Mourner in Zion

“Thus said the Lord: 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 are from the prophet Jeremiah, describing captive Jews passing by the tomb of the matriarch Rachel on their forced march into exile in Babylonia. Rachel Goldberg-Polin also refuses to be comforted. Her new memoir, When We See You Again, is less a recounting of her story (which surely all its readers already know) than a reenactment of that ancient voice from Ramah, the bitter weeping, the wail. It feels familiar. While her story is the absolute worst possible version of the current war against the Jews, almost every Jew on earth has heard or felt this cry in one form or another over the past two and a half years, whether or not they choose to heed it.

Just this week, I woke up to the news that two Jewish men had been viciously stabbed on the street in London. It’s hard to keep up. As we face an ongoing barrage of anti-Jewish attacks worldwide—the massacres of October 7 and the subsequent torture and murder of hostages, missile hailstorms, maniacs murdering Jews in synagogues and museums and on beaches and sidewalks, and nonstop calls from all sorts of influencers cheering for more of the same, or explaining why we deserve it—our responses have oscillated between confusion and outrage, with little room for sorrow. All this makes Goldberg-Polin’s book, with its ongoing visceral cry, a strange form of relief. It is a reminder that beneath all the armor each of us must now wear in public, we are actually wounded, grieving mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, and we are allowed to weep.

To recount, as one must: This particular mother Rachel’s twenty-three-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was taken hostage (“stolen,” as she puts it) from the Nova music festival in Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, after having his left hand and forearm blown off by a grenade while he hid with more than two dozen others in what became a roadside “Bomb Shelter of Death.” The festival was a celebration of “Love, Peace, and Unity.”

Hersh’s close friend Aner Shapira stood at the shelter’s entrance, catching and throwing back at least seven live grenades thrown by Hamas terrorists, until he was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade—“a weapon,” Goldberg-Polin notes, “meant to be used against tanks.” Most of the young festival attendees inside the shelter were murdered there. The few survivors, from whom we know these facts, managed to conceal themselves under the dead bodies before the terrorists entered. Four young men who were too gravely wounded to hide, including Hersh, were forced onto a pickup truck and taken into Gaza.

After an initial few days held captive in a “civilian” home while bleeding from his severed arm to the point of unconsciousness, Hersh was moved with other hostages to a series of deep underground tunnels, where he was starved and tortured for 328 days before being executed by Hamas alongside five other hostages, a group now iconically known in Israel as the “Beautiful Six.” In words no mother should ever have to put down or even know, Goldberg-Polin writes:

They were all executed, at close range. Most with guns pushing into their skin while they were shot numerous times. Their bodies were returned to their families on Day 330 . . . bearing signs of torture, and riddled with close-range bullet wounds. Hersh had six. And his hair was covered in gunpowder.

In the end, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was the only American citizen murdered in Hamas captivity.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin traveled the world alongside her husband Jon to plead with every leader who would meet with her, and address every audience who would listen, to keep her son’s and other hostages’ reality before the eyes of the world. In this, she reminded me of Avital Sharansky, wife of the imprisoned Soviet Jewish refusenik Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years organizing rallies and campaigns and meeting heads of state to advocate for his release. Goldberg-Polin, whose desperation turned her, like Sharansky, into a genius of public relations, created a simple and repeatable symbol that others around the world adopted by putting a strip of masking tape on her shirt each day inscribed with the number of days the hostages had been held.

She met with people she calls “Very Important Men” in places like Washington and Davos; she spoke with diplomats and influencers and intelligence officers and television anchors; she gave speeches at the UN Security Council and the Democratic National Convention and had an audience with the pope. She also spoke, as she discreetly puts it, with people who are “not like us” in “a land where we should not have been,” evidently referring to communications with Hamas and its proxies in Qatar, which she pointedly does not describe at all.

At one point, she went to a rally on Israel’s southern border where she and other hostage families “screamed into Gaza,” pouring their pain into loudspeakers. “I felt like I was lying down at the bottom of that pool, an anvil tied to my wrist making sure I stayed drowning beneath the sounds of the families of all the hostages, and by my own voice—is it called a voice when it is wailing?” It is. “And after all that torture, misery, agony, burning, scarring, battering, and torment, I now found out: that had been the good part.” That was the day Hersh was murdered.

Like the original mother Rachel, Goldberg-Polin is relentless in her refusal to be comforted. “People want hope, resilience, recovery, strength, survival, healing. They want thriving and rising from the ashes,” she writes. Instead, the story she tells after Hersh’s murder is “about pain, pain that is agonizing, throat-choking, debilitating, soul-shattering.” Nor, she insists, will it ever get better:

“Regular” people . . . do not want to accept that The Broken continue to suffer. But it is true. We have had, at this point, thousands of bereaved parents reach out to tell us that the pain does not lessen.

Another mother, long bereaved, tells Goldberg-Polin how she still weeps daily for her son who died forty-nine years ago. And this is the future that she sees for herself.

“There are days when I break completely,” she writes. “I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn’t think it was physically possible . . . and then there are days when there is a whisper of sun.” The first such whisper comes from a freed hostage whose name actually means light. Or Levy shocked the Goldberg-Polins by giving them the first information about their son in captivity that wasn’t from Hamas propaganda videos. Levy had shared a tunnel with Hersh for two days, during which Hersh’s serene attitude became a lifeline for him. In a now well-known story, Hersh shared with other captives a motivating line he remembered from the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s famous book Man’s Search for Meaning: “He who has a why can bear any how.” This inspired Levy to focus on his toddler son who was waiting for him.

Goldberg-Polin was stunned and moved to learn that even after all his suffering, her son hadn’t been “broken.” She (and many others) read Frankl’s book, which she regarded as a gift from her son, and versions of the phrase Hersh had shared with his fellow captives began appearing on Israeli bumper stickers and tattoos. As Goldberg-Polin met more people inspired by Hersh or by the campaign built around him, she felt further glimmers of light, and a form of solace even in her own grief, understanding it as “the love that continues to grow after its recipient is no longer here.” She admits that she is still trying to figure out her own why, though at least for the many readers who will find their own private grief articulated, amplified, and honored in this book, she has already found it.

I have never met Rachel Goldberg-Polin—though saying this feels somehow false, since at this point, every English-speaking Jew on earth is in a parasocial relationship with her. We have seen her at rallies fighting for her then still-living son; we have heard her voice on podcasts weeping for her executed child; we have seen her on television, her fight and her pain always on public display. And since Jews are a global family, I have, inevitably, also had some indirect contact with her. A mutual acquaintance told me that, remarking on the title of my book People Love Dead Jews, she suggested that the next one should be called People Hate Live Jews (ultimately I chose something even worse). This second-hand comment has stayed with me because it felt like more than a dark joke. It hinted at something that the public Goldberg-Polin, despite her enormous emotional exposure, rarely if ever expresses: rage.

Part of the galvanizing appeal of the cause of the hostages for worldwide audiences was that the hostages fit into the category of the kind of Jews that non-Jewish (and Jewish diaspora) audiences are more comfortable with: Jews who are powerless. This is one of the reasons for the broad acceptance of Holocaust memorialization, a history in which Jews are generally presented as powerless and pitiable victims. Goldberg-Polin is a woman of unfathomable energy and courage, but this unexamined and unconscious attitude toward Jews was part of what made it possible to share her public grief on mainstream American media outlets like 60 Minutes. It would be inconceivable, for instance, for the mother of a fallen IDF soldier to do so.

In Israel, in contrast, young Jews who have been killed fighting in Gaza are mourned alongside the civilians murdered or kidnapped on October 7. Everyone understands they are in the same fight for their lives, against an enemy that makes no distinction between soldiers and civilians. In her book, Goldberg-Polin dramatizes this equivalence with a moving personal story. She describes her fellow synagogue congregant Oshrat’s son Yuval, who constantly yelled Hersh’s name as he fought in Gaza, hoping to find his friend. At the end of Goldberg-Polin’s shiva, Oshrat was the one who recited the ritual statement “Get up from your mourning” and “took my broken paw in her cool, confident hand, and pulled me up into my New World.” A few months later, when Yuval was killed in Gaza, “it would be my hand to put into Oshrat’s broken paw, pulling her up into The New World where we both now live.”

When We See You Again is a deliberately apolitical book, almost stridently so, and, almost certainly, necessarily so. Beyond some important (and tragically not obvious) statements about mourning civilians on both sides, Goldberg-Polin makes no comments at all about the military or other choices of the Israeli government, which hostage families in Israel often vocally opposed. There was an inescapable—and for Hamas, intentional—tension in the official dual war aims of returning the hostages and defeating Hamas. The cause of freeing the hostages rightly became a near-universal obsession in Israel and the wider Jewish world, both because of the long Jewish tradition of ransoming captives and because of the sheer human horror of elderly people and children, even babies, being kidnapped, and innocents of all ages being shackled, beaten, starved, tortured, and in many cases sexually assaulted. But this meant negotiating with people who are “not like us,” people who regard murder, kidnapping, rape, and torture as legitimate, and it meant accepting their ever-more-outrageous demands, most consequentially the release of hundreds of convicted terrorists, many of them murderers. In 2011, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was, of course, returned to Gaza, along with a thousand other convicted terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit. The recent hostage horror show threatened to turn Jewish existence into a sickening real-life Trolley problem, in which “Bring Them Home Now” might be a track toward generating even more bereaved mothers in the future.

In discussing Hersh’s death, Goldberg-Polin invokes an ancient folktale retold by Victor Frankl as “Death in Tehran,” though it is more popularly known under Somerset Maugham’s title “Appointment in Samarra.” The point of the story is that no one can escape their predestined appointment with death. But, as she knows better than anyone, her son’s murder was not a natural disaster or force majeure; it was the result of human perpetrators making monstrous choices in “lands where we should not go,” including not only Gaza but also Qatar and Iran. Perhaps this is what drew her to a story called “Death in Tehran.”

Goldberg-Polin’s memoir is about her terrifying immersion in personal grief, not a confrontation with the political evil that produced it. But as she guides her readers through that gutting grief with all her luminous goodness and courage on display, it is easy to imagine her finding her why, in her (and our) horrific new world, where we all desperately need more goodness and courage like hers.

The prophet Jeremiah also gave us the divine response to the original mother Rachel’s wail from Ramah: “Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears. For there is a reward for your labor… and there is hope for your future.” There is.