(RNS) — I write these words on Sunday morning (Sept. 1). It was a sleepless night. At around 11:30 p.m., the phone had started buzzing on my night table. It was a text from a friend: “They murdered Hersh.”
Five other hostages had also been murdered by Hamas, their bodies recovered on Saturday.
It is common to speak of triggers and trigger warnings. Things happen that remind you of other things that happen.
Jonathan Safran Foer put it this way in “Everything Is Illuminated”:
Jews have six senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory… For Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks.
We remember how the tallit feels when we drape it around our shoulders. We remember the taste of the haroset (the apple nut mixture) from Passover to Passover. We remember what it was like to see Jerusalem for the first time. We remember the smell of the challah baking in the oven. We remember the sound of the shofar.
We remember the pinpricks.
Last night, I felt the pinprick.
No, we said. Not them. Not Hersh.
In Jerusalem, you cannot walk more than a few feet without encountering a poster of the hostages. The most prominent among them, it often seemed, was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American citizen, taken hostage at Nova, who had lost part of his arm as he was captured.
There are many hostages, and we do not know how many are still alive. The mind and soul stretch to imagine that. Hersh became the face of Oct. 7, as Anne Frank was and is the face of the Holocaust.
His wide familiarity was due to the enormous, unimaginable human, personal and spiritual activism of the Goldberg-Polin family, especially Rachel. They kept Hersh in the public eye and in the public imagination, placing his story before approximately 26 million viewers during the Democratic National Convention.
Wall graffiti in the German Colony, Jerusalem: “Hersh lives!”
As a result, it seemed that in the Jewish world there was only two degrees of separation between any particular Jew and the Goldberg-Polin family. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows the Goldberg-Polins.
Not just Hersh. No — another friend had hosted Carmel Gat, of blessed memory, at his son’s bar mitzvah celebration 13 years ago.
And so it goes. We Jews are a small people, but we are a large family. If the Jewish people had its own Facebook page, everyone would eventually show up on it.
I look at the leftover challah from Shabbat, and its braids; I look at the twisted strands of the havdalah candle, which we lit hours before we learned of these deaths. I say to myself: This is who I am, and this is who we are.
We, the Jews, are a braided challah — each one of us a strand. We, the larger human family, are a havdalah candle — preferably, one of those gorgeous multicolored candles that you can get in Israel and elsewhere, each color adding its own hue to a tangle of human concern.
If we could enter the homes of the families who learned their children’s fate, what would we say to them? We sometimes say that there are no words, but there actually are words — words constantly purified in Jewish tears, spiritual and emotional boilerplate, time-tested over the centuries.
“May God comfort you, in the midst of all those who still mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.”
In Hebrew, the prayer refers to God with a rather unusual term: HaMakom. HaMakom literally means “the place.” God is the place of the universe, the place beyond all places.
In a Hasidic story, a man says to his son: “I will give you a gold coin if you can tell me where God is.”
To which his son responds, with an appropriate amount of traditional Jewish snark: “And I will give you three gold coins if you can tell me where God is not.”
In recent weeks, I have been to numerous places where God is present, where I felt the Divine Presence most acutely and paradoxically.
I felt the Divine Presence in the ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz, devastated on Oct. 7.
I felt it at the site of the Nova festival — a place of abundant, magical life transformed into a place of death.
“Where does God dwell?” someone asked the Hasidic teacher the Kotzker Rebbe. To which he replied: “Wherever you let God in.” Sometimes, you just have to shoehorn God into a place.
When we call God HaMakom, the place, we are saying God contains every aspect of existence. Present in moments of birth, and present in moments of death; present in our laughter, and present in our tears; present in the babies we hold in our arms; present in the ancient parents whom we also hold in our arms.
Present, even and especially, in our hopes — even, and especially, in dashed hopes and shattered dreams.
And then, the comforter asks that God comfort the mourner “in the midst of all those who still mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.”
“What?” the bereaved person might ask. “My grief isn’t enough, I now have to remember everyone else who is mourning, and who has ever mourned?”
Stay with it. Stay in it. The Jew never walks alone. We walk with our family. We walk with our friends. We walk with our history.
What happens at a brit or baby-naming? The mohel or mohelet invokes the presence of Abraham, echoing God’s words to Abraham: “Walk before Me, and be whole.”
The mohel or mohelet points to an empty chair and says: “This is the chair of Elijah the prophet.” We imagine that Elijah attends every birth ceremony. Abraham is the first Jew. Elijah, the forerunner of the Messiah, is destined to be the last Jew. Both of them, skilled in the art of righteous anger (as we feel now); both of them, skilled in the art of righteous comfort (as we must now offer each other, and ourselves).
What happens at a wedding ceremony? At that moment, the couple are no longer themselves. They can imagine themselves as Adam and Eve, cradled yet again in the Garden of Eden. It is a dream; as Joni Mitchell sang about Woodstock, 55 years ago last month — “We have got to get ourselves back to the Garden” — and we have rarely felt as far from the Garden as we do today.
The seven wedding blessings end with the proclamation that this marriage may herald the coming of the messianic age. “Yet again may it be heard in the streets of Jerusalem: the sound of bride and groom rejoicing, the sounds of children playing … ”
Whenever I read, say or hear those words, I cry.
I cry today.
What happens at a funeral, and during the mourning period? You, the mourner, are not alone. You are surrounded by all those who still mourn in Zion and Jerusalem.
When we weep for our dead, our wails echo the cries of those who wept at the destruction of Jerusalem, and every destruction and death since. Mourning has a way of collapsing time and space. Every Jewish foot walks, ankle deep, through an ancient, modern, ever-renewing River of Tears.
History lives in all Jews, and through all Jews. No Jew truly walks alone.
We walk with the Goldberg-Polins, and with the families of Master Sgt. Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Eden Yerushalmi.
Our mourning is deep; our rage, incalculable.
May God comfort their families, in the midst of all who still mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.