Hersh, you taught us how to live joyfully
Hersh, in an hour your levaya will begin in Jerusalem.
It is unimaginably awful to be writing these words.
I never knew you but for me, and for so many like me, Jerusalemites who are also something else – American, or ‘Anglos’, you came to be ‘our’ hostage.
Not more treasured or precious than anyone else, but somehow closer.
There are so many reasons for feeling this connection: your family was friends of our friends – like Jessica Steinberg, who wrote about her friends the Go-Pos (Goldberg Polin) and we immediately loved them, just for that adorable name that suggested people with spirit and verve.
Like leader, writer, and activist Mikhael Manekin, who choked on his words when he told our New Israel Fund community that he always davened behind you in Hakhel and your seat had been so empty for so long.
Like NIF director Shira Ben Sasson, who couldn’t protest hard enough, often enough, with all her heart and all her soul, for your return.
You can tell people by the quality of their friends, and while I only know a few, they’re some of the best people I know.
Your parents, Jon and Rachel and, because I am a mother, your mother in particular.
Rachel’s optimism, her clarity of vision, her determination, her way of bringing a nation with her simply defeats the laws of nature.
When she spoke at the Democratic Convention last month, she electrified the room.
Your mum and dad achieved something so hard right now: a bridging of the gap between Israelis and ‘hutznikim’. They straddled their American and Israeli identities so elegantly and gracefully that they allowed diaspora Jewry a ‘home’ for their deepest love and concern at this excruciating time.
You.
I never met you, Hersh, but I felt a sense of kinship to you as a person.
In the images of you you’re always with an open, slightly goofy smile. I love your goofiness. I love the fact that people saw you in those photos for what you were: not a soldier, not a father (yet), not a hero.
Not a symbol for anything but a crazy fan of Hapoel Jerusalem whose room was plastered with their paraphernalia.
You were a young emerging adult, a boy who lived for their football team’s matches, for friends, for travel. You were incredibly brave and strong to fight and survive unimaginable conditions, but your presence in these months is of lightness, of a lust for life. There’s so much I don’t know about you.
Just last week (it seems like another era now) I was walking through the streets of Jerusalem on Shabbat with my nine-year-old daughter, Ziv. We walked back from Savta in Mevo Yoram street by the Palmach, through Emek Refaim, the German Colony, and through to Baka’a, your neighbourhood, and our borrowed flat in Arnona.
Despite becoming accustomed to all the hostage posters everywhere, even I was aware of the thickening and increasing weight of your presence as we walked down through HaMagid street, on Derech Beit Lechem, and into Baka’a.
The posters and stickers everywhere, yes of course, but also, simply, heartbreakingly, ‘Hersh x’ in black pen on street corners.
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I’m back in London now, and I dare not tell my Ziv that one of the hostages I’m crying about is you. It’s too much.
I can’t come to your levayah, but in a strange twist earlier today my 18 year-old texted to tell me that despite having only just left Jerusalem to head north for his gap year programme this morning, he’s turning around and coming with a small delegation to your funeral in Jerusalem.
Like me, he connected immediately to you, your family, your story.
You taught us how to live joyfully.
Your parents taught us the meaning of hope and stoicism.
Hadam shelanu adom. All our blood is red, today, Hersh.