‘I am Afflicted’: Hallel in a Time of Grief

Reflections on the first day of the month of Elul (Rosh Chodesh), after reciting the words of Hallel, the prayer of joy and thanksgiving:

How are we to sing with joy amid the horror?

How can I praise, when I wake in the watches of the night, panicked, with nightmare visions of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s capture on October 7, his arm burst open; of his final unspeakable moments last Thursday?

When I feel the awakening of the slumbering ghouls that stalked Jewish history, that chased my own grandfather Hersh from his home in Romania, that herded his parents to the gas chambers?

When I know terrorists would have grabbed me had I stood where he stood on that October day; stolen my child, who also bears the name of Hersh?

How can we say with a straight face, From the narrow place I have called, G-d; G-d answered me in the wide place – when six of our brothers and sisters spent 328 days gasping for breath in the narrow place, and were brutally executed in a hole in the ground, which their captors dug 20 meters below a Gazan child’s bedroom?

How can we say, I am Your servant, You have undone the cords that bound me, knowing there are 100 Israeli hostages — Muslims, Christians, Jews, peace activists, sympathizers with suffering of the Palestinian people, dreamers, children – bound even now in cords, yearning to be free?

How can we sing, “אוֹדְךָ כִּ֣י עֲנִיתָ֑נִי וַתְּהִי־לִ֝י לִישׁוּעָה”, I praise You, for You have answered me, and have become my deliverance, as the pleas of the parents of these precious souls – pleas to Hamas, pleas to Qatar, pleas to the UN, pleas to G-d –– went unanswered?

How can we croak, This is the day that the Lord has made, let us exult and be glad! When we know that last Thursday, Rachel Goldberg-Polin screamed to her son across the Gaza border, “Hersh!! It’s Mama! …We are working day and night, and we will never stop”, shouting the priestly blessing to him, “May G-d bless you and keep you,” — that very day, Hersh’s evil captors turned hope to horror, establishing that same day as his yahrzeit, his day of murder, forever?

But examine all of Hallel closely, and you see it holds not only shouts of joy, but cries of pain. Our current pain. We say these words too:

The death of His faithful ones is grievous in G-d’s eyes.

The pangs of death have encircled me, and the straits of the Pit have found me; I have found grief.

I have faith even as I say, “I am greatly afflicted.”

I am greatly afflicted.
The Jewish world is greatly afflicted.
All who treasure freedom and liberalism ought to be afflicted.

Yet even as I doubt, even as I fear, even as I say, “I am afflicted,” I find that I retain some faith.

I have faith, now more than ever, in the Torah’s celebration of life.

I have faith in the Torah’s fundamental principle that all people are created equal, made in G-d’s image, of infinite worth, and that Israel will live up to this value even as its enemies deride it.

I have faith that the West will learn to have compassion for Palestinian suffering, which is grievous, and yet see with clear eyes the fundamental evil of the terrorists that seek the West’s — and Israel’s — destruction, even at the cost of innocent Palestinians among whom they deliberately hide.

I have faith that G-d will allow us to build a redeemed world “where the wicked vanish like smoke” and “the reign of evildoers will be ended.”

I have faith in the divine call of our prophets — radical then, radical now — that we will someday build a world where “every person will sit under their vine and fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”

.אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא

.אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא