There Are No Words
In the face of grief and tragedy, there are often no words.
Words fail.
I wanted to write something for my blog on the anniversary of October 7.
I wasn’t there.
I didn’t lose anyone.
I saw it on the news.
So I decided to go online and see if I could find the stories of one or two people who were at the Nova Festival. Maybe I could encounter something of who they were and write about them.
The first person I found was Aner Shapira.
He was 22 years old. A rapper, musician, writer, visual artist.
And a hero.
But his family doesn’t want us to remember only the hero. On the website they created for him, they ask us to remember Aner the musician, the rapper, the thinker, the painter, the lover of humanity, the pursuer of justice. They invite us to get to know him through the art and music he left behind.
So I listened.
Aner had gone to the Nova Festival with friends for music and celebration. When the Hamas attack began, he and others fled and eventually took refuge in a roadside bomb shelter near Re’im.
There were around 30 people crammed inside.
When the attackers began throwing grenades into the shelter, Aner stood near the entrance.
He caught the grenades and threw them back out.
One.
Another.
Another.
Seven grenades.
The eighth exploded and killed him.
People in that shelter survived because of what he did.
I was reading about all of this while listening to Aner’s music, much of which his family and friends released after his death.
And my heart broke.
Because now I wasn’t reading about “a victim of October 7.”
I was listening to a young musician.
One of the songs I listened to was called Sinat Achim—“Hatred Between Brothers.”
The refrain is painfully simple:
Sinat achim.
Hayom ani nilcham neged sinat achim.
Hatred between brothers.
Today I fight against hatred between brothers.
And suddenly I didn’t know what I was supposed to write.
Then I discovered something I hadn’t known.
Aner was a close childhood friend of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Hersh.
Of course I knew Hersh’s story. Most of us did.
We followed his captivity. We watched his parents, Rachel and Jon, travel the world advocating for him and the other hostages. We hoped for his return.
And then, after almost eleven months, we learned that Hersh had been murdered in captivity.
What I hadn’t known was that Hersh and Aner were friends.
That they had gone to the festival together.
That they had ended up in the same shelter.
That the grenade attack that killed Aner was the same attack that blew off part of Hersh’s arm before he was taken into Gaza.
Suddenly two stories I had held separately became one story.
And I thought about something else I already knew about Hersh.
Or Levy, who was held with him, later told Hersh’s parents that Hersh would invoke Viktor Frankl and the idea that when you have a “why,” you can endure almost any “how.”
What’s your why today?
It became a kind of mantra among the people held with him.
I had gone looking for someone whose life I could learn about for October 7.
I found Aner.
And through Aner, I encountered Hersh again.
I listened to Aner sing about sinat achim—hatred between brothers.
I thought about Hersh, underground in Gaza, trying to help other human beings find a reason to endure another day.
And the desire to write drained out of me.
I don’t have a lesson.
I don’t know what their deaths are supposed to mean.
I don’t want to use them to prove something.
And yet there is an irony here.
Hersh, in the darkness of those tunnels, kept asking:
What’s your why today?
He was drawing on Viktor Frankl, who had survived his own encounter with unimaginable darkness and wrote about the human capacity to find meaning even there.
Maybe there is a difference between saying that something has meaning and saying that we can make meaning in its aftermath.
I cannot tell you what Aner’s death means.
I cannot tell you what Hersh’s death means.
I don’t believe their murders happened in order to teach us something.
But Hersh himself seems to leave us with a question.
What’s your why today?
I don’t have an answer tonight.
Tonight I just want to remember their names.
Aner Shapira Z”L.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin Z”L.
Tomorrow is October 7.
There are no words.
But perhaps, even when words fail, the question remains.
If you would like to encounter something of Aner beyond the story of his death, his family has made his music and art available through his website:
Listen to Aner Shapira’s music and see his art
The Aner Foundation, created in his memory, supports opportunities for young people from across Israeli society to make music together. It carries forward Aner’s commitment to creativity and connection across differences.
