The Blogs: The threads that bind us: A tale of grief and love

A little over two weeks ago, a woman stopped my father, Natan Sharansky, in the street. She told him about a gathering that her community leads every shabbat at the Oranim intersection in southern Jerusalem to show solidarity with the hostages, and asked him to come speak.

“I fought for you when you were in the Gulag,” she told him, after explaining that the gathering wasn’t political. “Now I’m asking you to help me fight for them.”

When my father told me that he intended to go, I was glad. I had attended the gathering once before, and was impressed by the organizers’ success at creating a rare non-political space where people who don’t necessarily agree about the best way to release the hostages can sit together, sing together, pray together, and be silent together, tapping into our deep shared care and concern for every single hostage. I was particularly glad he planned to come that particular week, when our shul’s rabbi, Rav David Ansbacher, promised to speak there as well, accompanied by many members of our community, BeOrcha.

“What gave me strength in prison was knowing that Am Israel (the Jewish people) is with me,” my father said at the gathering, urging us to offer our hostages the same source of empowerment.

The community that organized the gathering on that occasion (and all others) was Hakhel, the community of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s family. Like Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin themselves, Hakhel channeled its grief and pain following Hersh’s murder towards advocating for the remaining hostages. And the woman who convinced my father to come – the woman who fought for my father’s release from prison – was Oshrat Shoham, one of Hakhel’s leaders and a friend of the Goldberg-Polin family. She was the one to hold her hand out to Rachel Goldberg-Polin at the end of the shiva for Hersh, raising her from her state of deep mourning, as per the ancient Jewish belief that the mourner needs someone else to help him or her up and out of the state of shiva.

Oshrat was there for the Goldberg Polins when they advocated for Hersh. She was there for them when they mourned him. She was and is there to continue the struggle for the release of the remaining hostages.

And Jon and Rachel, like the rest of their wonderful community, were there for her and her husband Effie last Sunday, when their son, 22-year-old Yuval, was killed.

* * *

Oshrat and the Hakhel community helped us at the BeOrcha community two months ago, when Rav Avi Goldberg fell in battle. Rav Avi was a dearly beloved member and leader in our shul. He died side by side with Eliav Abitbul, brother of another beloved BeOrcha member, Aderet Sompolinsky. The double loss left us all reeling. As we gathered by the Oranim intersection to sing and cry before the funeral, as we followed Rav Avi’s family to the cemetery, we walked through the very spaces where we had stood two months earlier to honor Hersh.

Hersh, like too many young men lost since October 7th, had been Rav Avi’s student in the religious high school known simply as “Himmelfarb.”

And then, Rav Avi joined his students, in death.

Oshrat Shoham came to help us in those world-shattering hours, sharing her community’s hard won experience in organizing a massive shiva. Later in the week, when our broken-hearted community was getting ready to accept a first shabbat without Avi, members of the Hakhel community brought all of us cakes to show their solidarity. They themselves received cakes from yet another community in the shabbat following Hersh’s death. They knew what it meant to feel seen and cared for. And they extended the same gift to us, like a hand reaching to grasp ours across a terrible abyss.

* * *

This past shabbat, after shul, we stood once again at the Oranim intersection. Our community, BeOrcha, had agreed to cohost the solidarity gathering per Hakhel’s request, supporting them through this new season of grief. I looked at the faces around me, at all these different people who came together in the shadow of loss and in the name of the bonds that connect us. And I shared with them the following thoughts:

When I visited the shiva tent where Effie and Oshrat mourned, Effie told us how Yuval yelled Hersh’s name when he was fighting in Khan Younis. “Hersh, Hersh,” he called into the Gazan air, hoping against hope that his beloved community member would hear him and call back.

What courage, I marveled as I heard this story. Not only the courage to fight a war, but also the courage to put his thoughts, his yearning, his innermost desire out there, clearly and loudly, without self-consciousness or hesitation.

The more I listened to stories about Yuval and witnessed the love that animated Effie and Oshrat as they spoke of him, the more I realized that this courage was no aberration. Yuval grew up in a family that nurtured and encouraged candidness and courage, a family where parents and children alike are unafraid to voice their opinions and values even when they strongly disagree with one another. And even though I never met Yuval, his presence in the tent grew more and more solid with each story, until I felt as if I knew this young man well – his warmth, his dedication to the pursuit of truth and justice. Knew him well enough to understand that those moments when he yelled “Hersh, Hersh,” at the top of his voice were a natural continuation of the way he always lived his life.

In the same visit, Effie and Oshrat talked about the time Yuval analyzed one of poetess Zelda’s poems. A line from a different Zelda poem kept coming back to me the more I listened: “My peace (wellbeing) is tied with thread to yours.”

So many threads tie us all to one another. Yuval fought and yelled in Gaza because he felt the thread that tied him to Hersh. Yuval’s parents still feel the thread that ties them to their son. They feel the threads — the lifelines — that tie them to their community and beyond it, and we feel them too, these threads that taste of cakes and comfort, of hands to hold, and of far, far too much sorrow. These thread that pain us, at times, like live wires, but are woven through with care, with love.

These threads brought us to the Oranim intersection on too many sad days to honor too many beloved people we have lost — those we knew well and those we didn’t. And they brought us to the Oranim juncture on that shabbat morning, and on the ones before it, because we hold in our hands and hearts 100 threads that lead to our hostages in Gaza.

There is no doubt that these threads make us vulnerable. They make us suffer when death takes people we didn’t personally know. They make it easier for our enemies to manipulate and extort us. One might argue that we would be better off without them, that cutting them all would leave us stronger – and less sad.

We might. But we wouldn’t be ourselves without them. We wouldn’t be the people who rescued hostages from far away Entebbe. We wouldn’t be the people who empowered my father and his fellow activists in the USSR to stand up to the mighty Soviet empire, knowing that they wouldn’t have to take it on alone. We wouldn’t be the people who brought down the Iron Curtain. We wouldn’t be the people who survived millennia of internal strife and exiles by repeatedly answering Cain’s ancient question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” with a resounding “Yes!”

The threads between us don’t guarantee a uniformity of opinions. We disagree over what it is they demand of us right now. And the discourse surrounding these disagreements have become toxic, rife with accusations, negations, and rejection. But I believe that the ancient story of Joseph and his brothers invites us to cleanse our conversations from such vitroil and reframe them. And it offers us a way to do so, modeling it through Judah’s growth.

Early in the story, Judah and the brothers are painfully aware that their father loves Rachel and her sons more than any other wife or child. And this fact leads them to lash out, to react from a place of pain, to try and rid themselves of the apparent cause of their suffering – their brother Joseph.

But when Judah confronts Joseph at the end of the story – and at the moment that will become the beginning of a better, cleaner, grander story – he doesn’t shy away from the same old painful fact. He quotes his father as saying, “You know that my wife birthed two sons,” a statements that bluntly excludes Jacob’s other wives and sons. But instead of focusing on how Jacob’s words make him feel, he focuses on what he, Judah, believes is the right thing to say and do in this moment. Instead of trying to change his father or get rid of the competition, he takes ownership over his own part of the relationship, and chooses what sort of son and brother he wishes to be.

And it is when Judah states his beliefs and choices authentically and simply, much like Yuval who wasn’t embarrassed or afraid to simply yell “Hersh!” that all the screens and masks between the brothers fall apart, allowing them to unite and come together. It is only when Judah speaks his truth that the doors to partnership open wide.

I believe that if we will find in ourselves some of Judah and Yuval’s courage, and speak our deepest truths instead of reacting to insults and rejections and hurt, we will create a space where we can truly stand together. And in this space, our differing opinions wont stand in the way of partnership. Because in that space, we all stand and scream “Hersh” with Yuval. In that space, we all feel the hundred threads that tie our peace to the peace of our hostages in Gaza. In that space, we all bleed prayers for their safe and — please God! — imminent return.

* * *

At the end of the Goldberg-Polin shiva, Oshrat was the one to reach her hand out to Rachel, and pull her up and out of this first stage of grief.

At the end of Rav Avi’s shiva, the one Oshrat helped us organize, Rabbi Tzvi Wolff, Rachel Goldberg’s father, was the one to raise her from her shiva for her husband. Years earlier, as a teacher at Pardes, he had taught Rachel Goldberg-Polin the Jewish laws of mourning. These lessons were on her mind as she mourned her son.

This Sunday, at the conclusion of Oshrat and Effie’s Shiva, Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin reached their hands out to Oshrat and Effie, completing a painful, poignant, tragic circle.

But, like an outstretched hand, the threads that bind us don’t curl into themselves in suffering.

They lead out, to a world that still needs our love, our work, our dedication.

They lead to our hostages, to all our people.

They tell us that we don’t have the luxury to give in to despair and grief.

As Rachel Goldberg-Polin taught us, hope is still mandatory.

Let us hope and pray and work to bring our people home.