Thank you, Jon and Rachel

Sunday morning marked the end of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s shiva.

Throughout the week of mourning, thousands of people came to the vast blue tent that filled a parking lot between a main road and a gas station, steps away from the Goldberg-Polins’ home, to pay their respects. 

They came from across Israel, but many of them didn’t have very far to travel: they were residents of the cluster of neighborhoods in southern Jerusalem – Katamon, Baka, the German Colony, Mekor Chaim, and the vicinity – in which English-speaking immigrant families like the Goldberg-Polins are highly concentrated. That entire week, anytime anyone in that area – where I, too, live – referenced “the funeral” or “the shiva,” everyone knew exactly what they meant.

For hours each day, a line snaked around the periphery of the tent and out the door as people stood patiently awaiting their turn to sit with Rachel and Jon for a few moments and say some words of condolence. All the while, other visitors filled the rows of chairs in the center of the space, rotating out every ten to fifteen minutes. Volunteers in reflective vests directed traffic and offered visitors cups of water, fruit, and pastries.

I visited the shiva last Thursday and was there for over three hours. The language I heard more than any other was English and I saw countless familiar faces: friends, neighbors, people I see on the street and in the grocery store. As I made my way around the tent, I studied the red-and-black banners of Hapoel Jerusalem, Hersh’s favorite sports team, that adorned the walls.

All the while, Rachel and Jon sat on low plastic chairs in the front of the tent. They wore the same shirts they had worn at the funeral, both ripped at the collar in accordance with tradition, with small pieces of masking tape bearing the number of days since the start of the war and the day their nightmare began.

Hour after hour they sat there, receiving the slow but steady stream of visitors: exchanging a few words, smiling briefly here and there, wiping away tears, standing up from time to time to give and receive a hug. It often seemed as though they were comforting those who had come to comfort them.

As I stood in line, I found myself wondering if they were doing this primarily for themselves or for us. 

They could, after all, have chosen to have a private shiva, open only to close friends and family. They could have spared themselves the exhaustion, both physical and emotional, of sitting there for hours on end as well-wishers sat opposite them, grasping for words and breaking into tears.

But throughout their hellish, eleven-month ordeal, Jon and Rachel have dedicated their whole selves to the cause of bringing Hersh and the other hostages home. They have become the faces of the families seeking the return of their loved ones – traveling the world, appearing on the covers of magazines, meeting with world leaders, giving countless speeches to audiences in the millions.

And, along the way, we have come to see ourselves in them. 

To the concentric circles of community members, English-speaking immigrants in Jerusalem and across Israel, and Jews around the world, Hersh was “ours.” While we have hoped and prayed and fought for the release of all the hostages, the Goldberg-Polins’ experience has felt so deeply personal to us, both because our lives and backgrounds are objectively similar and because Jon and Rachel have shared their struggle so openly over the past eleven months.

As we saw them advocate for their child and heard them relate their unfathomable pain, it did not take much to imagine, horrifically, that Hersh could well have been our son, our brother, or to picture ourselves in the Goldberg-Polins’ place, fighting desperately to get our loved one back home.

During Hersh’s funeral, at the close of her heartbreaking eulogy, Rachel turned to all those who had supported her family throughout their struggle.

“I want to say now the sincerest and most heartfelt thank you to the countless people in our extended community who have held us, cared for us, prayed for us, cooked for us, and carried us when we could not stand up,” she said.

“I’m so thankful to you,” she continued, “and I apologize deeply, but we will need continued help to get through this sickening new chapter, too.”

“I am so sorry to ask, because we have given you nothing, and you have already given so profoundly and completely. But I beg of you all, please don’t leave us now.”

But it is not true that Jon, Rachel, and their family have given us nothing. They have, in a way, given us everything – their everything.

Throughout the past eleven months, their ordeal has been our ordeal. Their hope has been our hope. And now their grief is our grief. Exposing their shattered hearts for all to see, they have brought us into their private circle of bereavement and have given us permission to mourn together as one.

In conversations over the past few days, the word that has kept coming up in reference to the Goldberg-Polins has been atzilut – nobility, with a touch of grace.

By inviting us to cry with them, by enabling us to be by their side at their most intimate moment of pain, they have engaged in yet another selfless act of atzilut.

And all we can do is say thank you.