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Rachel Sharansky Danziger

A gift of strength from Ukraine

I asked the Jewish leaders and educators I was teaching what keeps them going, now years at war. Their answer was exactly what I needed to hear
President.gov.ua, via Wikimedia Commons

“How do you do it,” I asked the people around me. “How do you keep on going, keep on fighting, since the war keeps going on?”

We were sitting in a circle in a picturesque hotel in Western Ukraine, far away from the heavy bombardments wrecking Kharkiv a few hours to the east. Our own environment was peaceful enough; a casual visitor might well have forgotten all about the war if it weren’t for the camouflage covers draped here and there and the lights going on and off as the hotel’s generator valiantly, yet not always successfully, struggled to compensate for the electricity shortages that plague all of Ukraine these days.

But none of the people around me was likely to forget about the war, regardless. Many of them lost loved ones in the first devastating months of war and occupation or the two and half years that followed. Many others were displaced early in the war, and spent months and sometimes years as refugees within their own country. Some of the women even took their children to safety outside Ukraine for a time, forced to leave behind their draft-aged husbands, who are legally barred from leaving Ukraine. One of the woman in the circle came back from abroad to support her husband, but chose to leave her kids with relatives in Germany, for their own safety.

Her children are growing up far away from her. She misses them very much.

“But this way,” she told me, “I can sleep at night.”

She was not alone in having had to do her best in the face of impossible choices. All the people who sat in the circle hold important position in one of Ukraine’s four Conservative Jewish communities. Community leaders and teachers, youth movement councilors and activists, they have all been doing their best to uphold Jewish life and support their communities even as unspeakable tragedies extracted impossible costs. The group from Kyiv has been struggling to support the elderly Jews who were left all alone in the city when their relatives escaped west. Like the group from Odesa, they had to do so while adjusting to life under bombardments. One of them, Alina, told me she and her husband used to go to two different shelters whenever the sirens rent the air, so that their daughter would not be left alone in the world if one of the shelters was hit.

“Do you still do so?” I asked her, and she shook her head no.

“My husband is in the army, now.”

Participants of Midreshet Schechter’s educators’ seminar discussing current events, Torah, and the future of Israel and Ukraine. (courtesy, Midreshet Schechter)

Like Alina’s husband, tens of thousands of Ukrainian men from the age of 18 to the age of 60 are serving in the front, returning home for all too brief visits, before going back to a war with no end in sight. One of the women from Chernivtsi, Kristina, told me she had only seen her father twice since the war began. He recently turned 60 and was pulled from active fighting, but he isn’t coming home. His superiors moved him inland to train recruits instead.

Kristina and her fellow Chernivtsi Jews haven’t suffered through bombardments like their colleagues from farther east, but the war shook their lives in other ways. In the early months of the war, a tsunami of refugees hit their city, and they all threw themselves into housing, feeding, and supporting the people who flocked to their city, often with nothing but the clothes on their backs. And they did so while facing severe food shortages, the enlistment of their loved ones, and uncertainty about what lay ahead.

“I had my hands full also in my capacity as a psychologist,” Kristina added. “I treated people who were evacuated from the areas Russia occupied. I never thought I would treat so many rape cases.”

“So the Russian soldiers raped women, then,” I said, sighing.

She gave me a long look.

“I mostly treat children,” she said.

(Courtesy of Midreshet Schechter)

Officially, the reason Kristina and the others were sitting in a circle in Western Ukraine was professional development. Organized by Midreshet Schechter and sponsored by the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany and The Pincus Fund for Jewish Education, the annual educators’ seminar that brought the participants together was meant to nurture them in their roles as leaders within their communities. I joined them as a Torah teacher and a speaker for this purpose. But in every conversation I had with any of them, I saw how much they appreciated the opportunity to simply be together, to simply be amongst others who shared their burdens and their pain.

“So how do you do it?” I repeated my question. “How do you find the strength to go on?”

I looked from face to face. I thought of everything each of them told me about the challenges they had faced since February 2022, about the losses they had suffered.

And I could feel the desperate edge of my question, the urgency that propelled me to ask it. Because it wasn’t only empathy that drove it, but my own need, as well. When I looked at Kristina, Alina, and the others’ faces, I saw our own future, here in Israel. I saw the costs and toll of a war that keeps going and going. Worn out by nine long months of battles since October 7th, I wanted to know — I needed to know — how to keep on going when war goes on and on.

I had struggled with this question long before meeting our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, of course. As our war seemed to lengthen underneath our feet, as it transitioned from the mad sprint that saw us running around and volunteering in the first weeks after October 7th, to a new and horrible routine, I sought strength and inspiration in the wisdom of the people around me, in our distant past, and in the future still ahead.

Following advice from my father, Natan Sharansky, I taught myself to focus on the task at hand instead of the uncertainty around me. The focus that empowered him in the Soviet gulag helped me keep my sanity through the shockwaves of October 7th.

Following advice from my mother, Avital Sharansky, I reminded myself that I am but a soldier in the vast battle for our people’s future. It is not up to me to figure out how to win the struggle. Like any foot soldier, my job is simply to do the best I can within my own circle of influence, and rise to the mission at hand. The sense of mission that helped my mother remain optimistic and active as she fought for my father’s release from prison for nine long years helped me keep going on bleak days when soldiers died and I couldn’t understand the plans of our leaders.

Drawing strength and inspiration from our past, I prayed for the resilience of David, Adam, and Eve, who found the strength to rise from setbacks and exiles. I prayed for the perseverance of Abraham. And I prayed for the patience of Moses, who led the people through too many travails and kept on leading them, even as the road grew longer beneath their feet.

And I prayed for their strength, too — the strength of that first generation of Israelites, whose quick sprint from Egypt to the promised land flatlined into a life-long journey in the desert. As we read through the weekly Torah portions of Bamidbar, the book that tells the story of the Israelites’ journey, I think of that much-maligned generation, and how they had to find the strength to get up and keep going every morning. They knew their efforts would not secure a happy ending. They knew their existence as they knew it was all they would ever know.

But they kept on going, anyway. And they raised their children to achieve that which they could not.

Allow me to find this sort of strength within myself, I have asked God, over and over again. The strength to focus on the future — my children, our country, our people — and to keep on working towards it, even when the present is dark.

But as the war keeps going, as one hard day follows another, I find that I am in need of yet more inspiration, yet more sources of strength.

And so I turned to my new friends from Ukraine, hoping for something, anything, any hard-learned lesson they could pass to me, forged in the crucible of their own pain.

They didn’t offer me cheerful reasons for optimism. They didn’t teach me any techniques for overcoming sorrow and despair.

Whet they did give me was a grim truth, yet a profound one. A truth that I will carry with me now, deep my bones.

“We keep on going because there is no alternative,” said Galina from Odesa, leaning into the circle. “Because we know that if we don’t go on fighting, if we raise our hands and drop our weapons, it won’t be better for us. They wont stop hurting us. Some people say we should agree to a peace at all cost, but what will it achieve? They won’t stop taking and taking and hurting. It won’t be better. So we can’t stop.”

Galina’s words reminded me of Golda Meir’s comment to then-senator Biden years and years ago, words President Biden quoted when he visited Israel after October 7th: “Our secret weapon is that we have nowhere else to go.”

I sat there, reeling, and realized that Galina was right: you can’t stop fighting when the alternative is worse. When your enemy is committed to your destruction, as Hamas is, when your enemy loudly proclaims to all and sundry that its ultimate goal is your complete elimination, you simply don’t have the luxury of giving up.

Necessity isn’t as pleasant a source of strength as uplifting inspirational words. Nor is it as encouraging as tried-and-tested techniques that already helped people like my parents and our biblical ancestors to win struggles in the past. Accepting that we fight because we have to doesn’t offer hope as much as resolve.

But in the dark days still ahead, whenever my more cheery sources of inspiration falls short of the magnitude of the work before us, I will remember Galina, Kristina, Alina and the other amazing men and women I met in Ukraine. I will pray for their wellbeing, success and victory. And I will hold onto the resolution they have offered me, the reminder that we fight because we have to.

Because, sometimes, this knowledge is exactly what we need.

About the Author
Rachel is a Jerusalem-born writer and educator who's in love with her city's vibrant human scene. She writes about Judaism, history, and life in Israel for the Times of Israel and other online venues, and explores storytelling in the Hebrew bible as a teacher in Matan, Maayan, Torah in Motion, and Pardes.
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