Too many holy ones: On Rachel Goldberg-Polin book
There are too many of them. More than there should be, and none them of them deserve to be in this category.
I didn’t expect this, it isn’t what I signed up for exactly when I decided that I wanted to become completely Shabbat observant and learn Hebrew fluently( achievement unlocked, I can watch Israeli TV without subtitles) and spend a year in Israel.
But as the years go on, there are more of them I am connected to, sadly. Holy Jews, those considered as martyrs by our tradition. As Rachel Goldberg-Polin reminds us in her recent memoir about her son who is among their number, “A Jew killed for no other reason but being a Jew is called holy.”
Over time, they have gotten closer to me. When my husband and I spent the first year of our marriage in Jerusalem in 1990-91, Iris Azulai, who babysat for one of the members of the minyan we went to, was stabbed to death. A beautiful 18 year old with her life ahead of her, gone. The child she babysat for had special needs and could not understand why his beloved sitter came no more. There really isn’t an explanation. There are evil people in the world? Some people hate us?
During the Gulf War that year, the son of friends of my parents who had become part of a right wing religious community in Har Nof told us that he explained the war to his kids simply. Amalek. We didn’t have kids at the time but didn’t feel that was a sufficient explanation – don’t they deserve more reason for needing to go into a sealed room and put on gas masks at all hours? Though now I think perhaps that is enough. To know, in our past was someone who wanted to do harm to us for no reason, someone not afraid to attack those marching in the back of the line, the sick and the elderly, who wanted to fight unfairly against those least likely to defend themselves. But during that war the casualties were low though the stress of entering a sealed room, imagining that a chemical weapon could wipe out large swathes of the country that Jews had been struggling to build for the past forty two years was horrific and devastating to even think was in the realm of possibility.
And then in the intervening years, there were bus bombings and cafeteria bombs. On one of the buses was a couple with a striking resemblance to my husband and I, they had studied at the same undergraduate schools we had and the man was at the same rabbinical school my husband had graduated from. The young woman grew up at the same synagogue I did – my mother who was on the synagogue board ended up serving as an usher at their joint funeral. The rabbi who officiated at our aufruf was interviewed on NPR talking about the couple and the rabbi who officiated at my bat mitzvah was in a photo on the front page of the New York Times leading the funeral cortege. I felt – and wrote at the time – that the eerie similarities made me feel that had I been in Israel not in 1990-91 but in 1995-96 it could have been me. What is odd is that over the years, the connection to them seems to have tightened – I have close friends who were in the young woman’s high school class and in the man’s class in rabbinical school. But I didn’t actually know them though I am certain our paths would have crossed either in our home town, or alumni events for his college or rabbinical school conventions or simchas of shared friends.
Other random stabbings over the years connected to us – Koby Mandell and his friend Yosef Ishran killed while camping in Tekoa; Koby’s grandmother lived in Springfield, MA where we were living at the time. At the Café Hillel bombing in 2003, David and Nava Applebaum, the father and daughter duo who were killed the night before her wedding, were friends of the niece of our friends. The survivors of both these families have gone on to honor the memories of their relatives in various ways – there is a Koby Mandell foundation to assist bereaved families and surviving Applebaum daughters work in medicine in honor of the healing work of their father, constantly called to take care of others.
I feel like they are getting closer. Well, they have. You don’t have to be in Israel to be killed for being a Jew now—my own husband could have been killed in the synagogue where he is a rabbi. I did know most of the 11 Jews killed here in Pittsburgh in 2018 and went to the funerals of the three who were our congregants. I never thought it would be that close, that my husband would be officiating at the funerals of Jewish martyrs.
Did any of us sign up for this? My twenty five year old daughter made Aliyah a year and a half ago and when I was talking about this recent war she told me that it was hard but it was what she had signed up for, as opposed to her grandparents who had been visiting and spent the duration of the war in Israel and unable to travel or do many of the things they came to the country to do. Besides the funerals of those here, my kids have gone to other funerals for those who are holy – Ezra Schwartz killed in Israel 2015 and Elan Ganeles killed in a car driving to a wedding in Israel in 2023.
Really the question is not did we sign up for this but what will we do with the fact that there are so many. In the afterword to his wife’s book, Jon Polin quotes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s words in his Fate and Destiny, “What obligation does suffering impose upon man?” and the answer the rabbi gives, “The Halakhah teaches us that the sufferer commits a grave sin if he allows his troubles to go to waste and remain without meaning or purpose…From out of its midst the sufferer must arise enobled and refined.” Polin gives the examples of Candy Lightner who founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving just 4 days after her daughter Candy was killed by such a person, and of Christopher Reeve who founded an organization to treat people with spinal cord injuries and improve their quality of life. His question and that of his wife, is what will be their why, as Hersh quoted Victor Frankl’s statement, ““He who has a WHY can bear any how.” It is a tough one.
Sadly, I know from my congregants who lost holy ones in the shooting on October 27, 2018, the pain of losing a twin, of having birthdays that were once doubly joyous shared events shrunk down and shriveled to only one living member of what was once a duo. Of grandchildren being deprived of the presence of a grandfather in their lives and only children losing a precious parent and source of guidance. The loss of all these lives leaves an enormous void, a chasm, in their families and extended families and communities.
A first step, a question any of us can ask, is what a group of college students in Jerusalem on a solidarity trip asked Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “What can we do to ease your pain?” It is a profound and difficult question. Her response? “If, God forbid, we get to Day 100, please don’t make me be the only one wearing this number on my chest.” All the students immediately started wearing the number of that day since the hostages had been taken which was 88. Making those who suffer feel less alone, displaying solidarity in physical ways, showing up is crucial as these college students knew viscerally.
Another thing to do to value those lives lost and to move towards finding a “why” is to retain our humanity as Jews. Pope Francis said to the Goldberg-Polins when they met with him, according to what Rachel Goldberg-Polin writes, “What you have experienced is terrorism, and terrorism is the absence of humanity.” Goldberg-Polin then writes, “I don’t want to lose my faith in humanity.” None of us should. There are various ways one might interpret that but if we start from the premise that all lives are created in the image of God(Genesis 1:27) that can be a key as to how to behave in the world, despite all the suffering measured out to us as Jews.
Goldberg-Polin quotes an Instagram post by Israeli writer David Grossman; I heard her speak about this when she spoke at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem during Hanukkah in 2025. Grossman discusses the clergyman and activist A. J. Muste, who spent the Vietnam war standing in front of the White House with a sign protesting the war. After many years of this, a journalist asked Muste whether he thought his protest could change the world. Muste’s reply, as quoted by Goldberg-Polin is “No, I’m just making sure the world doesn’t change me.” As Jews we have a mission in the world. To act as agents of hesed, of kindness, in any situation we can encounter. To perpetuate our way of life, ,which includes gathering people to celebrate and promote Sabbath peace, studying Jewish texts and ideas, praying to God and generally reaching for increasing holiness.
It is perhaps no accident that Goldberg-Polin’s book was published on the week in which Jews around the world read the double portion from Leviticus 16:1-20:27, “Acharei Mot/ Kedoshim.” The first section is called “After Death” and the second “Holiness” based on their first words.
I’m not glad that the Goldberg-Polin family now contains a holy martyr but I am glad that their why is a thoughtful examination of what the Jewish sources and resources are which can help them and others cope, as Goldberg-Polin writes of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s introduction to Man’s Search for Meaning, that it is “an explanation of the sources of strength one needs to survive any genre of suffering.” They have found and created holiness, even after the death of a loved one who became himself holy. It is a difficult thing to do and a fraught and complicated one; reading When We See You Again, gives a reader a sense of the costs. And yet, the hope which Goldberg-Polin deems mandatory is still there. Let us hope it can spread a larger net and there won’t be more holy ones. There are already too many.