On September 11, 2026, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Academic Dean Michael Polebaum shared the following personal reflection with the Falmouth Academy community at All-School Meeting. His words, rooted in his own connection to that day and its aftermath, deeply moved those gathered. We are grateful to Michael for entrusting our community with his story and for allowing us to share it here.

Good morning. For those of you I still haven't met, my name is Michael Polebaum, and I am the new academic dean. While most of what you’ve heard from me pertains to schedules and class placements, I'd like to introduce myself properly by telling you about my cousin Scott.

Scott Saber was the towering figure of my childhood, and, improbably, he wanted to spend time with me. Which was surprising considering I was loud, brash, and impertinent towards Yankees fans, and Scott was a Yankee fan. I would insist, loudly and constantly, that the mid-90s Red Sox were the greatest team in baseball and that the Yankees were the worst. Scott took my bets. The wager got bigger every time, until by the end of a season I was thousands of dollars in debt to a grown man. Fortunately, he always accepted an IOU.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airplanes. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. One was flown into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after the passengers on board fought to take back control of it. Nearly three thousand people were killed that day. My cousin Scott was one of them.

That morning, instead of going to his office in midtown, Scott had gone downtown to give a keynote on the 107th floor of the North Tower, at the restaurant called Windows on the World. Breakfast, a speech, back to the office by ten. Scott never returned home. I was eleven years old, two weeks into the sixth grade, and I had no idea what to do with any of it.

I remember that day more clearly than almost any other in my life. Being pulled out of class for a special assembly, and our head of school telling us the country had been attacked. The parents standing in the lobby, waiting to take their kids home. Mrs. Locke at the front of math class with no idea how to proceed. Mr. Vorenberg taking out his harmonica and playing it, because he thought it might help. And sitting outside afterward, looking up at that ridiculous blue September sky and realizing there was not a single plane in it.

The next day my parents sat us down and told us Scott was missing and presumed dead. That evening my father took me grocery shopping, and we ran into my grandmother's cousin in the aisle; She held onto me for a long time while I cried. I have never felt so completely safe and so completely terrified at the same time.

That was twenty-five years ago. For most of you, September 11th is a chapter in a textbook, and textbooks are good at telling you what happened and terrible at telling you what it was like. Twenty-five years is about the point where an event stops being remembered and starts being taught. I’m a history teacher and I have spent my entire career on the teaching side of that line. This is the first time I have been on the other side of it.

Tonight is erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Twenty-five years ago, September 11th also fell days before Rosh Hashanah, so most of what I remember about that autumn is tangled up in synagogue. I remember the rabbi reading my cousin's name out loud. Scott Saber. And I remember the whole congregation turning toward my family. I could feel it happen.

Rosh Hashanah begins the Days of Awe. The Book of Life is opened, and for ten days most of us hang in the balance, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. During those ten days,   you are supposed to take an honest accounting of the person you have been this year. The word for that work is teshuvah. It usually gets translated as repentance. It more literally means return. And when I think about teshuvah, I think about Scott.

Because the Scott I have been describing is not the Scott my mother met. When she met him he was thirteen, and he was selfish, and he was cruel, and he was a bigot. He was racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. He would not have been in a room with a gay man if he could help it. My mother came home from his bar mitzvah unimpressed. If you had told her that her children would grow up worshipping this kid, she would have laughed in your face.

Maimonides teaches that you haven't truly completed teshuvah until you find yourself back in the same situation and act differently.

In the summer of 2001, Scott's older brother Brian came home from Vietnam with his newly adopted nine-month-old son and found that a burst pipe had flooded his apartment. Everything he owned was underwater. Brian was a single gay man with an infant and nowhere to go, and he called Scott. Scott's apartment could comfortably hold one adult and a houseplant. He said come. He never once acted like it was a favor.

Same situation. Different man.

The story read aloud in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah is the one where God tells Abraham to take his son up a mountain and sacrifice him. Abraham goes. At the top, with the knife raised, an angel calls his name, and Abraham answers with a single word: hineni. Here I am. It does not mean "I obey." It is closer to "I am present. I am turned toward you."

When the first plane hit, Scott called his assistant and asked her to tell his mother he was fine, that they were being evacuated up the stairs to the roof. Then he stopped using the phone. He passed it around so that the people trapped up there with him could call home. He never called his own mother. 

When the angel stopped Abraham's hand, Abraham untied his son and came down the mountain. It is striking to note that Isaac is not with him. A man who had been willing to sacrifice everything he loved for his God comes down that mountain alone, carrying his grief.

Weeks later, at Scott's memorial service, I watched my aunt Elaine try to stand up. Elaine was strong and proud and stubborn. Born in Brooklyn, she raised her kids on Long Island, certain of her beliefs and a hard nut to crack. And there she was in that synagogue, barely able to get to her feet, weighed down by her grief and no longer sure of the God she had been praying to her entire life.

I was crying in the pews when I noticed a man walking down the center aisle toward her. He had flown in from Tel Aviv. Scott had handed his phone to that man's son so he could call his wife and say goodbye. I watched two strangers hold each other up in the middle of that sanctuary.

My aunt did not come down that mountain alone.

Hineni. Here I am. Scott had twenty minutes left and he spent them on the person standing next to him. And a man on the other side of the world, who had just lost his own son, crossed an ocean so that my aunt would not have to stand up by herself.

This is the start of a year for all of us. A new school year, and tonight a new year on the Jewish calendar. For me, a new school entirely, in front of a room with no prior evidence about who I am. Scott was thirteen years old and full of hate, and he became a man who gave away the last twenty minutes of his life to strangers. If he could manage that, none of us have an excuse.

So this year, when you find yourself back in a situation you have been in before, act differently. Open the door. Turn toward whoever is in front of you and say: here I am.

That is what I am going to try to do this year. Shanah tovah.

In remembrance of the 2,977 lives lost this day 25 years ago, I ask for a moment of silence.