I didn’t know Rav Avi Goldberg, but he served as a rabbi in Memphis and left just a few years prior to my arrival. From all the accounts I’ve read, Rav Avi was unparalleled in his kindness, his devotion to peace-making, his love of the Torah, his love for the people of Israel and the land, and his genuine soul. He was a guide, teacher, and mentor. His teachers looked up to him just as much as his students. Rav Avi was gentle and sensitive, his longing for peace was apparent to everyone who knew him.
For the majority of the last year, Rav Avi was away from his wife and their 8 children while he served in the reserves in Israel, and this past week, he fell in battle in Lebanon. In Israel, homes that sit shiva are often very public, and all the more so for someone that has died in warfare. Thousands of people were at his funeral, and many more will come through the doors of his family’s home to pay a shiva call. Knowing this, his family put out an invitation and a call: Politicians were welcome to come for shiva, and if so, they must arrive with someone of the opposite party. They must arrive in pairs, having come together, to commit to the work that Rav Avi felt was his mission: bridging gaps and bringing people together for the betterment of our communities. And in fact, many politicians arrived this week to pay their respects paired with someone that they have viewed as opposite them, against them. His family said, “only come if you are committed to building together, to unity.”
Even in the moments of their greatest anguish and grief, of children losing a father, a woman losing her husband, the family was committed to the principles that were most important to him. And in doing so, they demanded that if others were to share in their grief, they must also share in Rav Avi’s passions.
I wish that I had the zechut, the merit, of knowing him and learning from him. Perhaps some of you did. But the beautiful - and tragic - thing about his legacy, now made so public, is that we still can learn from him. We can learn from the unbelievable example that his widow Rachel sets, of using this moment to continue his life’s work. This is what it means to make someone’s memory a blessing. To take what they stood for, what they fought for, and to turn it into action. It shouldn’t take this kind of grief, this tragedy, for us to reach across the aisle, to work with others. I hope that we too, across the world, in a community that he loved, can learn from his life’s work.
May the memory of Rav Avi Goldberg continue to be a blessing, may it bless us, may it bless all people, as we come together.
