For Rachel Goldberg-Polin and the Rest of Us

Driving to the dentist this morning was difficult. Not only was I dealing with a sore tooth and struggling to find a parking spot, I’d been listening to Rachel Goldberg-Polin on 60 Minutes, speaking about losing her only son, Hersh, to Hamas terrorists.

It’s hard to find parking when your eyes are shedding tears on busy Wilshire Boulevard. It’s hard to be in the world when you’re listening to a woman who, with unearthly grace, indescribable dignity, and bottomless sorrow, is on national television attempting to express the inexpressible. Her composure feels like someone lifting the back of a pickup truck, without wincing, without a single complaint.

How lucky we are to have her in our midst. She with her grief, she with her strength, she with her head held high, despite all odds.

A dear friend, with whom I’d been speaking today, wondered about the nature of Israelis. And I gently reminded him that this was, in some sense, simply the nature of Jews. He wondered if there weren’t a significant number of them who wished to kill all the Arabs.

“What do you mean by significant?” I asked, with a tinge of venom. “Like what—fifteen, twenty percent?”

I don’t recall exactly what he said, but I think he might have answered, “Yes, something like that.”

Before you read on, you should know: I’m not a historian, I’m not a journalist, and as someone who never went to college, I’m surely no scholar. I am simply a person who feels things deeply. Perhaps no more than most. And perhaps more than some.

There, on the phone, I just about flew into a rage. But since I love and admire the person I was speaking with, I grabbed hold of myself.

No, no, no… people in Israel don’t want to kill anyone! They just want to live. They just want not to die—to be left alone to live their lives.

Sometimes, I think it’s no use. Why waste so much breath, so much time, so much—

And my friend, wise and a good listener, said only: “This is hard for you, I know. This subject touches you in a very deep place. The place where you live. Where your spirit exists.”

Exactly. Exactly right.

For reasons only God knows, I was a young boy who fell easily in love with a people, with a place, just as other boys my age on the other side of a great divide, did the very same.

No—Israelis want to live. Just like everyone else.

Are there good reasons for war? Ultimately, I think not. Are there reasons for spilling blood, for causing pain, for wreaking havoc, for breaking and destroying? Ultimately, I think not.

And I also know—very painfully, very acutely—that we have yet to arrive at any ultimates. We have yet to cross any finish lines, to occupy safe places where there is no longer any need for the instruments of war-making.

Just as it is impossible to finish a marathon when you’re running a fever of 104°, just as it’s impossible to swim across an ocean—it is impossible to lay down arms when your sworn enemy has not laid down his own.

Today is Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day. Like our Memorial Day—although there, in Israel, people can be heard weeping. In every home, there is loss. On every street. On every bus and train. Every inch of the land has known the tread of death.

We, safe in America, are cocooned in a place and time that—for now—has spared us from truly considering such things.

And yet, we are bidden to remember. Bidden to smash the wineglass at every wedding, at the peak of joy. Commanded to remember that we have not yet reached the “ultimate.”

Rachel is a gifted woman who has been chosen to carry a burden. And in turn, she has chosen, by her own telling, to write and to speak about that burden. In some way, inconceivable to most of us, she says it helps her. She marks her time, as you would expect, between the kidnapping of her son, his torture, the notice of his death—and this moment.

In doing so, she holds for each of us the kind of nobility we wish for. She embodies the sort of wisdom we long for, but would never want to have learned.

When I hear her speak, now, as in times past when the fate of her son and the other hostages was uncertain, I feel an expansion of my essence—and with it, a negation of self, a diminution of my smallness, and a revitalization of my purposes among the living.

If you listen carefully, you too will cry. Cry for Rachel. Cry for those tortured. Cry for those never to return home alive.

And you will also cry for the whole of God’s creation—for every man, woman, and child struggling to come to grips with…

Sorry, I have no name for that.

There is no balm, no remedy. There is only walking ahead—with love for your life, and for the life of all things.

May these days soon become “those” days. Days of the past that, compared to a glorious, peace-filled future, will seem distant and dreamlike.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.