A Time for Joy and a Time for Tears: Holding Both as a People

“To everything there is a season… a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.”
(Ecclesiastes 3:1–4)

Listening to the words of Rachel Goldberg Polin this morning, I was moved to tears, and inspired deeply. And a question came: how can the teaching of the Ecclesiastes help us in these historic  times of trauma, rebirth, and post traumatic growth?

These words have accompanied our people through centuries of exile, loss, rebuilding, and renewal.
They are not abstract poetry. They describe the very rhythm of Jewish history — a rhythm that demands that we hold opposites at once: pain and gratitude, grief and relief, horror and hope.

Today, as hostages begin to return home, this teaching takes on a new, urgent meaning.
There is joy — life restored, families reunited, a collective exhale we have held for far too long.
And there are tears — for the long months of fear, for those who are not yet home, for the scars carried in every body and every soul.

To be a people capable of holding both is to practice community resilience in its truest form.

What Community Resilience Really Means

Community resilience is not the absence of pain; it is the capacity to stay connected through it.
It is the collective nervous system finding its breath again after long constriction.
It is neighbors holding each other, rescuers weeping with the rescued, teachers helping children name what cannot yet be spoken.

Resilience at this level means that we do not deny our exhaustion, anger, or fear — but we remember that none of us heals alone.
Each regulated breath, each act of compassion, each shared ritual or prayer becomes a thread in the fabric that keeps us from falling apart.

In trauma science, we know that regulation and safety are contagious.
When one person finds grounding, others around them begin to feel it too.
The same is true for communities. When we act with presence — when we bring calm, empathy, and structure into chaos — we create islands of safety in the storm. These small islands are how societies begin to heal.

The People Who Remember and Breathe Together

The return of the hostages invites us to remember who we are as a people: those who never stop hoping, who rebuild even when hearts are shattered, who turn mourning into meaning.
But it also calls us to collective responsibility — to accompany the survivors, to listen without rushing them, to give time for the nervous system of our nation to find equilibrium again.

There is a temptation to rush toward relief, to celebrate and “move on.” Yet Ecclesiastes reminds us: there is a time to weep.
We must give room to sorrow even in the light of joy.
Because only by allowing both — the breath of celebration and the sigh of grief — can we integrate what has happened and remain whole.

Resilience here does not mean “returning to normal.” It means re-creating normal together, grounded in truth, compassion, and presence.
It means asking: how can we build systems of support so that no one carries trauma alone? How can we teach tools of self-regulation and empathy across generations, schools, hospitals, and public spaces — so that the collective pulse of our people becomes one of coherence, not fragmentation?

Hope as a Collective Nervous System

In Jewish tradition, Tikvah — hope — is not a feeling but a practice. It is an action of the soul, a moral stance toward life.
To hope, especially after horror, is not naïve; it is sacred.
It is the decision to keep our hearts open, to believe in repair even when trust is fragile, to rebuild connection even when fear has lived in our bodies for too long.

Community resilience, then, is the embodiment of Tikvah.
It is the collective capacity to feel deeply, to stay human in inhuman times, to rebuild faith — not because we have forgotten pain, but because we have integrated it into the story of life.

To me, it is no coincidence that the song that held our people together over the past year is titled It Will Be Good, and Better (יהיה טוב ועוד יותר טוב). In dark times, it takes focused effort to keep hope alive and believe in the mere possibility that good can happen. This song was about believing beyond the limitations of our imagination. It was about believing in good — and even better than anything we could envision — when our vision was clouded and limited by pain and the fog of despair.

Nonetheless, we held on — and now we’re dancing again, just as a small part of us always knew we would. We’re not simply happy; we’re happier — albeit in a profoundly different way than before. We’ve learned, the hard way, how precious life is, how rare good news can be, and how essential it is to seize and celebrate it. The aftermath of trauma is not a return to “normal good”; it is a movement forward to something better. As Jared Kushner powerfully observed yesterday on Kikar Hatufim, we, as a people, are deeply changed. What starts emerging from this trauma is nothing short of exceptional: “a  level of greatness, achievement, global impact, and leadership that Israel has never seen.”

The Invitation for Our Time

As a people, we are being asked to do what Ecclesiastes taught millennia ago:
to hold both the joy of life returning and the ache of what has been lost.
To celebrate, yes — and to grieve, yes — without denying either.
To breathe again, but not to forget what it means to have lost our breath.

This is what it means to be resilient together:
to remember that the nervous system of our nation heals one breath, one reunion, one prayer at a time.
And that within each of us — and among us — there is still a kol tov, a whisper of goodness, a collective Amen to life.

Written with Emanuelle Girsowiczs