In Remembrance of Hersh Goldberg-Polin

Just a few days after October 7th, I saw, for the first time, a post on my social media feed with his photo and a hashtag: #BringHershHome.

It took me about a week to make the connection.

It was the middle of the night and my wife, Jacqueline, and I weren’t sleeping well, worried sick about loved ones and friends. I was half-asleep when Jacqueline cried out, “That’s our Rachel! It’s our Rachel!”

She showed me an article in The New York Times; it was dated October 12, 2023. The by-line was Rachel Goldberg and she was writing about her son, Hersh.

We realized at that moment what we should have figured out much more quickly—after all, how many people did we know with the name Hersh?

But this one, and his family, we did know. My wife ran to our living room and grabbed the photo album from our daughter’s bat mitzvah. She flipped through it frantically and then pointed to a photo of a twelve-year-old boy in a red sweatshirt wearing glasses and said, “That’s Hersh.”

Thirteen years ago, soon after we had moved to Jerusalem, my wife came home one afternoon and told me she’d made a new friend that day. Her name was Rachel and she and her husband, Jon, had invited us to Shabbat dinner.

The amazing, beautiful family that the world, for the most tragic of reasons, has come to know, is exactly as they appear: loving, devoted, sweet, compassionate, gracious, strong.

Hersh, as we’ve all come to know, was a special person. He was kind and generous. He loved music and music festivals. He loved to travel.

He was a great, great friend.

He was thoughtful.

He was a pure, pure soul.

This is what his mother wrote about him in that New York Times piece, published 328 days ago:

“Ten years ago, we were preparing to celebrate the bar mitzvah of our son, Hersh. His Torah portion was the same as the one Jews around the world will read in the coming days—the story of Noah and how God destroyed much of the world with a terrible flood.

But Hersh’s attention was not on destruction. Instead he focused on how water could save the world. So he swam laps to raise money for an organization that digs wells in Africa to provide clean, lifesaving water.

This is the kind of person Hersh, our oldest child and only son, is: gentle and kind and always finding creative ways to improve things and connect with other human beings.”

Later in her piece, Rachel wrote: “I don’t know if he is dead or alive or if I will ever see him again … The only thing I know is that this is not the fate that Hersh or any of the captives, among whom are several other Americans, deserves.”

We later came to learn that Hersh was alive after the terrorists who stole him from his family forced him to appear in a video that was released in April of 2024.

But Rachel and Jon, Leebie and Orly, never got to see him again. They never got to hold their son or brother. They never got the chance to say goodbye.

I hope that somehow, Hersh knew how hard his family and friends, and all of us, tried. I hope he knew how much we wanted to bring him home.

I’ve been thinking a lot about an image that Rachel used in the piece she wrote when she could not have possibly imagined what the next 328 days would bring: her trips around the world, her address to the United Nations and to the DNC. She and Jon couldn’t have known what the universe had in store for them—the hard, hard things they would somehow endure with a dignity and grace that is simply beyond comprehension.

Five days after Hersh was kidnapped, Rachel referenced the story of the flood that Hersh read about in his bar mitzvah parasha:

“Hersh is my whole world, and this evil is the flood that is destroying it. I really don’t know if anything can save it. If anyone knows, please tell me. To save a life, our sages taught, is to save a world. Please help me save my son; it will save my world.

Every single person in Gaza has a mother, or had a mother at some point.

Every single person in Gaza has a mother, or had a mother at some point.

And I would say this, then, as mother to other mothers: If you see Hersh, please help him. I think about it a lot. I really think I would help your son, if he was in front of me, injured, near me.”

So here is what we have to do with all of our heartbreak, all of our sorrow, all of our frustration, all of our anger and rage: We have to remember the beautiful, precious, kind, and generous soul whose absence causes this sorrow.

Hersh’s soul is like that of his mother and father: kind and loving, gracious and pure. We—all of us—have come to know this family. And when, 328 days later, we re-read Rachel’s words, words directed at the captors and their enablers who could have saved his life, when we hear her say, “I really think I would help your son, if he was in front of me, injured, near me,” we know it is true.

She would help a stranger’s child who was hurting.

So, to honor Hersh Goldberg-Polin let us find the strength, as impossibly hard as it seems right now, to flood this world with kindness, with compassion, with love. Tonight, let us start with one another. Let us be so kind to each other. Let us send our love and our compassion and our prayers for strength and healing to the families of Carmel, Eden, Alex, Ori, Almog and Hersh.

Let us flood the world with righteousness and compassion. Let us drown in togetherness and goodness.

It might not feel like we have it in us, like it’s in our nature.

But of this I am sure: It’s what Hersh would do.

Y’hi zichro baruch.

Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.