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I remember how I celebrated Chanukah before my father passed away during Chanukah. It was a joyous holiday. It is not the same since he passed away. The joy is tempered with sadness. It is the same with Shemini Atzeres. Until three years ago, it was a joyful day. Then came the attack by Hamas on Shemini Atzeres. It is known by most people as October 7. Now every year, I remember those who were murdered. It was the highest number of Jews killed on a single day since the Holocaust.

It is appropriate that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attack is when Rosh HaShanah starts in the evening. The last thing on anyone’s mind when they went to work in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 was that they would never make it home. The same could be said for those on the three planes that were hijacked that day. It is a reminder that we cannot take anything for granted, including being alive.

At 2:00 a.m. on Yom Kippur morning, the carbon monoxide/smoke detector near the upstairs hallway went off with three loud beeps. It woke everyone up. I went to check it out and found nothing. Then, in the afternoon during the break, the same alarm went off again with the same three beeps, and this time added the word “fire.” Again, there was nothing unusual that would warrant the alarm going off. (This detector is only a few months old, does not require battery changes, and has a 10-year lifespan.) This has never happened before. My theory was that this was a message that at least one of the people who were home needs to step up on Yom Kippur because what they are doing so far is not enough. If you do not improve, something bad could happen. Hopefully, we got the message.

I had originally planned to write about the recent primaries in Florida, including how two Jewish members of Congress, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz, who are strong supporters of Israel, won their primaries against progressive opposition.

When an event is commemorated, there are certain milestones. Those tend to elicit more emotion. During the time between milestone years, the feeling is not the same. Time has an impact. Normally, when 9/11 would arrive, I would spend time watching videos of that day and watching some of the events commemorating the day. I would need that to put me in the right frame of mind. Even then, the feeling was not so strong. For example, 4 years ago I went to the animal shelter to adopt our guinea pig, Squirrel. It was 21 years after the attack and was not a milestone year.

A good indication of the expected age of attendees to an event is what type of music they play (if they have music). The bike ride I went to on August 16 fit that description. They were playing music from the ‘50s as opposed to music for 50-year-olds. This was probably the oldest crowd I have seen for a bike ride.