The synagogue I serve has recently enlisted a sofer to restore our Torah scrolls. Alongside this sacred work, he has given us the equally holy gift of educating the various age groups of our congregation. During a visit to our early childhood centre, he showed the young children the opening words of the Torah about the creation of our world in Genesis. When he asked what God created first, he received some delightful answers.
“Pizza!” one boy exclaimed.
Then a three-year-old girl offered her own guess: “Love.”
Not long afterward, we were honoured to host another extraordinary teacher: Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of murdered hostage Hersh.
Two years ago, I invited a group of friends to celebrate my 30th birthday with me, and participate in all my favourite activities to mark this exciting, and slightly terrifying, milestone. But I’ll always remember that weekend for another reason because in the news it was announced that the group of young hostages known as “the Beautiful Six,” which included Hersh, were murdered. We were sitting in a bar when I read the news from my phone, announcing their deaths. Immediately, we all went into mourning.The itinerary for the remainder of the weekend quickly shifted from partying to protesting, and from jubilation to quiet sharing. Several friends no longer had the emotional energy to participate at all.
When Rachel sat in our sanctuary, CNBC anchor Sara Eisen asked her how she felt knowing that so much of the Jewish world was mourning her beloved son alongside her.
Had it been me, I suspect I would have been angry.
“You did not know my son,” I might have thought. “Why are you making this personal tragedy about yourselves?”
But Rachel was gracious enough to share her grief and her love for Hersh with us.
Rachel’s book, When We See You Again, is a stunning, heart-wrenching testament to pain and to love. In it, and during her talk, she describes grief as a badge of love and mentioned that the only thing getting her out of bed during the 330 days of her son’s captivity was prayer, and the words “hope is mandatory.”
These days, hope is still hard to find.
Stories of antisemitism that once seemed confined to history books about 1920s Europe no longer feel distant. Jews are being pushed out of institutions. Security has become a fixture inside Jewish spaces that once relied only on outdoor guards. Missing-person posters are torn down. No longer the ones of hostages but those like Toronto teen Esther, who has thankfully returned home, but whose only crime was being born a Jew.
I am scared and I am angry.
I know I’m not alone.
Yet, like Rachel, I have hope. Perhaps it is not entirely warranted. But it is necessary for survival.
After Hersh’s death, Rachel learned that what had sustained his hope in captivity was the wisdom he gleaned from Man’s Search for Meaning, written by Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. Frankl argued that human beings can endure unimaginable suffering if they know their purpose, if they can identify their “why.”
Rachel heard from survivors of the tunnels that Hersh had shared this lesson with them. When someone would falter, they would ask one another: “What’s your why?” For many it was simple: the family waiting for them at home.
In this time of suffering, we too must ask ourselves: What is our why?
For me, the answer comes from that preschool classroom. It is to find love amidst the void.
Despite the torture she indured, Rachel offers a remarkable lesson in her memoir:
“In Hebrew, the word for suffering is sevel. And the word for patience is savlanut. And the word for tolerance is sovlanut. The roots are all the same. Suffering, tolerance, and patience each grow from the same place. The same core. And though there's no linear path that I can discern, I do know I want to grow tolerance and patience so that I can bear the suffering, and do something else with it.”
The cure for suffering is not anger or revenge.
Human beings are capable of something extraordinary: an expansive, unending love.
Rachel recounts meeting with the Pope during her tireless campaign to secure her son’s release. He told her that what Hersh was enduring and what she herself was withstanding was terrorism. Then he added: “Terrorism is the absence of humanity.”
It is this lesson that is so important to uphold. We must not let anti-Jewish hatred rob us of our humanity, not for the sake of others, but for our own sake. In the face of hate, there is nothing more powerful than choosing love.
Perhaps that is what my preschool student understood all along. Before there was anything else—before fear, before grief, before suffering—God created love.
May we, like Rachel, find the strength to be God’s emissaries of love here on earth.
The synagogue I serve has recently enlisted a sofer to restore our Torah scrolls. Alongside this sacred work, he has given us the equally holy gift of educating the various age groups of our congregation. During a visit to our early childhood centre, he showed the young children the opening words of the Torah about the creation of our world in Genesis. When he asked what God created first, he received some delightful answers.
“Pizza!” one boy exclaimed.
Then a three-year-old girl offered her own guess: “Love.”
Not long afterward, we were honoured to host another extraordinary teacher: Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of murdered hostage Hersh.
Two years ago, I invited a group of friends to celebrate my 30th birthday with me, and participate in all my favourite activities to mark this exciting, and slightly terrifying, milestone. But I’ll always remember that weekend for another reason because in the news it was announced that the group of young hostages known as “the Beautiful Six,” which included Hersh, were murdered. We were sitting in a bar when I read the news from my phone, announcing their deaths. Immediately, we all went into mourning.The itinerary for the remainder of the weekend quickly shifted from partying to protesting, and from jubilation to quiet sharing. Several friends no longer had the emotional energy to participate at all.
When Rachel sat in our sanctuary, CNBC anchor Sara Eisen asked her how she felt knowing that so much of the Jewish world was mourning her beloved son alongside her.
Had it been me, I suspect I would have been angry.
“You did not know my son,” I might have thought. “Why are you making this personal tragedy about yourselves?”
But Rachel was gracious enough to share her grief and her love for Hersh with us.
Rachel’s book, When We See You Again, is a stunning, heart-wrenching testament to pain and to love. In it, and during her talk, she describes grief as a badge of love and mentioned that the only thing getting her out of bed during the 330 days of her son’s captivity was prayer, and the words “hope is mandatory.”
These days, hope is still hard to find.
Stories of antisemitism that once seemed confined to history books about 1920s Europe no longer feel distant. Jews are being pushed out of institutions. Security has become a fixture inside Jewish spaces that once relied only on outdoor guards. Missing-person posters are torn down. No longer the ones of hostages but those like Toronto teen Esther, who has thankfully returned home, but whose only crime was being born a Jew.
I am scared and I am angry.
I know I’m not alone.
Yet, like Rachel, I have hope. Perhaps it is not entirely warranted. But it is necessary for survival.
After Hersh’s death, Rachel learned that what had sustained his hope in captivity was the wisdom he gleaned from Man’s Search for Meaning, written by Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. Frankl argued that human beings can endure unimaginable suffering if they know their purpose, if they can identify their “why.”
Rachel heard from survivors of the tunnels that Hersh had shared this lesson with them. When someone would falter, they would ask one another: “What’s your why?” For many it was simple: the family waiting for them at home.
In this time of suffering, we too must ask ourselves: What is our why?
For me, the answer comes from that preschool classroom. It is to find love amidst the void.
Despite the torture she indured, Rachel offers a remarkable lesson in her memoir:
“In Hebrew, the word for suffering is sevel. And the word for patience is savlanut. And the word for tolerance is sovlanut. The roots are all the same. Suffering, tolerance, and patience each grow from the same place. The same core. And though there's no linear path that I can discern, I do know I want to grow tolerance and patience so that I can bear the suffering, and do something else with it.”
The cure for suffering is not anger or revenge.
Human beings are capable of something extraordinary: an expansive, unending love.
Rachel recounts meeting with the Pope during her tireless campaign to secure her son’s release. He told her that what Hersh was enduring and what she herself was withstanding was terrorism. Then he added: “Terrorism is the absence of humanity.”
It is this lesson that is so important to uphold. We must not let anti-Jewish hatred rob us of our humanity, not for the sake of others, but for our own sake. In the face of hate, there is nothing more powerful than choosing love.
Perhaps that is what my preschool student understood all along. Before there was anything else—before fear, before grief, before suffering—God created love.
May we, like Rachel, find the strength to be God’s emissaries of love here on earth.