered with human ash, zombied their way across the Brooklyn Bridge. Or the months following, when every American lived in fear, choked on rage, and dwelled in sorrow. 

Not only has the universe not returned to normal since it went to hell in a hummus basket, but in so many ways it’s been turned upside down by the ignorant and naive. The terrorists are the freedom fighters, the victims are all colonizers, and the truth has become fertilizer.

But I remember. I don’t forget, and I don’t forgive. And if you’re gonna come at me this week and disparagingly call me a “Zio,” or say 9/11 was “an inside job,” or couch your Jew hatred in horseshit phrases like “AIPAC money” and “stolen land,” don’t be shocked if I go Ground Zero on you. I may not be a first responder, but I think you know my first response (shows middle finger). 

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York. Happy Jewish New Year, sad anniversary, and shalom dammit.

(c) 2026 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.