September 6, 2024
3 Elul 5784
We began blowing the shofar this week. To me, it sounded like wailing. Like gasps for air. Like cries that emerge from the deepest corners of our souls.
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah we read in the Haftarah,
כֹּה אָמַר יְהֹוָה קוֹל בְּרָמָה נִשְׁמָע נְהִי בְּכִי תַמְרוּרִים רָחֵל מְבַכָּה עַל־בָּנֶיהָ מֵאֲנָה לְהִנָּחֵם עַל־בָּנֶיהָ כִּי אֵינֶנּוּ׃
Thus said God: “A cry is heard in Ramah— Wailing, bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone.
These words have reverberated through my brain the entire gut-wrenching week. In that haftarah, we are meant to understand Rachel Imenu, our matriarch Rachel, as the mother of all Jews, weeping for them sent into exile. But this week, these words meant something different, as we saw another mother Rachel, weep, bitterly, for her son.
This Rachel, too, has become the mother of all the Jewish people. The mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l, Rachel spent eleven months travelling around the world speaking to anyone who would listen to her son’s story, and in truth, the story of every single hostage. As his parents reiterated at the DNC just a few weeks ago, each one represents an entire universe. They have been the voice of universe upon universe. Her pain was our pain, because she brought Hersh to all of us. He was our son, our brother, our friend. We thought we’d cried all the tears there were to cry and felt all the anguish our souls could bear. But we were wrong, and we have shed more tears and we have felt our souls torn apart.
All of the deaths, the innocent, precious souls brutally murdered, they are all horrible and utterly tragic. And I’ve been thinking about why Hersh’s death in particular was such a gut punch to our people, why his brutal murder feels like such a devastating blow. His mother Rachel, who became all of our mothers, her pain was our pain but her hope was also our hope, when we thought our reservoirs were empty. Throughout these eleven months, she has been a masterclass in resilience and hope in the face of the worst nightmare.
I feel as sad as I do, as much grief as I do, because I had hope. Because she gave us hope. We are a nation of believers. Even after almost eleven months of being held in captivity by monsters, we prayed for their rescue and we believed it was possible. I believed. I thought it didn’t have to end this way, that perhaps one day we would celebrate Hersh’s return, a glorious reunification with his family. And so we are in another level of grief and mourning.
And yet, if there is any message from our people’s tortured history, when there have been too many like Hersh, we are taught to somehow still have hope. To somehow believe that things will be different. To still believe it doesn’t have to be this way.
That Haftarah continues with Jeremiah’s prophecy, that God has heard Rachel’s tears. He writes that the Jewish nation will be restored to their borders. The scroll is still wet, drenched in tears, and yet somehow it is able to end with a note of hope. We will hear those words chanted in just under a month, and I hope they will be true then. That our people will be returned to our land.
May the memories of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi be a blessing for all. May their lives inspire us to not give up on the possibility of a better world. May their memories be a revolution.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Sarit
