“What we have learned from Rachel Goldberg-Polin” ( Second day of Rosh HaShanah 5785 / 2024)

 Second day of Rosh HaShanah 5785 / 2024: 

“What we have learned from Rachel Goldberg-Polin”

Rabbi Robert Scheinberg

United Synagogue of Hoboken

A voice is heard in the heights:  wailing, bitter weeping; Rachel crying for her children. 

 קֹ֣ול בְּרָמָ֤ה נִשְׁמָע֙ נְהִי֙ בְּכִ֣י תַמְרוּרִ֔ים רָחֵ֖ל מְבַכָּ֣ה עַל־בָּנֶ֑יהָ

We read these words in today’s Haftarah from the book of Jeremiah.  These words have been on my mind truly all year since I first heard the name Rachel Goldberg-Polin.  I never met Rachel though we are almost exact contemporaries and we have numerous friends in common.  and I know there are several people in our community, maybe here in this room right now, who have some connection with her.  

Around the world people know Rachel now, and for the most terrible reason:  she is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin of blessed memory, who was murdered by his Hamas captors eleven months after being kidnapped on October 7 and she emerged as one of the most public faces for the English speaking world of the aftermath of October 7. She has been such a public face, in fact, that even people who never met her, feel like they know her.  Just as people who never met Hersh, now feel like they knew Hersh -- who should have been celebrating his 24th birthday yesterday, October 3.  

Rachel is on my mind today not only because of the image that we read about in today’s haftarah -- the devastating image of Rachel weeping for her children. But I’m also thinking about how -- at the dawn of a new year, Jewish tradition invites us to make every effort to be our best selves, and to picture : how can we best live up to our potential?  How can we bring healing to ourselves and to others? How can we live lives that are maximally connected?  How can we balance our strength and our vulnerability? How can we fulfill whatever we think is God’s role for us in the world? How can we live lives of awareness and gratitude, and compassion and forgiveness? how can we be dedicated to those who are close to us and also have room in our hearts for all of humanity?  

And there is probably something that each of us could learn from how Rachel Goldberg-Polin and her husband Jon Polin answered these questions during this terribly agonizing year.  

That’s why -- though I have never done this before -- I want to devote my entire sermon today to just some of what Rachel Goldberg-Polin, together with Jon Polin, have taught us and taught the world this year.   All people are different and clearly there are aspects of Rachel’s story that will resonate differently for each of us, and no one person is likely to be a role model for us in all ways.  But there’s hopefully some wisdom here for each of us as we walk through the tribulations of our own lives -- with the hope that we will not have our love and commitment tested as theirs has been, even if what we each decide to take away from their story may be  different.  

In the book of Esther, Mordechai approaches Queen Esther to ask her to intercede with the king on behalf of the Jewish people, and Queen Esther is really reluctant to do it.  Mordechai says to her:  ומי יודע אם לעת כזאת הגעת למלכות -- “Who knows - maybe it was for a time such as this that you got to your royal position.” And that’s what convinces Esther to step up and become an advocate for her people. I remember this line when I think of ordinary people who get thrust into public roles that they never sought and then use those roles to exercise remarkable and heroic leadership.    Please don’t misunderstand me -- I am not suggesting that God inflicts suffering on people in order to get them to exercise leadership.  Not at all.  But sometimes adversity pushes us in directions that we never would have chosen to go. And when the need arises, we activate the various traits that we have, simply because we have no choice.  That’s what Rachel and Jon did throughout this year - because they felt it was their responsibility to their son and to all those who were kidnapped and all those who were victims of October 7. 

Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute described this especially poignantly: 

One time I heard Rachel Goldberg speak this year, she alluded to these encounters born of relentless desperation, the need to set up a telegram account, the willingness to travel to places they didn’t know, shrouded in secrecy, to meet people none of us would ever want to meet, looking for leverage or anything else that might bring Hersh home. The whole story is unfathomable. Many times this year, I found myself wondering whether I would have had the fortitude to do a fraction of what they did. There were many times I watched Rachel, quite visibly a private person, speaking with a clarity of message like a biblical prophet channeling the wisdom of the divine, and I thought to myself, I speak publicly for a living, and I can’t hold a candle to what this woman is doing all by herself, with no ghost writers, just the pulsing of a soul, longing to hug her son one more time.

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Rachel began last fall to put a piece of masking tape over her heart on which she would write the number of days since the war had begun, since her son had been kidnapped, this counting of days of days of suffering and torture and longing that went on longer than anyone could have imagined. It was one way that she could continue putting one foot in front of the other, but also a way to remind a world that seemed uninterested, that the people in this crisis were real people who were truly suffering.  She would look people in the eye and ask them what they would do if their child was held in captivity for this agonizing number of days. The number of her heart would drive home the multiple absurdities of the endurance of this hostage crisis -- including for example that the Red Cross had not and actually still has not been given access to ANY hostages that have been held in Gaza for these many months.  (Can you imagine how this year would have been different, if the Red Cross had been permitted to visit the hostages even once?) 

And soon many others started similarly to wear masking tape with numbers in solidarity with Rachel and Hersh and all those who were seeming to be forgotten, or expendable.  

Rachel is an educator, and that informed her statements which tended to focus on the Torah portion of the week and on the Jewish practices that were the bedrock of their family and that continued to provide solace to her during this agonizing year.  She spoke, for example, about the birkat habanim, the priestly blessing that she would bestow upon her children every Friday night, and how the traditional Jewish blessing for sons surprisingly enough says ישימך אלהים כאפרים וכמנשה - May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe, who are at best, bit players in the Torah - they’re the two sons of Joseph, and they are really prominent only in one scene in the torah-- the torah would not give you the impression that these two people are paradigms of blessing.  And she cites the interpretation that we say ‘may God make you like Ephraim and Menashe’ for one simple reason -- they are actually the first siblings in the torah who get along well with each other.  This is our chiefest prayer for our children -- and it is God’s chiefest prayer for all of us who are God’s children. 

With each Jewish holiday, Rachel would share some insight about the meaning of the holiday and the value of pidyon shevuyim, the Jewish imperative to empathize with and take all possible steps for the redemption of captives.  Like many of us she expressed being stunned that Jewish tradition has included a prayer specifically for the welfare of captives that is nearly 1000 years old because this has been a communal challenge for that entire time. 

I shared with our community the videos that I took at an Erev Shirah, an evening of communal singing in Jerusalem, that Rachel and Jon had convened this summer as part of a series of events to both express solidarity with the hostages, and to take the grief and sadness that everyone was feeling and to start to channel it into building community. And somehow they managed to do something all too rare in Israel today --  creating an event that brought thousands of religious Jews and secular Jews together who often operate in separate spheres and often have different political priorities, and who definitely sing different songs -- to come together for an evening of singing the same Hebrew songs, the very most secular and the very most religious.  

The Israeli scholar and rabbi Mishael Zion wrote this year that he was about to be interviewed on TV in Tel Aviv and the journalist, seeing his kippah, asked him “Wait, what type of religious person are you exactly?” -- as there’s a lot of effort in Israel today, as in so many places in the world, to get people to define the little ideological box in which they fit themselves. Mishael was confused and a little annoyed at the question, but then he said “You’ve heard of Hersh’s parents, Rachel and Jon, from Jerusalem? So I’m religious like them.”  (By which he may have meant that this shomer shabbat family that was deeply connected to an egalitarian prayer community, that was eager to stand alongside faith leaders of all religions in prayer for the welfare of their son and the other captives,  are bridge builders who defy simple categorization.)

This summer,  Rachel and Jon led an initiative to write a new torah scroll for their community, the egalitarian community in Jerusalem called Hakhel, in honor of Hersh, in memory of those who had died, and in the hope and prayer that this new torah scroll would be a mitzvah bringing merit to Hersh.  Remarkably, in her speech at the dedication of that torah scroll, Rachel had the presence of mind to express her extreme gratitude to her community who had stood with her throughout such a difficult 10 months at that point.  And she noted that at the dedication of a torah scroll it’s traditional to say the Sheheheyanu blessing for special occasions - the blessing that says ‘thank you god for having kept us in life and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this day.”   Sheheheyanu tends to be everyone’s favorite blessing,  and when it’s said with genuine kavvanah (intention), it’s a blessing that reminds us that we have so much to be grateful for, that even being alive is a gift not to  be taken for granted.  And Rachel spoke about her ambivalence because it is so hard to say a blessing like Sheheheyanu - when knowing that her son is living in agony and torture, just 60 miles away.   But she acknowledged the wisdom of Jewish tradition that has us say this blessing at specific times even if we are not feeling we can say it in the full throated way.  And so they recited the Sheheheyanu - but also noted that it would be nothing like the Sheheheyanu that they hoped to recite when Hersh would come home safe. 

As I noted yesterday, it is not surprising when people experiencing terrible trauma have trouble looking beyond their own pain to the pain of others.  We have seen that so much this year.  And surprisingly enough, over and over Rachel was likely to make reference even while advocating for the welfare of her son, for the welfare of all who caught up in this monumental tragedy.

She wrote in the New York Times last October about how Hersh was named after his great-great-uncle Hersh who was killed in the Holocaust, and how it was so meaningful to her that some of Hersh's best friends in the world were fans of a particular German soccer team, and he had recently spent time with them in Germany.   She wrote: “ It was beautiful for me to be reminded, through these friendships, that for young Germans and Jews particularly, the world that Hersh has lived in has recognized and worked to overcome the terror experienced by my great-uncle.” 

At one of her first speeches at the United Nations, Rachel told the tragic story of how Hersh and several other young people took refuge in a shelter but then Hamas terrorists kept throwing grenades into the shelter - and Hersh’s friend Aner picked them up and threw them back outside before they exploded - until the one grenade that he did not get to in time, which killed him - and that or a different grenade is how Hersh lost his arm. 

And then Rachel went on to tell another tragic part of the story.  “One thing gave me a whisper of hope on October 7th, because one of the witnesses with whom I spoke told me that when the rocket fire began, and when all those hippies went running into the bomb shelter, there was a Bedouin man who was a guard at the kibbutz across the street, and he ran into that same shelter, and as Hamas closed in on the bomb shelter, the man said: “Stay quiet let me go talk to them.” And [he] went outside and said in Arabic: “I am a Muslim. Everyone inside is my family. They are Muslim. You don’t have to search in there.”  He tried to save them. He could have said “I am a Muslim” and just saved himself, but he tried to do the right thing, even though it was terrifying, and even though it required unimaginable courage – he was brutally beaten, and the witnesses do not know what his fate was, but I take comfort for a fleeting moment that there was someone trying to do the right thing when everything in the universe had been turned upside down. We human beings have been blessed with the gifts of intellect, creativity, insight and perception. Why are we not using them to solve global conflicts all over the world? Because doing this is hard and takes fortitude and imagination, grit, risk and hope. So instead we opt for hatred because hatred is so comfortable and so very, very easy.”

Throughout every step of her advocacy, Rachel continually noted that whereas the villainy in this story came from Hamas, the death and destruction were happening to Israelis and Palestinians alike. this is the text of a poem that she wrote and shared earlier this year at the UN, called “One Tiny Seed.”  Before she read it, she noted that she had written it “for a woman in Gaza -- she knows who she is”:    

There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand tears before you grow to be a man.
I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?
Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.
And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.

We know the next part of the story, full of multiple layers of tragedy, that that dream was not to be. Not only would Hersh not come home alive -- but he was murdered by his captors,  and if he hadn’t been, he quite likely could have survived. And that only with the news of his death did his family know for sure that he had survived in captivity for 11 months.  

Hersh’s funeral took place just as the relatives of his dear friend Aner were concluding their 11 months of saying Kaddish. And there were yet more things to learn from Rachel. She began her eulogy with Hakarat Hatov - with an expression of gratitude - who ever heard of such a thing , expressing gratitude when your son has been murdered after 11 months in captivity?  but she said:  It is not that Hersh was perfect. But, he was the perfect son for me. And I am so grateful to G-d, and I want to do hakarat hatov and thank G-d right now, for giving me this magnificent present of my Hersh…. For 23 years I was privileged to have this most stunning treasure, to be Hersh’s Mama. I’ll take it and say thank you. I just wish it had been for longer.

She spoke in her eulogy with the wisdom of someone who had been thinking deeply and hopefully about the arc of grief, when she said: I know it will take a long time, but please may G-d bless us that one day, one fine day, Dada, Leebie, Orly and I will hear laughter, and we will turn around and see… that it’s us. And that we are ok. 

And one of Rachel’s most profound messages was something she communicated non-verbally on the day of the funeral - because she was still wearing a piece of masking tape over her heart, now with the number 330.  And in so doing she demonstrated that this gesture was never about her and was not only about Hersh - it was about all those who were captive and all whose lives were disrupted. 

From a traditional Jewish perspective, one of the objectives of this time of year is Tikkun ha-Middot - examining our actions and character traits and seeing where and how it’s possible to grow. And sometimes seeing the example of others is helpful in that process.  Rachel Goldberg-Polin never sought to be a public figure and would have given anything to not be well known. And yet, Throughout this most horrifying year, somehow Rachel, together with Jon, managed to become exemplars of mustering their strength,  seeking out opportunities for gratitude even at excruciating times, and being willing to express vulnerability and brutal honesty and compassion. Each of us in our own way may be able to find some inspiration from their words and example.

Before our service continues I would like to give Rachel the last word - in some words she sent to members of the Hakhel community at the conclusion of Shiva, which also can be an inspiration for any community about how to care for people at a time of crisis.

To my beautiful Hakhel family,

How do I begin to thank you for every single thing? For 342 days you have been with us. In every way, every day. So, the words 'thank you' are so hollow. But here goes an attempt to express to you a molecule of gratitude for the universe of support, effort and love you showered us with by the bucketful, every single day, in different ways, for hundreds of days and millions of seconds.

From the late morning of October 7th, you showed up. Since then, those of you I knew and didn't know have prayed for Hersh and us, cooked, advocated, took to the streets, cried for us and tried for us. Prayed and prayed and prayed. I felt it. It washed over me. I felt it.

And then came that shiva that was so surreal and unfamiliar. But you all showed up in different ways. You all looked like angels in bright yellow vests. You were magnificently bossy when needed with the hoards [of visitors]. And gentle, always so gentle with us.

 … I feel tremendous relief that he is not in that hell hole (literally) anymore. I am so relieved we gave his battered and abused body a proper majestic and halachic burial. I am so relieved that his beautiful neshama is finally free. I will now have to learn to be in this world without him. But having him all the years I did is worth the pain I will have.

Worth every tear and sigh and lump in my throat and every pang of pain until it's my time to be buried next to him when I am 120 and have many grandchildren and great grandchildren (hopefully, one who is named Hersh). Worth it. Worth it...truly.

… Thank you endlessly and always for holding us however you have during this dark chapter. ….Keep davening that we all survive and thrive again somehow, someway...someday; BECAUSE WE WILL.

And may Hersh's light always inspire us. May his memory be a blessing and a revolution... but not a crazy revolution... just a revolution to think and do differently.

To think and do....better.