(RNS) — I write these phrases on Sunday morning (Sept. 1). It was a sleepless evening. At round 11:30 p.m., the telephone had began buzzing on my evening desk. It was a textual content from a good friend: “They murdered Hersh.”
5 different hostages had additionally been murdered by Hamas, their our bodies recovered on Saturday.
It’s common to talk of triggers and set off warnings. Issues occur that remind you of different issues that occur.
Jonathan Safran Foer put it this manner in “The whole lot Is Illuminated“:
Jews have six senses. Contact, style, sight, scent, listening to … reminiscence… For Jews reminiscence isn’t any much less major than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the style of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers different pins. It is just by tracing the pinprick again to different pinpricks.
We keep in mind how the tallit feels after we drape it round our shoulders. We keep in mind the style of the haroset (the apple nut combination) from Passover to Passover. We keep in mind what it was wish to see Jerusalem for the primary time. We keep in mind the scent of the challah baking within the oven. We keep in mind the sound of the shofar.
We keep in mind the pinpricks.
Final evening, I felt the pinprick.
No, we mentioned. Not them. Not Hersh.
In Jerusalem, you can’t stroll various ft with out encountering a poster of the hostages. Essentially the most distinguished amongst them, it typically appeared, was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American citizen, taken hostage at Nova, who had misplaced a part of his arm as he was captured.
There are lots of hostages, and we have no idea what number of are nonetheless alive. The thoughts and soul stretch to think about that. Hersh grew to become the face of Oct. 7, as Anne Frank was and is the face of the Holocaust.
His vast familiarity was as a result of monumental, unimaginable human, private and non secular activism of the Goldberg-Polin household, particularly Rachel. They saved Hersh within the public eye and within the public creativeness, inserting his story earlier than roughly 26 million viewers in the course of the Democratic Nationwide Conference.
Wall graffiti within the German Colony, Jerusalem: “Hersh lives!”
In consequence it appeared that within the Jewish world there was solely two levels of separation between any explicit Jew and the Goldberg-Polin household. Everybody is aware of somebody who is aware of somebody who is aware of the Goldberg-Polins.
Not simply Hersh. No — one other good friend had hosted Carmel Gat, of blessed reminiscence, at his son’s bar mitzvah celebration 13 years in the past.
And so it goes. We Jews are a small folks, however we’re a big household. If the Jewish folks had its personal Fb web page, everybody would finally present up on it.
I have a look at the leftover challah from Shabbat, and its braids; I have a look at the twisted strands of the havdalah candle, which we lit hours earlier than we discovered of those deaths. I say to myself: That is who I’m, and that is who we’re.
We, the Jews, are a braided challah — every considered one of us a strand. We, the bigger human household, are a havdalah candle — ideally, a kind of attractive multicolored candles you can get in Israel and elsewhere, every coloration including its personal hue to a tangle of human concern.
If we might enter the properties of the households who discovered their youngsters’s destiny, what would we are saying to them? We typically say that there aren’t any phrases, however there really are phrases — phrases consistently purified in Jewish tears, non secular and emotional boilerplate, time-tested over the centuries.
“Might God consolation you, within the midst of all those that nonetheless mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.”
In Hebrew, the prayer refers to God with a reasonably uncommon time period: HaMakom. HaMakom actually means “the place.” God is the place of the universe, the place past all locations.
In a Hasidic story, a person says to his son: “I will provide you with a gold coin when you can inform me the place God is.”
To which his son responds, with an applicable quantity of conventional Jewish snark: “And, I will provide you with three gold cash when you can inform me the place God just isn’t.”
In current weeks, I’ve been to quite a few locations the place God is current, the place I felt the Divine Presence most acutely and paradoxically.
I felt the Divine Presence within the ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz, devastated on Oct. 7.
I felt it on the website of the Nova competition — a spot of ample, magical life remodeled into a spot of loss of life.
“The place does God dwell?” somebody requested the Hasidic trainer the Kotzker Rebbe. To which he replied: “Wherever you let God in.” Generally, you simply need to shoehorn God into a spot.
After we name God HaMakom, the place, we’re saying God comprises each facet of existence. Current in moments of delivery, and current moments of loss of life; current in our laughter, and current in our tears; current within the infants we maintain in our arms; current within the historical mother and father whom we additionally maintain in our arms.
Current, even and particularly, in our hopes — even, and particularly, in dashed hopes and shattered goals.
After which, the comforter asks that God consolation the mourner “within the midst of all those that nonetheless mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.”
“What?” the bereaved individual would possibly ask. “My grief isn’t sufficient, I now have to recollect everybody else who’s mourning, and who has ever mourned?”
Stick with it. Keep in it. The Jew by no means walks alone. We stroll with our household. We stroll with our buddies. We stroll with our historical past.
What occurs at a brit or baby-naming? The mohel or mohelet invokes the presence of Abraham, echoing God’s phrases to Abraham: “Stroll earlier than Me, and be complete.”
The mohel or mohelet factors to an empty chair, and says: “That is the chair of Elijah the prophet.” We think about that Elijah attends each delivery ceremony. Abraham is the primary Jew. Elijah, the forerunner of the Messiah, is destined to be the final Jew. Each of them, expert within the artwork of righteous anger (as we really feel now); each of them, expert within the artwork of righteous consolation (as we should now provide one another, and ourselves).
What occurs at a marriage ceremony? At that second, the couple are not themselves. They will think about themselves as Adam and Eve, cradled but once more within the Backyard of Eden. It’s a dream; as Joni Mitchell sang about Woodstock, 55 years in the past final month — “Now we have acquired again to the Backyard” — and now we have not often felt as removed from the Backyard as we do as we speak.
The seven marriage ceremony blessings finish with the proclamation that this marriage might herald the approaching of the messianic age. “But once more might it’s heard within the streets of Jerusalem: the sound of bride and groom rejoicing, the sounds of youngsters taking part in…”
Every time I learn, say, or hear these phrases, I cry.
I cry as we speak.
What occurs at a funeral, and in the course of the mourning interval? You, the mourner, will not be alone. You might be surrounded by all those that nonetheless mourn in Zion and Jerusalem.
After we weep for our useless, our wails echo the cries of those that wept on the destruction of Jerusalem, and each destruction and loss of life since. Mourning has a manner of collapsing time and area. Each Jewish foot walks, ankle deep, by way of an historical, trendy, ever-renewing River of Tears.
Historical past lives in all Jews, and thru all Jews. No Jew really walks alone.
We stroll with the Goldberg-Polins, and with the households of Grasp Sgt. Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi.
Our mourning is deep; our rage, incalculable.
Might God consolation their households, within the midst of all who nonetheless mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.
