The Tears of Tishrei

“It’s a very sad time now,” an Israeli friend told me.  “So many shivas going on at once, so many more fatherless children and precious soldiers gone.  Fifty-six more kids without fathers in the past week.”  She paused.  “It’s awful.”

Standing in shule, waiting to hear tekias shofar on Rosh Hashonah, I began my annual exercise of setting next year’s agenda.  What can I do better?  What can I achieve?

It didn’t work.

Instead, for the first time in my life, I broke into tears.

For me, perhaps for all of us, 5784 was the most difficult year of my life.  With fresh wounds opening nonstop, I felt an ache akin to aveilus every day.

On Rosh Hashonah, when sections of the shofar service are reminiscent of the sobs of the bereaved, I could not help but think of those broken souls, both here and in Israel, families afflicted by injuries, torture, murder.

I also thought about Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom my congregational rabbi, Rabbi Daniel Yolkut, had known as a happy little kid running around his shule in Richmond, Virginia.  Four decades ago, the Congregation Poale Zedeck happy little kid was our son Jesse, now a dad in Potomac, Maryland.  Thinking of the two of them, how one child could have been the other, and the pain Rabbi Yolkut and Hersh’s parents must continue to feel, I wept as if it were Tisha b’Av.

“The pain has not stopped,” I wrote to another Israeli friend.  “I have never mourned so much in my life — without end.”

“The tears are flowing here,” she answered, “all the time. It is paralyzing.  Yet we still live our lives, somewhat in robotic motion.”

“It’s a nightmare time,” I wrote back.

Unwanted and unbidden, the tears simply start to flow.

As they did at Yizkor on Shmini Atzeras, when I thought about multiple losses, including family members murdered in the Holocaust.

Including the Nova site, which I’ve visited twice.

I could not hold back the tears.

Nor, I thought, should I.

Later that day, two Pittsburgh synagogues, Congregations Poale Zedeck and Shaarei Torah, held a joint memorial service before Simchas Torah.  At one point, Rabbi Yolkut spoke about how the dancing shoes of Simchas Torah forge a crown for G-d.

As do the shoes abandoned by the Kedoshim at the Nova site.

Yes, I thought, like the barracks in Maidanek, one entirely filled with shoes.  The three-tiered bunks encased in chicken wire, the only light from the door, the shoes, thousands and thousands of them, disappear into the darkness.  When I was there, two dozen years ago, I felt impelled to walk to the back, although I knew there were no surprises there, nothing but shoes, their emptiness, their obscene odor.  As I walked into the darkness, gripped by the horror of mass murder, by the knowledge that family members had been murdered here, I feared for my sanity, for humanity, for every decent thing that I had ever known.

And so I wept again.

How to stop the tears?  How to staunch the sorrow?

Get up and do something.  Go back to Israel.  Help the Jewish people.

My family’s in danger.

History’s calling.

And my grandchildren are watching.

There is danger, certainly.  But as the Gemara asks, is my blood any redder than anyone else’s?

“It’s wonderful that you’re coming again,” a friend wrote.  “So good for our collective souls!  It’s a very sad time now.”

Perhaps for a moment, I can lift some of that sadness.

So I return to Israel for the third time this year, to Jerusalem, to Chabad of Katamon, to help feed displaced children.

There are thousands of children who need lunches.

I’ll make sandwiches for them.