“We think of 9/11 every day,” says Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. “All you do when it comes to the anniversary, you try to look back and say have I made a difference?”

The blast of the shofar during the High Holy Days, says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, "sends a shiver" and reminds us "we can be better than we are."

Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, says everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is designed "to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on."

"On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur thousands of people gather together and go through many, many prayers in which we ask ourselves, how have I done?"

Whether they are Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist or Reform, whether they gather on a California beach or in a New York City synagogue, Jews share at least one common element at their Rosh Hashanah observances: the shofar.

"Judaism is packed with symbols. The shofar is one of the main symbols that people identify with, you know, in terms of the High Holidays" says Rabbi Chaim Hershkowitz of Chabad's Jewish Children's Museum.

We spoke about the High Holidays with a hazzan, also known as a cantor, who leads a congregation in sung prayer.

"Repentance, prayer, and charity are the hallmark[s] of this season," says Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, "We search our souls and then we pour out our souls to God, saying, 'God help us, give us the strength to be the kind of people that we want to be.'"